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

6 months to
25 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 425 338 375
Rank change year-on-year -87 +37 +43
Contract jobs citing R 160 201 231
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.42% 0.64% 0.52%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.38% 1.91% 1.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 101 112 164
10th Percentile £300 £298 £313
25th Percentile £406 £381 £384
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £514 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.68% -2.14% -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £638 £625
90th Percentile £688 £800 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £455 £438
% change year-on-year +12.64% +4.00% +2.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 7 15
10th Percentile £21.91 £20.80 £25.43
25th Percentile £24.03 £21.25 £30.62
Median hourly rate £27.71 £24.00 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +15.45% -43.53% +71.44%
75th Percentile £30.94 £53.75 £48.13
90th Percentile £32.63 £56.55 £49.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.71 £21.37 £47.50
% change year-on-year +29.67% -55.02% +114.35%

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 11,570 10,511 13,225
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.54% 33.33% 29.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,684 6,657 9,361
10th Percentile £350 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -2.78% -4.42%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £650
90th Percentile £725 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -1.02% -2.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 433 247 490
10th Percentile £39.55 £21.25 £35.50
25th Percentile £52.50 £35.38 £46.25
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.00 £69.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £85.00 £77.55
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £63.00 £62.50
% change year-on-year +3.17% +0.80% -3.85%

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 25 January 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
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 25 January 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 -90 142 £510 -2.86% 228
London -44 74 £519 -5.68% 65
UK excluding London -83 62 £513 +12.64% 217
Work from Home -6 55 £536 +4.59% 52
South East -17 20 £600 +17.07% 60
Midlands -40 18 £435 +22.19% 31
East Midlands -22 11 £385 +20.88% 19
North of England -56 11 £500 +40.45% 56
North West -25 9 £513 +44.14% 28
East of England -18 7 £641 -1.38% 27
West Midlands -45 7 £475 +10.08% 12
Wales -4 4 £366 - 13
South West -24 2 - - 18
North East -15 1 £475 - 10
Yorkshire - 1 - - 20

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 24 (15.00%) Apache Spark
2 15 (9.38%) SAS
3 8 (5.00%) SharePoint
4 5 (3.13%) Apache Airflow
5 4 (2.50%) Apache
6 3 (1.88%) Confluence
7 1 (0.63%) Jupyter
Applications
1 19 (11.88%) Microsoft Excel
2 7 (4.38%) Microsoft Office
2 7 (4.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.63%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 1 (0.63%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (0.63%) Salesforce CRM
1 1 (0.63%) SAP ERP
1 1 (0.63%) SAP IBP
1 1 (0.63%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.63%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 59 (36.88%) Power Platform
2 50 (31.25%) Azure
3 38 (23.75%) AWS
4 23 (14.38%) GCP
5 8 (5.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
5 8 (5.00%) Power Automate
5 8 (5.00%) PowerApps
6 7 (4.38%) Azure Data Factory
6 7 (4.38%) Azure Machine Learning
6 7 (4.38%) Snowflake
7 5 (3.13%) Azure DevOps
7 5 (3.13%) Microsoft Purview
8 4 (2.50%) Azure AKS
9 3 (1.88%) Amazon Bedrock
9 3 (1.88%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.88%) dbt
10 2 (1.25%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.25%) AWS Lambda
10 2 (1.25%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.25%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.25%) 2G
1 2 (1.25%) 5G
1 2 (1.25%) LTE
1 2 (1.25%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.25%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 59 (36.88%) Power BI
2 42 (26.25%) Tableau
3 24 (15.00%) Big Data
4 21 (13.13%) Data Warehouse
5 15 (9.38%) Hadoop
6 12 (7.50%) Data Lake
7 8 (5.00%) Data Mining
7 8 (5.00%) Looker
8 7 (4.38%) Delta Lake
8 7 (4.38%) Metadata
8 7 (4.38%) NoSQL
8 7 (4.38%) Power Query
9 6 (3.75%) Relational Database
9 6 (3.75%) Spark SQL
10 5 (3.13%) Amazon Redshift
10 5 (3.13%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.88%) BigQuery
11 3 (1.88%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
12 2 (1.25%) Azure SQL Database
12 2 (1.25%) Mixpanel
Development Applications
1 13 (8.13%) Git
2 6 (3.75%) Jenkins
3 4 (2.50%) JIRA
3 4 (2.50%) MLflow
4 2 (1.25%) GoCD
4 2 (1.25%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.25%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.25%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.63%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.63%) Maven
5 1 (0.63%) RStudio
General
1 56 (35.00%) Social Skills
2 50 (31.25%) Analytical Skills
3 42 (26.25%) Finance
4 19 (11.88%) Public Sector
5 16 (10.00%) Marketing
6 12 (7.50%) Pharmaceutical
7 10 (6.25%) Banking
8 6 (3.75%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 6 (3.75%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (2.50%) Manufacturing
10 3 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.88%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.25%) Legal
11 2 (1.25%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.63%) Advertising
12 1 (0.63%) Automotive
12 1 (0.63%) Financial Institution
12 1 (0.63%) Publishing
12 1 (0.63%) Retail
Job Titles
1 41 (25.63%) Data Scientist
2 29 (18.13%) Analyst
3 22 (13.75%) Senior
4 21 (13.13%) Data Analyst
5 18 (11.25%) Data Engineer
6 17 (10.63%) Developer
7 11 (6.88%) Architect
7 11 (6.88%) Lead
8 10 (6.25%) Senior Data Scientist
9 7 (4.38%) Business Intelligence Developer
9 7 (4.38%) Software Engineer
10 6 (3.75%) Azure Engineer
10 6 (3.75%) Consultant
10 6 (3.75%) Power BI Developer
11 5 (3.13%) Business Analyst
12 4 (2.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
12 4 (2.50%) Azure Data Engineer
12 4 (2.50%) Data Analytics Engineer
12 4 (2.50%) Machine Learning Engineer
12 4 (2.50%) Senior Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (8.13%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.88%) scikit-learn
3 10 (6.25%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.63%) Pandas
4 9 (5.63%) PySpark
5 6 (3.75%) Kafka
6 5 (3.13%) YAML
7 4 (2.50%) Keras
7 4 (2.50%) LangChain
8 3 (1.88%) FastAPI
8 3 (1.88%) Hugging Face
8 3 (1.88%) JSON
8 3 (1.88%) Shiny
9 2 (1.25%) CrewAI
9 2 (1.25%) Faiss
9 2 (1.25%) LangGraph
9 2 (1.25%) NLTK
9 2 (1.25%) Plotly
9 2 (1.25%) Seaborn
9 2 (1.25%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 12 (7.50%) Credit Risk
2 11 (6.88%) Algorithms
3 7 (4.38%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.75%) Cloud Native
5 5 (3.13%) Management Information System
5 5 (3.13%) Product Ownership
5 5 (3.13%) Self-Motivation
6 3 (1.88%) IoT
6 3 (1.88%) NHS
7 2 (1.25%) AI Agents
7 2 (1.25%) Analytical Mindset
7 2 (1.25%) Genomics
7 2 (1.25%) Hybrid Cloud
7 2 (1.25%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.25%) Multi-touch
7 2 (1.25%) Onboarding
8 1 (0.63%) Greenfield Project
8 1 (0.63%) Legacy Systems
8 1 (0.63%) Pricing Data
8 1 (0.63%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 3 (1.88%) Linux
2 1 (0.63%) Unix
2 1 (0.63%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 81 (50.63%) Data Science
2 76 (47.50%) Analytics
3 66 (41.25%) Machine Learning
4 60 (37.50%) Business Intelligence
5 58 (36.25%) Visualisation
6 44 (27.50%) Decision-Making
7 40 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
8 39 (24.38%) Data Analysis
9 38 (23.75%) Data Modelling
10 34 (21.25%) Agile
11 32 (20.00%) Statistical Modelling
12 31 (19.38%) Data Governance
13 30 (18.75%) Data Visualisation
14 29 (18.13%) Actionable Insight
15 26 (16.25%) AI
16 24 (15.00%) CI/CD
17 23 (14.38%) Validation
18 22 (13.75%) Data Pipeline
19 18 (11.25%) Data Analytics
19 18 (11.25%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 151 (94.38%) Python
2 111 (69.38%) SQL
3 13 (8.13%) Java
4 9 (5.63%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 9 (5.63%) Scala
5 8 (5.00%) C++
6 6 (3.75%) JavaScript
6 6 (3.75%) MATLAB
7 3 (1.88%) C#
7 3 (1.88%) VBA
8 2 (1.25%) Ada
8 2 (1.25%) Go
8 2 (1.25%) PL/SQL
8 2 (1.25%) Rust
8 2 (1.25%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.63%) Bash
9 1 (0.63%) LookML
9 1 (0.63%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 28 (17.50%) Degree
2 27 (16.88%) Security Cleared
3 21 (13.13%) SC Cleared
4 12 (7.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.75%) BPSS Clearance
6 5 (3.13%) Master's Degree
7 4 (2.50%) Microsoft Certification
8 3 (1.88%) Azure Certification
8 3 (1.88%) PhD
9 2 (1.25%) MCP
9 2 (1.25%) Tableau Certification
10 1 (0.63%) CIMA
10 1 (0.63%) CTC Cleared
10 1 (0.63%) DBS Check
10 1 (0.63%) GIAC
10 1 (0.63%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (14.38%) Data Quality
2 6 (3.75%) GDPR
2 6 (3.75%) QA
3 5 (3.13%) Actionable Recommendations
4 2 (1.25%) Accessibility
4 2 (1.25%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.63%) Sarbanes-Oxley
5 1 (0.63%) WCAG
System Software
1 11 (6.88%) Docker
2 2 (1.25%) HDFS
3 1 (0.63%) Lustre
3 1 (0.63%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 12 (7.50%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.25%) Ansible
2 2 (1.25%) rkt
2 2 (1.25%) Terraform
3 1 (0.63%) Packer
3 1 (0.63%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 26 (16.25%) Databricks
2 19 (11.88%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.38%) Pega
4 6 (3.75%) Oracle
5 4 (2.50%) OpenAI
5 4 (2.50%) SAP
6 3 (1.88%) Cognos
6 3 (1.88%) Google
6 3 (1.88%) Informatica
6 3 (1.88%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.88%) Splunk
7 2 (1.25%) Adobe
7 2 (1.25%) Amplitude
7 2 (1.25%) Dynatrace
7 2 (1.25%) Red Hat
7 2 (1.25%) TIBCO
8 1 (0.63%) Arqiva
8 1 (0.63%) Instagram
8 1 (0.63%) UiPath
8 1 (0.63%) Workday