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 22 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 403 318 407
Rank change year-on-year -85 +89 -10
Contract jobs citing R 172 249 219
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.48% 0.68% 0.47%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.49% 2.11% 1.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 102 139 149
10th Percentile £304 £299 £308
25th Percentile £413 £350 £391
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -11.76%
75th Percentile £600 £611 £638
90th Percentile £688 £715 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £513 £500 £513
% change year-on-year +2.50% -2.44% +3.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 16 16
10th Percentile £24.55 £20.06 £25.06
25th Percentile £27.19 £20.12 £25.47
Median hourly rate £31.25 £21.50 £40.32
Median % change year-on-year +45.35% -46.67% +43.98%
75th Percentile £37.50 £26.44 £49.06
90th Percentile £51.25 £53.75 £58.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.00 £20.24 £47.50
% change year-on-year +48.26% -57.40% +110.97%

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 11,522 11,774 14,428
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 32.07% 32.05% 30.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,597 7,554 10,267
10th Percentile £350 £350 £360
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £506 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.62% -4.55% -2.65%
75th Percentile £621 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £756 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £490 £500
% change year-on-year -3.06% -2.00% -3.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 344 293 446
10th Percentile £29.53 £21.37 £32.16
25th Percentile £48.44 £37.55 £47.50
Median hourly rate £63.07 £62.50 £60.36
Median % change year-on-year +0.91% +3.55% -0.24%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £78.38
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £65.00

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 22 November 2025.

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 22 November 2025.

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 22 November 2025. 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 -74 152 £500 +2.35% 604
London -36 81 £500 - 240
UK excluding London -66 71 £513 +2.50% 475
Work from Home -6 60 £550 +10.00% 118
South East -2 25 £525 +2.44% 132
North of England -34 14 £465 +24.00% 113
North West -17 13 £479 +34.41% 68
East of England -7 12 £608 -2.72% 60
Midlands -44 9 £525 +34.44% 83
Wales -6 6 £366 - 23
East Midlands -16 5 £375 +10.29% 34
West Midlands -30 4 £575 -6.05% 48
Scotland -9 3 £550 -6.38% 29
South West -14 2 £513 -29.31% 34
Yorkshire -40 1 £450 -2.70% 36

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 23 (13.37%) Apache Spark
2 22 (12.79%) SAS
3 5 (2.91%) Apache Airflow
4 4 (2.33%) Apache
4 4 (2.33%) Confluence
4 4 (2.33%) SharePoint
5 2 (1.16%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.58%) Luigi
Applications
1 23 (13.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (6.40%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (4.65%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.58%) Chatbot
4 1 (0.58%) ProjectWise
Business Applications
1 2 (1.16%) Distributed Ledger
2 1 (0.58%) NEC Housing
2 1 (0.58%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.58%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 1 (0.58%) Salesforce CRM
2 1 (0.58%) SAP ERP
2 1 (0.58%) SAP IBP
2 1 (0.58%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 57 (33.14%) Power Platform
2 56 (32.56%) Azure
3 33 (19.19%) AWS
4 25 (14.53%) GCP
5 9 (5.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
6 8 (4.65%) Azure Machine Learning
6 8 (4.65%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.91%) Azure AKS
9 4 (2.33%) Azure DevOps
10 3 (1.74%) GitHub
10 3 (1.74%) Google Analytics
10 3 (1.74%) Power Automate
11 2 (1.16%) Adobe Analytics
11 2 (1.16%) Amazon EC2
11 2 (1.16%) Amazon S3
11 2 (1.16%) AWS Lambda
11 2 (1.16%) dbt
11 2 (1.16%) PowerApps
11 2 (1.16%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 2 (1.16%) 2G
1 2 (1.16%) 5G
1 2 (1.16%) LTE
1 2 (1.16%) Mobile Backhaul
1 2 (1.16%) VoIP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 57 (33.14%) Power BI
2 40 (23.26%) Tableau
3 20 (11.63%) Data Warehouse
4 18 (10.47%) Big Data
5 15 (8.72%) Hadoop
6 12 (6.98%) Data Lake
7 10 (5.81%) Data Mining
7 10 (5.81%) NoSQL
8 8 (4.65%) Metadata
9 5 (2.91%) Looker
10 4 (2.33%) Amazon Redshift
10 4 (2.33%) Relational Database
10 4 (2.33%) Spotfire
10 4 (2.33%) SQL Server
11 3 (1.74%) Amazon QuickSight
11 3 (1.74%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
11 3 (1.74%) Impala
12 2 (1.16%) Azure SQL Data Warehouse
12 2 (1.16%) MongoDB
12 2 (1.16%) Power Query
Development Applications
1 11 (6.40%) Git
2 5 (2.91%) Jenkins
2 5 (2.91%) JIRA
3 4 (2.33%) MLflow
4 2 (1.16%) GoCD
4 2 (1.16%) SonarQube
4 2 (1.16%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (1.16%) TeamCity
5 1 (0.58%) Bitbucket
5 1 (0.58%) Eclipse
5 1 (0.58%) Maven
5 1 (0.58%) RStudio
General
1 62 (36.05%) Social Skills
2 59 (34.30%) Analytical Skills
3 46 (26.74%) Finance
4 26 (15.12%) Marketing
5 17 (9.88%) Pharmaceutical
6 13 (7.56%) Banking
7 10 (5.81%) Public Sector
8 6 (3.49%) Documentation Skills
8 6 (3.49%) Manufacturing
8 6 (3.49%) Organisational Skills
9 5 (2.91%) Legal
10 3 (1.74%) Local Government
10 3 (1.74%) Telecoms
11 2 (1.16%) Digital Health
11 2 (1.16%) Influencing Skills
11 2 (1.16%) Retail
12 1 (0.58%) Agriculture
12 1 (0.58%) Agrochemical
12 1 (0.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 1 (0.58%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 45 (26.16%) Data Scientist
2 33 (19.19%) Analyst
3 23 (13.37%) Data Analyst
4 17 (9.88%) Architect
4 17 (9.88%) Developer
5 16 (9.30%) Data Engineer
6 15 (8.72%) Senior
7 7 (4.07%) Lead
7 7 (4.07%) Senior Data Scientist
8 6 (3.49%) Business Analyst
8 6 (3.49%) Software Engineer
9 5 (2.91%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
9 5 (2.91%) Consultant
9 5 (2.91%) Security Architect
10 4 (2.33%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
10 4 (2.33%) Azure Engineer
10 4 (2.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
10 4 (2.33%) Power BI Developer
10 4 (2.33%) Python Engineer
10 4 (2.33%) Senior Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (9.88%) TensorFlow
2 16 (9.30%) PyTorch
3 15 (8.72%) scikit-learn
4 14 (8.14%) Pandas
5 6 (3.49%) Kafka
6 4 (2.33%) Google JAX
6 4 (2.33%) JAX
6 4 (2.33%) Matplotlib
6 4 (2.33%) Seaborn
7 3 (1.74%) FastAPI
7 3 (1.74%) FHIR
7 3 (1.74%) NumPy
7 3 (1.74%) PySpark
8 2 (1.16%) ATL
8 2 (1.16%) Hugging Face
8 2 (1.16%) JSON
8 2 (1.16%) REST
8 2 (1.16%) XML
8 2 (1.16%) YAML
9 1 (0.58%) ODBC
Miscellaneous
1 19 (11.05%) Algorithms
2 12 (6.98%) Credit Risk
3 8 (4.65%) Multi-touch
4 6 (3.49%) Data Structures
4 6 (3.49%) Self-Motivation
5 5 (2.91%) Cloud Native
5 5 (2.91%) Product Ownership
6 4 (2.33%) NHS
7 3 (1.74%) Analytical Mindset
7 3 (1.74%) IoT
7 3 (1.74%) Management Information System
8 2 (1.16%) Distributed Computing
8 2 (1.16%) Genomics
8 2 (1.16%) Greenfield Project
8 2 (1.16%) Legacy Systems
8 2 (1.16%) Life Science
8 2 (1.16%) Mobile App
8 2 (1.16%) Security Posture
8 2 (1.16%) Social Media
8 2 (1.16%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 5 (2.91%) Linux
2 2 (1.16%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 87 (50.58%) Data Science
2 79 (45.93%) Machine Learning
3 68 (39.53%) Analytics
4 66 (38.37%) Business Intelligence
5 52 (30.23%) Data Analysis
6 51 (29.65%) Visualisation
7 44 (25.58%) Data Modelling
8 41 (23.84%) Statistical Modelling
9 40 (23.26%) Problem-Solving
10 36 (20.93%) Decision-Making
11 31 (18.02%) AI
11 31 (18.02%) Validation
12 29 (16.86%) Actionable Insight
13 28 (16.28%) Data Governance
13 28 (16.28%) Data Visualisation
14 26 (15.12%) Statistics
15 25 (14.53%) Agile
15 25 (14.53%) Computer Science
16 24 (13.95%) Mathematics
17 20 (11.63%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 160 (93.02%) Python
2 110 (63.95%) SQL
3 16 (9.30%) Java
4 13 (7.56%) C++
5 11 (6.40%) MATLAB
6 7 (4.07%) Scala
7 5 (2.91%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 4 (2.33%) C
8 4 (2.33%) PL/SQL
9 3 (1.74%) Go
9 3 (1.74%) JavaScript
10 2 (1.16%) Bash
10 2 (1.16%) Rust
10 2 (1.16%) VBA
11 1 (0.58%) Fortran
11 1 (0.58%) Korn
11 1 (0.58%) PowerShell
11 1 (0.58%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 39 (22.67%) Degree
2 17 (9.88%) Security Cleared
3 14 (8.14%) SC Cleared
4 12 (6.98%) Master's Degree
4 12 (6.98%) PhD
5 9 (5.23%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (4.07%) BPSS Clearance
7 2 (1.16%) Azure Certification
7 2 (1.16%) Tableau Certification
8 1 (0.58%) ACCA
8 1 (0.58%) CFA
8 1 (0.58%) CIMA
8 1 (0.58%) CTC Cleared
8 1 (0.58%) GIAC
8 1 (0.58%) Numerate Degree
8 1 (0.58%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (16.86%) Data Quality
2 9 (5.23%) QA
3 8 (4.65%) GDPR
4 4 (2.33%) EU AI Act
4 4 (2.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 2 (1.16%) Accessibility
5 2 (1.16%) Actionable Recommendations
5 2 (1.16%) DICOM
5 2 (1.16%) NIST
6 1 (0.58%) HL7
6 1 (0.58%) IFRS
6 1 (0.58%) IFRS 9
6 1 (0.58%) LOINC
6 1 (0.58%) PCI DSS
6 1 (0.58%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 1 (0.58%) SNOMED CT
System Software
1 11 (6.40%) Docker
2 3 (1.74%) Slurm Workload Manager
3 1 (0.58%) Lustre
Systems Management
1 14 (8.14%) Kubernetes
2 2 (1.16%) Ansible
2 2 (1.16%) rkt
2 2 (1.16%) Terraform
3 1 (0.58%) Packer
3 1 (0.58%) Progress Chef
Vendors
1 17 (9.88%) Microsoft
2 16 (9.30%) Databricks
3 10 (5.81%) Oracle
4 7 (4.07%) Google
4 7 (4.07%) Pega
5 5 (2.91%) SAP
6 4 (2.33%) ServiceNow
6 4 (2.33%) TIBCO
7 3 (1.74%) Splunk
8 2 (1.16%) Adobe
8 2 (1.16%) Amplitude
8 2 (1.16%) Bloomberg
8 2 (1.16%) Cognos
8 2 (1.16%) Dynatrace
8 2 (1.16%) Refinitiv
9 1 (0.58%) Arqiva
9 1 (0.58%) Cribl.io
9 1 (0.58%) OpenAI
9 1 (0.58%) TikTok
9 1 (0.58%) Workday