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 3 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 467 364 400
Rank change year-on-year -103 +36 +11
Contract jobs citing R 167 158 182
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.34% 0.55% 0.42%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.27% 1.61% 1.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 117 106 119
10th Percentile £292 £328 £315
25th Percentile £406 £406 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -12.59%
75th Percentile £575 £625 £638
90th Percentile £650 £731 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £444 £475 £400
% change year-on-year -6.58% +18.75% -23.08%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 3 17
10th Percentile £27.93 £23.66 £20.12
25th Percentile £33.44 £24.66 £21.25
Median hourly rate £50.75 £26.32 £21.86
Median % change year-on-year +92.82% +20.40% -68.77%
75th Percentile £60.30 £42.54 £47.50
90th Percentile £60.40 £52.26 £63.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.00 £23.00 £20.24
% change year-on-year +86.96% +13.66% -71.09%

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 13,131 9,828 12,943
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 26.88% 34.16% 30.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,589 6,685 9,180
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £415 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £626 £650
90th Percentile £713 £756 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £475 £488
% change year-on-year +1.32% -2.56% -2.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 559 227 522
10th Percentile £36.25 £27.00 £31.25
25th Percentile £53.88 £34.20 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% -7.26% -0.80%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £78.80 £85.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £62.50
% change year-on-year +4.00% - -

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 3 June 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 3 June 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for R in the UK

R
Top 16 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 3 June 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 -118 147 £465 -11.43% 230
London -69 88 £525 -4.55% 87
Work from Home -25 66 £550 +22.22% 44
UK excluding London -112 53 £444 -6.58% 194
North of England -69 13 £425 -9.81% 41
South East -60 12 £550 +35.38% 54
South West -28 10 £450 -47.98% 23
Yorkshire -51 10 £425 +1.49% 15
East of England -40 9 £413 -36.54% 32
Midlands -60 7 £416 -7.19% 25
East Midlands -23 6 £395 -11.63% 17
North West -37 2 - - 20
Northern Ireland +4 1 - - 7
Wales -13 1 £490 +10.11% 7
West Midlands -65 1 £438 +4.48% 8
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 35 (20.96%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.59%) Apache
3 4 (2.40%) Apache Superset
4 2 (1.20%) Confluence
4 2 (1.20%) Jupyter
5 1 (0.60%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.60%) R Markdown
Applications
1 16 (9.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 2 (1.20%) Spreadsheet
3 1 (0.60%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.60%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 1 (0.60%) SAP APO
1 1 (0.60%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 55 (32.93%) Power Platform
2 46 (27.54%) AWS
3 38 (22.75%) Azure
4 12 (7.19%) GCP
4 12 (7.19%) Snowflake
5 6 (3.59%) Azure DevOps
6 3 (1.80%) Amazon S3
6 3 (1.80%) Azure Data Factory
6 3 (1.80%) dbt
6 3 (1.80%) OpenShift
6 3 (1.80%) Serverless
7 2 (1.20%) Amazon Bedrock
7 2 (1.20%) Amazon EMR
7 2 (1.20%) Amazon Kinesis
7 2 (1.20%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 2 (1.20%) Cloud Functions
7 2 (1.20%) GitHub
7 2 (1.20%) Google Analytics
7 2 (1.20%) SaaS
8 1 (0.60%) Datadog
Database & Business Intelligence
1 54 (32.34%) Power BI
1 54 (32.34%) Tableau
2 31 (18.56%) Big Data
3 22 (13.17%) Hadoop
4 15 (8.98%) Data Warehouse
5 12 (7.19%) Looker
6 8 (4.79%) Relational Database
7 7 (4.19%) Mixpanel
8 5 (2.99%) Data Lake
9 4 (2.40%) Amazon Athena
9 4 (2.40%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (2.40%) BigQuery
9 4 (2.40%) NoSQL
9 4 (2.40%) Power Query
9 4 (2.40%) SQL Server
10 3 (1.80%) RDBMS
10 3 (1.80%) Spark SQL
10 3 (1.80%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 2 (1.20%) Flink
11 2 (1.20%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 2 (1.20%) Git
1 2 (1.20%) MLflow
2 1 (0.60%) Jenkins
2 1 (0.60%) JIRA
2 1 (0.60%) RStudio
General
1 54 (32.34%) Analytical Skills
2 32 (19.16%) Social Skills
3 31 (18.56%) Public Sector
4 28 (16.77%) Finance
5 14 (8.38%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 8 (4.79%) Marketing
8 6 (3.59%) Telecoms
9 4 (2.40%) Presentation Skills
10 3 (1.80%) Banking
10 3 (1.80%) Front Office
10 3 (1.80%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.80%) Retail
11 2 (1.20%) Manufacturing
11 2 (1.20%) Social Science
12 1 (0.60%) Billing
12 1 (0.60%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.60%) Organisational Skills
12 1 (0.60%) Private Banking
12 1 (0.60%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 52 (31.14%) Data Scientist
2 43 (25.75%) Analyst
3 37 (22.16%) Data Analyst
4 22 (13.17%) Senior
5 14 (8.38%) Data Engineer
5 14 (8.38%) Developer
5 14 (8.38%) Senior Data Scientist
6 10 (5.99%) Lead
7 9 (5.39%) Technical Analyst
8 8 (4.79%) Consultant
8 8 (4.79%) SQL Analyst
8 8 (4.79%) SQL Data Analyst
9 7 (4.19%) Lead Data Scientist
10 6 (3.59%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 6 (3.59%) Data Consultant
10 6 (3.59%) Software Engineer
11 5 (2.99%) Java Developer
11 5 (2.99%) Senior Analyst
11 5 (2.99%) Senior Developer
11 5 (2.99%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.78%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.59%) PyTorch
3 10 (5.99%) Pandas
4 7 (4.19%) scikit-learn
5 6 (3.59%) Keras
6 5 (2.99%) JSON
6 5 (2.99%) NumPy
6 5 (2.99%) PySpark
7 4 (2.40%) LangChain
7 4 (2.40%) Matplotlib
7 4 (2.40%) Seaborn
7 4 (2.40%) Shiny
8 3 (1.80%) Plotly
9 2 (1.20%) Apache Avro
9 2 (1.20%) Apache Beam
9 2 (1.20%) Hugging Face
9 2 (1.20%) NLTK
9 2 (1.20%) Prophet
9 2 (1.20%) SciPy
9 2 (1.20%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 14 (8.38%) Algorithms
2 11 (6.59%) CRISPR
3 7 (4.19%) Cloud Native
4 6 (3.59%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.99%) Data Protection Act
6 4 (2.40%) AI Agents
6 4 (2.40%) Analytical Mindset
6 4 (2.40%) Onboarding
7 3 (1.80%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.80%) Mainframe
7 3 (1.80%) Multi-touch
8 2 (1.20%) Credit Risk
8 2 (1.20%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (1.20%) Management Information System
8 2 (1.20%) Self-Motivation
9 1 (0.60%) Data Centre
9 1 (0.60%) Greenfield Project
9 1 (0.60%) NHS
9 1 (0.60%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 4 (2.40%) Linux
2 3 (1.80%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (52.10%) Data Science
2 86 (51.50%) Analytics
3 76 (45.51%) Visualisation
4 62 (37.13%) Machine Learning
5 52 (31.14%) Data Pipeline
6 51 (30.54%) Business Intelligence
7 46 (27.54%) Actionable Insight
8 45 (26.95%) Decision-Making
9 38 (22.75%) AI
9 38 (22.75%) Data Visualisation
9 38 (22.75%) Problem-Solving
10 35 (20.96%) Statistical Modelling
11 34 (20.36%) Data Analytics
12 29 (17.37%) Agile
13 28 (16.77%) Statistical Analysis
13 28 (16.77%) Statistics
14 26 (15.57%) Mathematics
15 25 (14.97%) Dashboard Development
16 23 (13.77%) Data Analysis
16 23 (13.77%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 158 (94.61%) Python
2 119 (71.26%) SQL
3 15 (8.98%) Java
4 9 (5.39%) C#
5 8 (4.79%) C++
6 5 (2.99%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 3 (1.80%) Scala
7 3 (1.80%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.20%) Ada
8 2 (1.20%) JavaScript
9 1 (0.60%) LookML
9 1 (0.60%) T-SQL
9 1 (0.60%) VB
Qualifications
1 41 (24.55%) Security Cleared
2 35 (20.96%) SC Cleared
3 26 (15.57%) Degree
4 5 (2.99%) PhD
5 4 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 4 (2.40%) Computer Science Degree
5 4 (2.40%) Master's Degree
6 2 (1.20%) Microsoft Certification
6 2 (1.20%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.60%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.60%) DBS Check
7 1 (0.60%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (7.78%) Data Quality
2 10 (5.99%) Actionable Recommendations
3 8 (4.79%) QA
4 5 (2.99%) GDPR
5 3 (1.80%) Accessibility
6 2 (1.20%) WCAG
7 1 (0.60%) MiFID
7 1 (0.60%) PCI DSS
7 1 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 2 (1.20%) Docker
1 2 (1.20%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 8 (4.79%) Terraform
2 7 (4.19%) Kubernetes
3 1 (0.60%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 20 (11.98%) Databricks
2 10 (5.99%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.19%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.99%) Google
4 5 (2.99%) OpenAI
5 3 (1.80%) Red Hat
6 2 (1.20%) Informatica
6 2 (1.20%) Splunk
7 1 (0.60%) Alteryx
7 1 (0.60%) Oracle
7 1 (0.60%) Pega
7 1 (0.60%) SAP
7 1 (0.60%) ServiceNow