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 1 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 450 360 387
Rank change year-on-year -90 +27 +43
Contract jobs citing R 176 161 216
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.39% 0.55% 0.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.38% 1.63% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 120 112 148
10th Percentile £313 £350 £313
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 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £455 £390
% change year-on-year +2.20% +16.67% -8.24%
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 12,748 9,859 12,934
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.53% 33.95% 29.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,489 6,631 9,140
10th Percentile £352 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £414 £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 £715 £753 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £475 £488
% change year-on-year - -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 524 244 486
10th Percentile £41.25 £22.30 £30.63
25th Percentile £54.55 £32.88 £46.20
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.56 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £74.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £64.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +1.56% +3.90% -1.44%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 -96 155 £510 -2.86% 187
London -59 87 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home -15 67 £536 +12.84% 40
UK excluding London -94 64 £465 +2.20% 154
South East -47 18 £594 +49.84% 39
North of England -60 15 £488 +7.14% 34
Midlands -68 15 £395 +1.94% 23
East Midlands -25 10 £385 +31.40% 15
North West -36 10 £526 +15.66% 14
South West -27 8 £450 +2.86% 22
East of England -34 7 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -62 5 £438 +6.84% 8
Yorkshire -51 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -10 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 (19.32%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.25%) Apache
3 8 (4.55%) SAS
4 5 (2.84%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.27%) Apache Superset
6 2 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
7 1 (0.57%) Confluence
7 1 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 1 (0.57%) R Markdown
Applications
1 15 (8.52%) 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 (35.80%) Power Platform
2 52 (29.55%) AWS
3 47 (26.70%) Azure
4 20 (11.36%) GCP
5 8 (4.55%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.55%) PowerApps
6 7 (3.98%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.41%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.84%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.84%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.70%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.70%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.70%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.70%) dbt
9 3 (1.70%) 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 (35.80%) Power BI
2 49 (27.84%) Tableau
3 34 (19.32%) Big Data
4 25 (14.20%) Hadoop
5 22 (12.50%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.25%) Looker
7 8 (4.55%) Power Query
8 7 (3.98%) Delta Lake
8 7 (3.98%) Metadata
8 7 (3.98%) Mixpanel
8 7 (3.98%) Relational Database
8 7 (3.98%) Spark SQL
9 6 (3.41%) Data Lake
10 5 (2.84%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (2.84%) Data Mining
10 5 (2.84%) SQL Server
11 4 (2.27%) NoSQL
12 3 (1.70%) Amazon Athena
13 2 (1.14%) Pinecone
13 2 (1.14%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 11 (6.25%) Git
2 4 (2.27%) 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 (30.11%) Analytical Skills
2 51 (28.98%) Social Skills
3 38 (21.59%) Finance
4 32 (18.18%) Public Sector
5 14 (7.95%) Pharmaceutical
6 12 (6.82%) Marketing
7 10 (5.68%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 7 (3.98%) Telecoms
9 5 (2.84%) Banking
10 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
10 2 (1.14%) Influencing Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
10 2 (1.14%) Retail
10 2 (1.14%) Social Science
11 1 (0.57%) Billing
11 1 (0.57%) Local Government
11 1 (0.57%) Manufacturing
11 1 (0.57%) Organisational Skills
11 1 (0.57%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 54 (30.68%) Data Scientist
2 31 (17.61%) Analyst
3 27 (15.34%) Data Analyst
3 27 (15.34%) Senior
4 19 (10.80%) Data Engineer
5 17 (9.66%) Developer
5 17 (9.66%) Senior Data Scientist
6 11 (6.25%) Architect
6 11 (6.25%) Lead
7 7 (3.98%) Consultant
8 6 (3.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
8 6 (3.41%) Business Intelligence Developer
8 6 (3.41%) Lead Data Scientist
9 5 (2.84%) Azure Engineer
9 5 (2.84%) Java Developer
9 5 (2.84%) Power BI Developer
9 5 (2.84%) Software Engineer
10 4 (2.27%) Data Consultant
10 4 (2.27%) Senior Analyst
10 4 (2.27%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.39%) TensorFlow
2 10 (5.68%) PyTorch
3 9 (5.11%) Pandas
3 9 (5.11%) PySpark
3 9 (5.11%) scikit-learn
4 8 (4.55%) JSON
5 6 (3.41%) Keras
5 6 (3.41%) Shiny
6 5 (2.84%) YAML
7 4 (2.27%) LangChain
7 4 (2.27%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.27%) Seaborn
8 3 (1.70%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.70%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.70%) Kafka
8 3 (1.70%) NumPy
8 3 (1.70%) Plotly
9 2 (1.14%) HTML
9 2 (1.14%) Node.js
9 2 (1.14%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.09%) Algorithms
2 9 (5.11%) Cloud Native
3 7 (3.98%) CRISPR
4 6 (3.41%) Credit Risk
4 6 (3.41%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.84%) Self-Motivation
6 4 (2.27%) Data Structures
7 3 (1.70%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.70%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.70%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.70%) Multi-touch
7 3 (1.70%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (1.14%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (1.14%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (1.14%) IoT
8 2 (1.14%) Mainframe
9 1 (0.57%) Data Fabric
9 1 (0.57%) Legacy Systems
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.70%) Linux
2 2 (1.14%) Unix
3 1 (0.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 93 (52.84%) Analytics
1 93 (52.84%) Data Science
2 74 (42.05%) Visualisation
3 71 (40.34%) Machine Learning
4 64 (36.36%) Business Intelligence
5 49 (27.84%) Decision-Making
6 41 (23.30%) Data Pipeline
7 40 (22.73%) Data Visualisation
8 39 (22.16%) Actionable Insight
8 39 (22.16%) Data Analysis
8 39 (22.16%) Problem-Solving
9 38 (21.59%) Statistical Modelling
10 37 (21.02%) Data Modelling
11 33 (18.75%) Agile
12 32 (18.18%) AI
13 31 (17.61%) Data Analytics
14 30 (17.05%) Data Governance
15 26 (14.77%) Dashboard Development
15 26 (14.77%) Statistics
15 26 (14.77%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 167 (94.89%) Python
2 128 (72.73%) SQL
3 12 (6.82%) Java
4 10 (5.68%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (3.98%) JavaScript
6 6 (3.41%) C++
6 6 (3.41%) Scala
7 5 (2.84%) C#
8 3 (1.70%) 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 (26.14%) Security Cleared
2 39 (22.16%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.18%) Degree
4 8 (4.55%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.41%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.41%) Microsoft Certification
6 5 (2.84%) PhD
7 4 (2.27%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.70%) 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 (13.07%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.25%) Actionable Recommendations
3 9 (5.11%) QA
4 7 (3.98%) GDPR
5 3 (1.70%) 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 (2.84%) Docker
2 2 (1.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.11%) Kubernetes
2 4 (2.27%) Terraform
3 1 (0.57%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (12.50%) Databricks
2 17 (9.66%) Microsoft
3 7 (3.98%) Amplitude
4 6 (3.41%) Pega
5 5 (2.84%) OpenAI
6 4 (2.27%) ServiceNow
7 3 (1.70%) Google
7 3 (1.70%) Informatica
7 3 (1.70%) Oracle
7 3 (1.70%) Red Hat
7 3 (1.70%) SAP
8 2 (1.14%) Splunk
9 1 (0.57%) Adobe
9 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
9 1 (0.57%) Arqiva
9 1 (0.57%) Cognos
9 1 (0.57%) Salesforce
9 1 (0.57%) UiPath