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

6 months to
28 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 443 325 370
Rank change year-on-year -118 +45 +57
Contract jobs citing R 166 200 227
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.40% 0.65% 0.51%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.33% 1.93% 1.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 104 114 160
10th Percentile £313 £301 £308
25th Percentile £413 £382 £376
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £688 £774 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £453 £380
% change year-on-year +10.50% +19.08% -15.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 5 13
10th Percentile £23.32 £21.75 £25.36
25th Percentile £27.60 £22.50 £25.50
Median hourly rate £32.50 £52.50 £35.63
Median % change year-on-year -38.10% +47.35% +18.77%
75th Percentile £54.88 £58.75 £47.50
90th Percentile £60.33 £59.95 £51.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 - £23.55
% change year-on-year - - +6.25%

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 12,446 10,373 13,080
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 29.88% 33.90% 29.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,302 6,704 9,236
10th Percentile £353 £355 £350
25th Percentile £413 £420 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -0.94% -5.36%
75th Percentile £606 £638 £650
90th Percentile £715 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £485 £500
% change year-on-year -0.93% -3.00% -1.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 481 241 503
10th Percentile £41.25 £21.25 £31.40
25th Percentile £53.75 £35.00 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.31
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £77.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.37 £62.25
% change year-on-year +2.57% +1.80% -4.23%

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 February 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 28 February 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 28 February 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 -112 145 £525 +5.00% 267
London -50 79 £550 - 72
UK excluding London -117 62 £500 +10.50% 267
Work from Home +1 60 £543 +9.97% 45
South East -40 17 £600 +29.73% 70
Midlands -52 17 £395 +6.25% 45
North of England -60 13 £500 +32.28% 63
East Midlands -16 11 £385 +20.88% 28
North West -31 11 £513 +35.75% 26
East of England -29 8 £641 -1.38% 32
West Midlands -51 6 £438 +6.84% 16
Wales -6 4 £366 - 12
South West -35 3 - - 30
North East -16 1 £475 - 14
Yorkshire - 1 - - 25

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 29 (17.47%) Apache Spark
2 15 (9.04%) SAS
3 8 (4.82%) SharePoint
4 5 (3.01%) Apache
4 5 (3.01%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.60%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.60%) Confluence
5 1 (0.60%) Jupyter
Applications
1 17 (10.24%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (3.01%) Microsoft Office
3 4 (2.41%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 1 (0.60%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.60%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.60%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.60%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.60%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 60 (36.14%) Power Platform
2 48 (28.92%) AWS
3 45 (27.11%) Azure
4 22 (13.25%) GCP
5 9 (5.42%) Snowflake
6 8 (4.82%) Power Automate
6 8 (4.82%) PowerApps
7 5 (3.01%) dbt
7 5 (3.01%) Microsoft Purview
8 4 (2.41%) Azure Data Factory
8 4 (2.41%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (1.81%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.81%) Azure Machine Learning
9 3 (1.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.81%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.81%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.20%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.20%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.20%) Amazon SageMaker
10 2 (1.20%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.20%) 2G
1 2 (1.20%) 5G
1 2 (1.20%) LTE
1 2 (1.20%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.20%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 60 (36.14%) Power BI
2 44 (26.51%) Tableau
3 28 (16.87%) Big Data
4 22 (13.25%) Hadoop
5 19 (11.45%) Data Warehouse
6 13 (7.83%) Looker
7 7 (4.22%) Data Lake
7 7 (4.22%) Data Mining
7 7 (4.22%) Delta Lake
7 7 (4.22%) Metadata
7 7 (4.22%) Mixpanel
7 7 (4.22%) NoSQL
7 7 (4.22%) Power Query
8 6 (3.61%) Spark SQL
9 5 (3.01%) Amazon Redshift
9 5 (3.01%) Relational Database
10 4 (2.41%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.81%) BigQuery
12 2 (1.20%) Amazon Athena
12 2 (1.20%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 12 (7.23%) Git
2 6 (3.61%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.20%) GoCD
3 2 (1.20%) MLflow
3 2 (1.20%) RStudio
3 2 (1.20%) SonarQube
3 2 (1.20%) Sonatype Nexus
3 2 (1.20%) TeamCity
4 1 (0.60%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.60%) JIRA
4 1 (0.60%) Maven
General
1 58 (34.94%) Social Skills
2 50 (30.12%) Analytical Skills
3 43 (25.90%) Finance
4 28 (16.87%) Public Sector
5 14 (8.43%) Marketing
6 12 (7.23%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (6.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 8 (4.82%) Banking
9 6 (3.61%) Organisational Skills
10 3 (1.81%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.81%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.20%) Financial Institution
11 2 (1.20%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.20%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.20%) Retail
11 2 (1.20%) Social Science
12 1 (0.60%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.60%) Agrochemical
12 1 (0.60%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.60%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 52 (31.33%) Data Scientist
2 31 (18.67%) Analyst
3 25 (15.06%) Senior
4 24 (14.46%) Data Analyst
5 19 (11.45%) Data Engineer
6 16 (9.64%) Senior Data Scientist
7 14 (8.43%) Developer
8 13 (7.83%) Architect
9 10 (6.02%) Lead
10 8 (4.82%) Software Engineer
11 7 (4.22%) Business Intelligence Developer
12 6 (3.61%) Power BI Developer
13 5 (3.01%) Azure Engineer
13 5 (3.01%) Business Analyst
13 5 (3.01%) Lead Data Scientist
14 4 (2.41%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 4 (2.41%) Consultant
14 4 (2.41%) Data Analytics Engineer
15 3 (1.81%) Senior Data Engineer
15 3 (1.81%) SQL Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (8.43%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.63%) PyTorch
2 11 (6.63%) scikit-learn
3 9 (5.42%) Pandas
4 8 (4.82%) PySpark
5 6 (3.61%) Kafka
5 6 (3.61%) Keras
6 5 (3.01%) YAML
7 4 (2.41%) LangChain
7 4 (2.41%) Shiny
8 3 (1.81%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.81%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.81%) JSON
8 3 (1.81%) Matplotlib
8 3 (1.81%) Seaborn
9 2 (1.20%) Node.js
9 2 (1.20%) NumPy
9 2 (1.20%) REST
9 2 (1.20%) SciPy
9 2 (1.20%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 15 (9.04%) Algorithms
2 12 (7.23%) Credit Risk
3 8 (4.82%) Cloud Native
4 7 (4.22%) Data Structures
5 6 (3.61%) Product Ownership
6 5 (3.01%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (1.81%) CRISPR
7 3 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.81%) IoT
7 3 (1.81%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.81%) Multi-touch
8 2 (1.20%) AI Agents
8 2 (1.20%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.20%) NHS
8 2 (1.20%) Onboarding
9 1 (0.60%) Clustering
9 1 (0.60%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 1 (0.60%) Mainframe
9 1 (0.60%) Social Media
9 1 (0.60%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.20%) Linux
2 1 (0.60%) Unix
2 1 (0.60%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 93 (56.02%) Data Science
2 91 (54.82%) Analytics
3 73 (43.98%) Machine Learning
4 67 (40.36%) Visualisation
5 57 (34.34%) Business Intelligence
6 48 (28.92%) Decision-Making
7 40 (24.10%) Data Analysis
8 37 (22.29%) Statistical Modelling
9 36 (21.69%) Problem-Solving
10 35 (21.08%) Data Modelling
10 35 (21.08%) Data Visualisation
11 34 (20.48%) Agile
12 33 (19.88%) Actionable Insight
13 31 (18.67%) Data Governance
13 31 (18.67%) Data Pipeline
14 28 (16.87%) AI
15 25 (15.06%) Dashboard Development
16 24 (14.46%) Data Analytics
16 24 (14.46%) Validation
17 22 (13.25%) Statistics
Programming Languages
1 157 (94.58%) Python
2 118 (71.08%) SQL
3 12 (7.23%) Java
4 9 (5.42%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (4.22%) Scala
6 6 (3.61%) C++
6 6 (3.61%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.81%) C#
7 3 (1.81%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.20%) Ada
8 2 (1.20%) Go
8 2 (1.20%) Rust
8 2 (1.20%) VBA
9 1 (0.60%) Bash
9 1 (0.60%) LookML
9 1 (0.60%) PL/SQL
9 1 (0.60%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 35 (21.08%) Security Cleared
2 31 (18.67%) Degree
3 28 (16.87%) SC Cleared
4 7 (4.22%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.61%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.61%) PhD
6 4 (2.41%) BPSS Clearance
6 4 (2.41%) Microsoft Certification
7 3 (1.81%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.60%) CIMA
8 1 (0.60%) CTC Cleared
8 1 (0.60%) DBS Check
8 1 (0.60%) GIAC
8 1 (0.60%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 25 (15.06%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.63%) Actionable Recommendations
3 7 (4.22%) GDPR
4 6 (3.61%) QA
5 2 (1.20%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.20%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.60%) MiFID
6 1 (0.60%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.60%) WCAG
System Software
1 8 (4.82%) Docker
2 2 (1.20%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 12 (7.23%) Kubernetes
2 3 (1.81%) Terraform
3 2 (1.20%) rkt
4 1 (0.60%) Ansible
4 1 (0.60%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 22 (13.25%) Databricks
2 16 (9.64%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.22%) Amplitude
3 7 (4.22%) Pega
4 5 (3.01%) Oracle
5 4 (2.41%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.41%) SAP
5 4 (2.41%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.81%) Informatica
6 3 (1.81%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.81%) Splunk
7 2 (1.20%) Cognos
7 2 (1.20%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.20%) Google
7 2 (1.20%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.60%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.60%) Cribl.io
8 1 (0.60%) Instagram
8 1 (0.60%) TikTok
8 1 (0.60%) UiPath