R Contract Job Trends

R
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring R skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 5 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 460 365 391
Rank change year-on-year -95 +26 +35
Contract jobs citing R 175 168 215
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.39% 0.57% 0.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.36% 1.69% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 118 116 148
10th Percentile £339 £328 £314
25th Percentile £406 £406 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -2.86% -2.78% -1.82%
75th Percentile £575 £675 £638
90th Percentile £650 £787 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £458 £461 £413
% change year-on-year -0.81% +11.82% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 7 13
10th Percentile £22.38 £22.00 £25.36
25th Percentile £25.21 £22.75 £25.50
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% -38.07% -29.17%
75th Percentile £60.25 £56.25 £52.50
90th Percentile £60.37 £59.55 £72.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £25.36
% change year-on-year +10.50% -9.31% -2.76%

All Programming Languages
UK

R falls under the Programming Languages category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring coding skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for coding skills 12,887 9,923 12,900
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.44% 33.95% 29.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,578 6,676 9,147
10th Percentile £355 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £650
90th Percentile £718 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £478 £488
% change year-on-year -0.47% -1.95% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 532 242 481
10th Percentile £41.62 £22.25 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.13 £46.18
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.38 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.30
% change year-on-year +1.56% +4.40% -1.92%

R
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing R relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

R job vacancy trend in the UK

R
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R

R
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing R over the 6 months to 5 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing R

R
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing R over the 6 months to 5 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Top 15 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing R within the UK over the 6 months to 5 April 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England -104 154 £511 -2.62% 187
London -47 87 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home -9 67 £536 +11.09% 40
UK excluding London -100 63 £458 -0.81% 154
South East -44 18 £594 +49.84% 39
Midlands -65 15 £395 -3.54% 23
North of England -66 14 £475 +4.40% 34
East Midlands -27 10 £385 +31.40% 15
North West -40 9 £530 +16.51% 14
South West -28 8 £450 -5.26% 22
East of England -37 7 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -61 5 £438 +1.39% 8
Yorkshire -54 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -13 1 £425 - 7
North East - 1 £475 - 7

R
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 34 (19.43%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.29%) Apache
3 7 (4.00%) SAS
4 5 (2.86%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.29%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (1.14%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.57%) Confluence
7 1 (0.57%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (8.57%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.14%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.57%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.14%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.57%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.57%) SAP APO
2 1 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 63 (36.00%) Power Platform
2 51 (29.14%) AWS
3 46 (26.29%) Azure
4 19 (10.86%) GCP
5 8 (4.57%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.57%) PowerApps
6 7 (4.00%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.43%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.86%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.86%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.71%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.71%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.71%) dbt
9 3 (1.71%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.14%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.14%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.14%) 2G
1 2 (1.14%) 5G
1 2 (1.14%) LTE
1 2 (1.14%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.14%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (36.00%) Power BI
2 48 (27.43%) Tableau
3 34 (19.43%) Big Data
4 25 (14.29%) Hadoop
5 21 (12.00%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.29%) Looker
7 8 (4.57%) Power Query
8 7 (4.00%) Delta Lake
8 7 (4.00%) Metadata
8 7 (4.00%) Mixpanel
8 7 (4.00%) Relational Database
8 7 (4.00%) Spark SQL
9 6 (3.43%) Data Lake
10 5 (2.86%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (2.86%) Data Mining
10 5 (2.86%) SQL Server
11 4 (2.29%) NoSQL
12 3 (1.71%) Amazon Athena
13 2 (1.14%) Pinecone
13 2 (1.14%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 11 (6.29%) Git
2 4 (2.29%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.14%) MLflow
3 2 (1.14%) RStudio
4 1 (0.57%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.57%) JIRA
4 1 (0.57%) Maven
General
1 53 (30.29%) Analytical Skills
2 52 (29.71%) Social Skills
3 37 (21.14%) Finance
4 32 (18.29%) Public Sector
5 14 (8.00%) Pharmaceutical
6 12 (6.86%) Marketing
7 10 (5.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 7 (4.00%) Telecoms
9 5 (2.86%) Banking
10 3 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.71%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
11 2 (1.14%) Retail
11 2 (1.14%) Social Science
12 1 (0.57%) Billing
12 1 (0.57%) Front Office
12 1 (0.57%) Local Government
12 1 (0.57%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.57%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 54 (30.86%) Data Scientist
2 31 (17.71%) Analyst
3 28 (16.00%) Senior
4 27 (15.43%) Data Analyst
5 19 (10.86%) Data Engineer
6 17 (9.71%) Developer
6 17 (9.71%) Senior Data Scientist
7 11 (6.29%) Lead
8 10 (5.71%) Architect
9 7 (4.00%) Consultant
10 6 (3.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.43%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 6 (3.43%) Lead Data Scientist
11 5 (2.86%) Azure Engineer
11 5 (2.86%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.86%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (2.86%) Senior Analyst
11 5 (2.86%) Software Engineer
12 4 (2.29%) Business Analyst
12 4 (2.29%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.43%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.71%) Pandas
2 10 (5.71%) PyTorch
3 9 (5.14%) PySpark
3 9 (5.14%) scikit-learn
4 8 (4.57%) JSON
5 6 (3.43%) Keras
5 6 (3.43%) Shiny
6 5 (2.86%) YAML
7 4 (2.29%) LangChain
7 4 (2.29%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.29%) NumPy
7 4 (2.29%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.71%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.71%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.71%) Kafka
8 3 (1.71%) Plotly
9 2 (1.14%) Node.js
9 2 (1.14%) SciPy
9 2 (1.14%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.14%) Algorithms
2 9 (5.14%) Cloud Native
3 7 (4.00%) CRISPR
3 7 (4.00%) Product Ownership
4 5 (2.86%) Credit Risk
4 5 (2.86%) Self-Motivation
5 4 (2.29%) Data Structures
6 3 (1.71%) AI Agents
6 3 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
6 3 (1.71%) Management Information System
6 3 (1.71%) Multi-touch
6 3 (1.71%) Onboarding
7 2 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (1.14%) Distributed Systems
7 2 (1.14%) IoT
7 2 (1.14%) Mainframe
8 1 (0.57%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.57%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.71%) Linux
2 2 (1.14%) Unix
3 1 (0.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 93 (53.14%) Data Science
2 92 (52.57%) Analytics
3 74 (42.29%) Visualisation
4 71 (40.57%) Machine Learning
5 63 (36.00%) Business Intelligence
6 49 (28.00%) Decision-Making
7 41 (23.43%) Data Pipeline
8 40 (22.86%) Data Visualisation
9 39 (22.29%) Problem-Solving
10 38 (21.71%) Actionable Insight
10 38 (21.71%) Data Analysis
10 38 (21.71%) Statistical Modelling
11 37 (21.14%) Data Modelling
12 34 (19.43%) Agile
13 32 (18.29%) AI
14 31 (17.71%) Data Analytics
15 30 (17.14%) Data Governance
16 27 (15.43%) Validation
17 26 (14.86%) Statistics
18 25 (14.29%) Dashboard Development
Programming Languages
1 166 (94.86%) Python
2 127 (72.57%) SQL
3 12 (6.86%) Java
4 10 (5.71%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (4.00%) JavaScript
6 6 (3.43%) C++
6 6 (3.43%) Scala
7 5 (2.86%) C#
8 3 (1.71%) TypeScript
9 2 (1.14%) Ada
9 2 (1.14%) VBA
10 1 (0.57%) LookML
10 1 (0.57%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 46 (26.29%) Security Cleared
2 39 (22.29%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.29%) Degree
4 8 (4.57%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.43%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.43%) Microsoft Certification
6 5 (2.86%) PhD
7 4 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.71%) Azure Certification
9 2 (1.14%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.57%) CIMA
10 1 (0.57%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.57%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
10 1 (0.57%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.14%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.29%) Actionable Recommendations
3 9 (5.14%) QA
4 7 (4.00%) GDPR
5 3 (1.71%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.14%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.14%) WCAG
7 1 (0.57%) MiFID
7 1 (0.57%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 5 (2.86%) Docker
2 2 (1.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.14%) Kubernetes
2 4 (2.29%) Terraform
3 1 (0.57%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (12.57%) Databricks
2 17 (9.71%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.00%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.86%) OpenAI
4 5 (2.86%) Pega
5 4 (2.29%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.71%) Google
6 3 (1.71%) Informatica
6 3 (1.71%) Oracle
6 3 (1.71%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.71%) SAP
7 2 (1.14%) Splunk
8 1 (0.57%) Adobe
8 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.57%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.57%) Cognos
8 1 (0.57%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.57%) UiPath