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 28 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 431 325 381
Rank change year-on-year -106 +56 +36
Contract jobs citing R 163 201 230
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.42% 0.64% 0.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.39% 1.93% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 102 113 164
10th Percentile £300 £294 £313
25th Percentile £406 £381 £384
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £618 £638 £625
90th Percentile £688 £800 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £455 £425
% change year-on-year +12.64% +7.06% -1.45%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 6 15
10th Percentile £21.91 £21.25 £25.43
25th Percentile £24.03 £21.56 £30.62
Median hourly rate £27.71 £38.25 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -27.56% -10.00% +71.44%
75th Percentile £30.94 £53.75 £48.13
90th Percentile £32.63 £57.25 £51.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.71 £22.50 £47.50
% change year-on-year +23.14% -52.63% +114.35%

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 11,731 10,440 13,112
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.56% 33.35% 29.71%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,780 6,607 9,282
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £538
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.42% -4.78%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £491 £500
% change year-on-year -1.12% -1.90% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 440 243 495
10th Percentile £39.59 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.62
90th Percentile £76.25 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 28 January 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
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 28 January 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 -100 144 £510 -2.86% 255
London -52 76 £525 -4.55% 71
UK excluding London -69 62 £513 +12.64% 246
Work from Home -11 57 £531 +3.51% 71
South East -16 20 £600 +17.07% 72
Midlands -44 19 £438 +22.89% 33
East Midlands -27 11 £385 +20.88% 21
North of England -55 11 £500 +40.45% 58
North West -25 9 £513 +44.14% 28
West Midlands -36 8 £475 +10.08% 12
East of England -14 6 £662 +1.77% 32
Wales -3 4 £366 - 15
South West -29 2 - - 22
North East -17 1 £475 - 11
Yorkshire - 1 - - 21

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 25 (15.34%) Apache Spark
2 15 (9.20%) SAS
3 8 (4.91%) SharePoint
4 5 (3.07%) Apache
4 5 (3.07%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (2.45%) Confluence
6 1 (0.61%) Jupyter
Applications
1 19 (11.66%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (4.29%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (4.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.61%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.61%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (0.61%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.61%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.61%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.61%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.61%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 59 (36.20%) Power Platform
2 50 (30.67%) Azure
3 40 (24.54%) AWS
4 24 (14.72%) GCP
5 8 (4.91%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 8 (4.91%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.91%) PowerApps
5 8 (4.91%) Snowflake
6 7 (4.29%) Azure Data Factory
6 7 (4.29%) Azure Machine Learning
7 5 (3.07%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (3.07%) Microsoft Purview
8 4 (2.45%) Azure AKS
8 4 (2.45%) dbt
9 3 (1.84%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.84%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.84%) Google Analytics
10 2 (1.23%) Adobe Analytics
10 2 (1.23%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.23%) Cloud Computing
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.23%) 2G
1 2 (1.23%) 5G
1 2 (1.23%) LTE
1 2 (1.23%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.23%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (36.20%) Power BI
2 43 (26.38%) Tableau
3 25 (15.34%) Big Data
4 21 (12.88%) Data Warehouse
5 15 (9.20%) Hadoop
6 12 (7.36%) Data Lake
7 8 (4.91%) Data Mining
7 8 (4.91%) Looker
7 8 (4.91%) NoSQL
8 7 (4.29%) Delta Lake
8 7 (4.29%) Metadata
8 7 (4.29%) Power Query
9 6 (3.68%) Amazon Redshift
9 6 (3.68%) Relational Database
9 6 (3.68%) Spark SQL
10 5 (3.07%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.84%) BigQuery
11 3 (1.84%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
12 2 (1.23%) Azure SQL Database
12 2 (1.23%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 13 (7.98%) Git
2 6 (3.68%) Jenkins
3 4 (2.45%) JIRA
3 4 (2.45%) MLflow
4 2 (1.23%) GoCD
4 2 (1.23%) RStudio
4 2 (1.23%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.23%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.23%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.61%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.61%) Maven
General
1 56 (34.36%) Social Skills
2 51 (31.29%) Analytical Skills
3 42 (25.77%) Finance
4 20 (12.27%) Public Sector
5 16 (9.82%) Marketing
6 11 (6.75%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (6.13%) Banking
8 6 (3.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (3.68%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (2.45%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.84%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.84%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.23%) Legal
11 2 (1.23%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.61%) Advertising
12 1 (0.61%) Local Government
12 1 (0.61%) Private Banking
12 1 (0.61%) Publishing
12 1 (0.61%) Retail
Job Titles
1 41 (25.15%) Data Scientist
2 30 (18.40%) Analyst
3 22 (13.50%) Data Analyst
4 21 (12.88%) Senior
5 18 (11.04%) Data Engineer
6 16 (9.82%) Developer
7 13 (7.98%) Architect
8 11 (6.75%) Lead
9 10 (6.13%) Senior Data Scientist
10 7 (4.29%) Business Intelligence Developer
10 7 (4.29%) Software Engineer
11 6 (3.68%) Azure Engineer
11 6 (3.68%) Consultant
11 6 (3.68%) Power BI Developer
12 5 (3.07%) Business Analyst
13 4 (2.45%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 4 (2.45%) Azure Data Engineer
13 4 (2.45%) Lead Data Scientist
13 4 (2.45%) Machine Learning Engineer
13 4 (2.45%) Senior Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.98%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.75%) scikit-learn
3 10 (6.13%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.52%) Pandas
4 9 (5.52%) PySpark
5 6 (3.68%) Kafka
6 5 (3.07%) YAML
7 4 (2.45%) Keras
7 4 (2.45%) LangChain
8 3 (1.84%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.84%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.84%) JSON
8 3 (1.84%) Shiny
9 2 (1.23%) HTML
9 2 (1.23%) Matplotlib
9 2 (1.23%) Node.js
9 2 (1.23%) NumPy
9 2 (1.23%) REST
9 2 (1.23%) SciPy
9 2 (1.23%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 12 (7.36%) Credit Risk
2 11 (6.75%) Algorithms
3 7 (4.29%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.68%) Cloud Native
5 5 (3.07%) Management Information System
5 5 (3.07%) Product Ownership
5 5 (3.07%) Self-Motivation
6 3 (1.84%) IoT
6 3 (1.84%) NHS
7 2 (1.23%) AI Agents
7 2 (1.23%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.23%) Genomics
7 2 (1.23%) Hybrid Cloud
7 2 (1.23%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.23%) Multi-touch
7 2 (1.23%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.61%) CRISPR
8 1 (0.61%) Data Fabric
8 1 (0.61%) Legacy Systems
8 1 (0.61%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.23%) Linux
2 1 (0.61%) Unix
2 1 (0.61%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 83 (50.92%) Data Science
2 79 (48.47%) Analytics
3 68 (41.72%) Machine Learning
4 60 (36.81%) Business Intelligence
5 59 (36.20%) Visualisation
6 45 (27.61%) Decision-Making
7 40 (24.54%) Data Analysis
8 39 (23.93%) Data Modelling
8 39 (23.93%) Problem-Solving
9 36 (22.09%) Agile
10 32 (19.63%) Data Governance
10 32 (19.63%) Statistical Modelling
11 31 (19.02%) Data Visualisation
12 30 (18.40%) Actionable Insight
13 28 (17.18%) AI
14 24 (14.72%) CI/CD
15 23 (14.11%) Data Pipeline
15 23 (14.11%) Validation
16 18 (11.04%) Data Engineering
16 18 (11.04%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 154 (94.48%) Python
2 114 (69.94%) SQL
3 14 (8.59%) Java
4 9 (5.52%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 9 (5.52%) Scala
5 8 (4.91%) C++
6 6 (3.68%) JavaScript
7 5 (3.07%) MATLAB
8 3 (1.84%) C#
8 3 (1.84%) VBA
9 2 (1.23%) Ada
9 2 (1.23%) Go
9 2 (1.23%) PL/SQL
9 2 (1.23%) Rust
9 2 (1.23%) TypeScript
10 1 (0.61%) Bash
10 1 (0.61%) LookML
10 1 (0.61%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 29 (17.79%) Security Cleared
2 28 (17.18%) Degree
3 23 (14.11%) SC Cleared
4 12 (7.36%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.68%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (3.07%) Master's Degree
7 4 (2.45%) Microsoft Certification
8 3 (1.84%) Azure Certification
8 3 (1.84%) PhD
9 2 (1.23%) MCP
9 2 (1.23%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.61%) CIMA
10 1 (0.61%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.61%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.61%) GIAC
10 1 (0.61%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (14.11%) Data Quality
2 7 (4.29%) GDPR
2 7 (4.29%) QA
3 5 (3.07%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (1.23%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.23%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.61%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.61%) WCAG
System Software
1 10 (6.13%) Docker
2 2 (1.23%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 11 (6.75%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.23%) rkt
2 2 (1.23%) Terraform
3 1 (0.61%) Ansible
3 1 (0.61%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 26 (15.95%) Databricks
2 19 (11.66%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.29%) Pega
4 6 (3.68%) Oracle
5 4 (2.45%) Google
5 4 (2.45%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.45%) SAP
5 4 (2.45%) ServiceNow
5 4 (2.45%) Splunk
6 3 (1.84%) Cognos
6 3 (1.84%) Informatica
7 2 (1.23%) Adobe
7 2 (1.23%) Amplitude
7 2 (1.23%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.23%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.23%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.61%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.61%) Instagram
8 1 (0.61%) UiPath
8 1 (0.61%) Workday