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 27 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 451 360 387
Rank change year-on-year -91 +27 +42
Contract jobs citing R 180 162 195
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.37% 0.57% 0.46%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.38% 1.66% 1.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 127 108 135
10th Percentile £292 £329 £325
25th Percentile £406 £406 £386
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £513 £542
Median % change year-on-year -7.32% -5.36% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £631 £625
90th Percentile £650 £729 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £438 £481 £400
% change year-on-year -9.09% +20.31% -20.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 5 15
10th Percentile £22.38 £21.95 £20.12
25th Percentile £25.21 £23.00 £21.25
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.32 £26.24
Median % change year-on-year +63.37% +0.30% -62.51%
75th Percentile £60.25 £53.75 £48.13
90th Percentile £60.37 £56.75 £68.36
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.42 £23.00 £20.24
% change year-on-year +10.50% +13.66% -68.87%

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 13,083 9,730 12,802
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.84% 34.05% 30.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,548 6,631 9,124
10th Percentile £357 £357 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £518 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.38% -1.43% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £630 £650
90th Percentile £713 £763 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £482 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.47% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 565 212 503
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.04 £32.25
25th Percentile £53.53 £34.94 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -8.00% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.59% +0.40% -

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 27 May 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 27 May 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 27 May 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 -107 161 £472 -10.14% 233
London -50 94 £525 -4.55% 95
Work from Home -19 71 £538 +19.44% 49
UK excluding London -119 60 £438 -9.09% 189
North of England -64 14 £425 -6.59% 45
Midlands -68 13 £416 -7.19% 25
South East -56 12 £550 +29.41% 50
South West -30 11 £450 -47.98% 19
Yorkshire -45 10 £425 +1.49% 18
East of England -40 9 £413 -36.54% 32
East Midlands -25 8 £395 -11.63% 17
West Midlands -64 5 £438 +4.48% 8
North West -42 3 - - 21
Northern Ireland +2 1 - - 3
North East - 1 £475 - 6

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 36 (20.00%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.11%) Apache
3 4 (2.22%) Apache Superset
3 4 (2.22%) SharePoint
4 2 (1.11%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.56%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.56%) Confluence
5 1 (0.56%) R Markdown
Applications
1 18 (10.00%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.56%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.56%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.56%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.56%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.56%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 65 (36.11%) Power Platform
2 45 (25.00%) AWS
3 41 (22.78%) Azure
4 12 (6.67%) GCP
4 12 (6.67%) Snowflake
5 7 (3.89%) PowerApps
6 6 (3.33%) Azure DevOps
6 6 (3.33%) Power Automate
7 3 (1.67%) Amazon S3
7 3 (1.67%) Azure Data Factory
7 3 (1.67%) Copilot Studio
7 3 (1.67%) dbt
7 3 (1.67%) Microsoft Purview
7 3 (1.67%) OpenShift
7 3 (1.67%) Serverless
8 2 (1.11%) Amazon EMR
8 2 (1.11%) Amazon Kinesis
8 2 (1.11%) GitHub
8 2 (1.11%) Google Analytics
8 2 (1.11%) SaaS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 64 (35.56%) Power BI
2 61 (33.89%) Tableau
3 32 (17.78%) Big Data
4 22 (12.22%) Hadoop
5 16 (8.89%) Data Warehouse
6 14 (7.78%) Looker
7 10 (5.56%) Power Query
8 9 (5.00%) Mixpanel
9 8 (4.44%) Relational Database
10 5 (2.78%) Data Lake
10 5 (2.78%) Delta Lake
10 5 (2.78%) Spark SQL
11 4 (2.22%) Amazon Athena
11 4 (2.22%) Amazon Redshift
11 4 (2.22%) BigQuery
11 4 (2.22%) NoSQL
11 4 (2.22%) SQL Server
12 3 (1.67%) Metadata
12 3 (1.67%) Parquet
12 3 (1.67%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 6 (3.33%) Git
2 2 (1.11%) MLflow
3 1 (0.56%) Jenkins
3 1 (0.56%) RStudio
General
1 56 (31.11%) Analytical Skills
2 39 (21.67%) Social Skills
3 31 (17.22%) Public Sector
4 30 (16.67%) Finance
5 14 (7.78%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.11%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (4.44%) Marketing
8 6 (3.33%) Telecoms
9 4 (2.22%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.67%) Banking
10 3 (1.67%) Front Office
10 3 (1.67%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.67%) Retail
11 2 (1.11%) Manufacturing
11 2 (1.11%) Publishing
11 2 (1.11%) Social Science
12 1 (0.56%) Billing
12 1 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.56%) Local Government
12 1 (0.56%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 55 (30.56%) Data Scientist
2 45 (25.00%) Analyst
3 38 (21.11%) Data Analyst
4 27 (15.00%) Senior
5 18 (10.00%) Developer
6 16 (8.89%) Data Engineer
6 16 (8.89%) Senior Data Scientist
7 10 (5.56%) Lead
8 9 (5.00%) Technical Analyst
9 8 (4.44%) Consultant
9 8 (4.44%) SQL Analyst
9 8 (4.44%) SQL Data Analyst
10 7 (3.89%) Lead Data Scientist
11 6 (3.33%) Architect
11 6 (3.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 6 (3.33%) Business Intelligence Developer
11 6 (3.33%) Data Consultant
11 6 (3.33%) Senior Analyst
11 6 (3.33%) Software Engineer
12 5 (2.78%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (7.78%) TensorFlow
2 12 (6.67%) PyTorch
3 10 (5.56%) Pandas
4 8 (4.44%) scikit-learn
5 7 (3.89%) PySpark
6 6 (3.33%) JSON
6 6 (3.33%) Keras
7 5 (2.78%) NumPy
7 5 (2.78%) Shiny
8 4 (2.22%) LangChain
8 4 (2.22%) Matplotlib
8 4 (2.22%) Seaborn
9 3 (1.67%) Plotly
9 3 (1.67%) YAML
10 2 (1.11%) Apache Avro
10 2 (1.11%) Hugging Face
10 2 (1.11%) LangGraph
10 2 (1.11%) Node.js
10 2 (1.11%) SciPy
10 2 (1.11%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 15 (8.33%) Algorithms
2 11 (6.11%) CRISPR
3 7 (3.89%) Cloud Native
4 6 (3.33%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.78%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (2.22%) Analytical Mindset
7 3 (1.67%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.67%) Data Structures
7 3 (1.67%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.67%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.67%) Mainframe
7 3 (1.67%) Multi-touch
7 3 (1.67%) Onboarding
7 3 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
8 2 (1.11%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (1.11%) Management Information System
9 1 (0.56%) Data Centre
9 1 (0.56%) Data Fabric
9 1 (0.56%) Distributed Computing
9 1 (0.56%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.22%) Linux
2 3 (1.67%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 96 (53.33%) Analytics
2 94 (52.22%) Data Science
3 84 (46.67%) Visualisation
4 64 (35.56%) Machine Learning
5 62 (34.44%) Business Intelligence
6 52 (28.89%) Data Pipeline
7 51 (28.33%) Decision-Making
8 49 (27.22%) Actionable Insight
9 46 (25.56%) Data Visualisation
10 40 (22.22%) Problem-Solving
11 38 (21.11%) AI
12 37 (20.56%) Data Analytics
13 36 (20.00%) Agile
14 34 (18.89%) Statistical Analysis
14 34 (18.89%) Statistical Modelling
15 29 (16.11%) Statistics
16 28 (15.56%) Mathematics
17 27 (15.00%) Dashboard Development
17 27 (15.00%) Data Modelling
18 26 (14.44%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 171 (95.00%) Python
2 132 (73.33%) SQL
3 16 (8.89%) Java
4 11 (6.11%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 9 (5.00%) C#
6 8 (4.44%) C++
7 6 (3.33%) Scala
8 4 (2.22%) JavaScript
9 3 (1.67%) TypeScript
10 2 (1.11%) Ada
10 2 (1.11%) VBA
11 1 (0.56%) LookML
11 1 (0.56%) T-SQL
11 1 (0.56%) VB
Qualifications
1 44 (24.44%) Security Cleared
2 37 (20.56%) SC Cleared
3 29 (16.11%) Degree
4 6 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
4 6 (3.33%) Microsoft Certification
5 5 (2.78%) PhD
6 4 (2.22%) BPSS Clearance
6 4 (2.22%) Master's Degree
7 2 (1.11%) Tableau Certification
8 1 (0.56%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.56%) DBS Check
8 1 (0.56%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 17 (9.44%) Data Quality
2 10 (5.56%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (3.89%) QA
4 5 (2.78%) GDPR
5 3 (1.67%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.11%) WCAG
7 1 (0.56%) MiFID
7 1 (0.56%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 2 (1.11%) Docker
1 2 (1.11%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 8 (4.44%) Terraform
2 7 (3.89%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 22 (12.22%) Databricks
2 18 (10.00%) Microsoft
3 9 (5.00%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.78%) Google
4 5 (2.78%) OpenAI
5 3 (1.67%) Informatica
5 3 (1.67%) Red Hat
6 2 (1.11%) SAP
6 2 (1.11%) Splunk
7 1 (0.56%) Adobe
7 1 (0.56%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.56%) Cognos
7 1 (0.56%) Oracle
7 1 (0.56%) Pega
7 1 (0.56%) ServiceNow