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 7 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 418 321 420
Rank change year-on-year -97 +99 -41
Contract jobs citing R 169 243 216
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.66% 0.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.49% 2.06% 1.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 99 132 157
10th Percentile £308 £284 £308
25th Percentile £413 £330 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £475 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% -9.52% -11.76%
75th Percentile £600 £611 £650
90th Percentile £688 £675 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £505 £513 £513
% change year-on-year -1.46% - +3.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 18 14
10th Percentile £24.55 £20.08 £24.94
25th Percentile £27.19 £20.12 £35.00
Median hourly rate £31.25 £21.50 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year +45.35% -52.22% +73.08%
75th Percentile £37.50 £27.88 £49.69
90th Percentile £51.25 £53.75 £64.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £20.24 £50.00
% change year-on-year +48.26% -59.53% +122.07%

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 11,308 11,807 14,620
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.35% 32.15% 31.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,449 7,629 10,418
10th Percentile £345 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.33% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £625 £644 £662
90th Percentile £725 £750 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 317 285 435
10th Percentile £29.00 £24.74 £33.09
25th Percentile £42.50 £40.06 £47.50
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £61.00
Median % change year-on-year - +2.46% -0.81%
75th Percentile £67.50 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £75.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 7 November 2025.

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 7 November 2025.

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 7 November 2025. 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 -75 150 £500 +5.26% 710
UK excluding London -55 76 £505 -1.46% 569
London -45 72 £500 +5.26% 305
Work from Home +13 62 £543 +8.60% 183
South East +1 26 £525 +2.44% 228
East of England -3 15 £575 -8.00% 54
North of England -31 13 £458 +22.00% 117
North West -19 11 £433 +21.49% 65
Midlands -28 10 £538 +50.98% 82
Wales +2 6 £366 - 23
East Midlands -22 5 £375 +10.29% 35
West Midlands -34 4 £575 -6.05% 46
Scotland +5 3 £550 -12.00% 29
South West -7 3 £806 +11.21% 33
Yorkshire -28 2 £469 +1.35% 35

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 19 (11.24%) Apache Spark
1 19 (11.24%) SAS
2 4 (2.37%) Apache Airflow
2 4 (2.37%) Confluence
3 3 (1.78%) Apache
3 3 (1.78%) SharePoint
4 2 (1.18%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.59%) Luigi
Applications
1 21 (12.43%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (6.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (4.73%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.59%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.59%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 2 (1.18%) Distributed Ledger
2 1 (0.59%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.59%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.59%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 1 (0.59%) SAP ERP
2 1 (0.59%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.59%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 53 (31.36%) Power Platform
2 52 (30.77%) Azure
3 29 (17.16%) AWS
4 21 (12.43%) GCP
5 11 (6.51%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 7 (4.14%) Azure Machine Learning
6 7 (4.14%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.55%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.96%) Azure AKS
9 4 (2.37%) GitHub
10 3 (1.78%) Google Analytics
11 2 (1.18%) Adobe Analytics
11 2 (1.18%) Amazon EC2
11 2 (1.18%) Amazon S3
11 2 (1.18%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.18%) Azure DevOps
11 2 (1.18%) dbt
11 2 (1.18%) Power Automate
11 2 (1.18%) PowerApps
11 2 (1.18%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.18%) 2G
1 2 (1.18%) 5G
1 2 (1.18%) LTE
1 2 (1.18%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.18%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 53 (31.36%) Power BI
2 41 (24.26%) Tableau
3 16 (9.47%) Big Data
4 15 (8.88%) Data Lake
4 15 (8.88%) Data Warehouse
5 13 (7.69%) Hadoop
6 9 (5.33%) Data Mining
7 8 (4.73%) NoSQL
8 5 (2.96%) Looker
9 4 (2.37%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (2.37%) Metadata
9 4 (2.37%) Spotfire
10 3 (1.78%) Amazon QuickSight
10 3 (1.78%) Impala
10 3 (1.78%) Relational Database
10 3 (1.78%) SQL Server
11 2 (1.18%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 2 (1.18%) MongoDB
11 2 (1.18%) Oracle Database
11 2 (1.18%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 8 (4.73%) Git
2 5 (2.96%) JIRA
3 4 (2.37%) Jenkins
3 4 (2.37%) MLflow
4 2 (1.18%) GoCD
4 2 (1.18%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.18%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.18%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.59%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.59%) Eclipse
5 1 (0.59%) Maven
5 1 (0.59%) RStudio
General
1 56 (33.14%) Analytical Skills
2 55 (32.54%) Social Skills
3 40 (23.67%) Finance
4 23 (13.61%) Marketing
5 16 (9.47%) Pharmaceutical
6 12 (7.10%) Banking
6 12 (7.10%) Public Sector
7 6 (3.55%) Manufacturing
7 6 (3.55%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (2.96%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (2.96%) Legal
8 5 (2.96%) Local Government
9 3 (1.78%) Telecoms
10 2 (1.18%) Digital Health
10 2 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.18%) Retail
11 1 (0.59%) Corporate Banking
11 1 (0.59%) Influencing Skills
11 1 (0.59%) Police
11 1 (0.59%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 46 (27.22%) Data Scientist
2 36 (21.30%) Analyst
3 25 (14.79%) Data Analyst
4 16 (9.47%) Developer
5 15 (8.88%) Architect
5 15 (8.88%) Senior
6 12 (7.10%) Data Engineer
7 9 (5.33%) Lead
8 7 (4.14%) Senior Data Scientist
9 6 (3.55%) Business Analyst
9 6 (3.55%) Software Engineer
10 5 (2.96%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
10 5 (2.96%) Security Architect
10 5 (2.96%) Senior Analyst
11 4 (2.37%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
11 4 (2.37%) Consultant
11 4 (2.37%) Data Science Developer
11 4 (2.37%) Machine Learning Engineer
11 4 (2.37%) Power BI Developer
11 4 (2.37%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 18 (10.65%) TensorFlow
2 16 (9.47%) PyTorch
2 16 (9.47%) scikit-learn
3 14 (8.28%) Pandas
4 4 (2.37%) Google JAX
4 4 (2.37%) JAX
4 4 (2.37%) Kafka
4 4 (2.37%) Matplotlib
4 4 (2.37%) Seaborn
5 3 (1.78%) FHIR
5 3 (1.78%) NumPy
6 2 (1.18%) ATL
6 2 (1.18%) Hugging Face
6 2 (1.18%) JSON
6 2 (1.18%) REST
6 2 (1.18%) Shiny
7 1 (0.59%) CSS
7 1 (0.59%) Gherkin
7 1 (0.59%) ODBC
7 1 (0.59%) SQLAlchemy
Miscellaneous
1 20 (11.83%) Algorithms
2 10 (5.92%) Credit Risk
3 7 (4.14%) Data Structures
3 7 (4.14%) Multi-touch
4 5 (2.96%) Product Ownership
5 4 (2.37%) Analytical Mindset
5 4 (2.37%) Cloud Native
5 4 (2.37%) NHS
5 4 (2.37%) Self-Motivation
6 3 (1.78%) Genomics
6 3 (1.78%) IoT
6 3 (1.78%) Smart Meter
7 2 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
7 2 (1.18%) Life Science
7 2 (1.18%) Management Information System
7 2 (1.18%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.18%) Security Posture
7 2 (1.18%) Social Media
7 2 (1.18%) Video\Live Streaming
8 1 (0.59%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 7 (4.14%) Linux
2 2 (1.18%) VMS
2 2 (1.18%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 82 (48.52%) Data Science
2 74 (43.79%) Machine Learning
3 68 (40.24%) Analytics
4 62 (36.69%) Business Intelligence
5 54 (31.95%) Data Analysis
6 52 (30.77%) Visualisation
7 40 (23.67%) Data Modelling
8 39 (23.08%) Statistical Modelling
9 37 (21.89%) Problem-Solving
10 34 (20.12%) Decision-Making
11 32 (18.93%) Data Visualisation
12 31 (18.34%) AI
13 29 (17.16%) Actionable Insight
14 26 (15.38%) Validation
15 25 (14.79%) Agile
16 24 (14.20%) Statistics
17 23 (13.61%) Data Governance
18 22 (13.02%) Computer Science
19 21 (12.43%) Mathematics
20 19 (11.24%) CI/CD
Programming Languages
1 156 (92.31%) Python
2 108 (63.91%) SQL
3 16 (9.47%) Java
4 12 (7.10%) C++
5 11 (6.51%) MATLAB
6 5 (2.96%) Data Analysis Expressions
6 5 (2.96%) Scala
7 4 (2.37%) C
7 4 (2.37%) PL/SQL
8 3 (1.78%) Go
9 2 (1.18%) Bash
9 2 (1.18%) Rust
9 2 (1.18%) VBA
10 1 (0.59%) Fortran
10 1 (0.59%) JavaScript
10 1 (0.59%) Korn
10 1 (0.59%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 36 (21.30%) Degree
2 15 (8.88%) Security Cleared
3 11 (6.51%) Master's Degree
3 11 (6.51%) PhD
4 10 (5.92%) SC Cleared
5 8 (4.73%) Computer Science Degree
6 6 (3.55%) BPSS Clearance
7 2 (1.18%) Tableau Certification
8 1 (0.59%) ACCA
8 1 (0.59%) CFA
8 1 (0.59%) CIMA
8 1 (0.59%) GIAC
8 1 (0.59%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (15.98%) Data Quality
2 8 (4.73%) QA
3 7 (4.14%) GDPR
4 5 (2.96%) Accessibility
5 4 (2.37%) EU AI Act
5 4 (2.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (1.18%) DICOM
6 2 (1.18%) NIST
7 1 (0.59%) Actionable Recommendations
7 1 (0.59%) HL7
7 1 (0.59%) IFRS
7 1 (0.59%) IFRS 9
7 1 (0.59%) LOINC
7 1 (0.59%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.59%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 11 (6.51%) Docker
2 3 (1.78%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 1 (0.59%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 14 (8.28%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.18%) Ansible
2 2 (1.18%) rkt
2 2 (1.18%) Terraform
3 1 (0.59%) Packer
3 1 (0.59%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 20 (11.83%) Microsoft
2 15 (8.88%) Databricks
3 9 (5.33%) Oracle
4 7 (4.14%) Google
5 5 (2.96%) Pega
5 5 (2.96%) SAP
6 4 (2.37%) TIBCO
7 3 (1.78%) Splunk
8 2 (1.18%) Adobe
8 2 (1.18%) Amplitude
8 2 (1.18%) Bloomberg
8 2 (1.18%) Cognos
8 2 (1.18%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.18%) Refinitiv
8 2 (1.18%) ServiceNow
9 1 (0.59%) Autodesk
9 1 (0.59%) Cribl.io
9 1 (0.59%) NEC
9 1 (0.59%) OpenAI
9 1 (0.59%) TikTok