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

6 months to
10 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 456 341 367
Rank change year-on-year -115 +26 +69
Contract jobs citing R 175 170 214
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.38% 0.58% 0.49%
As % of the Programming Languages category 1.35% 1.71% 1.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 119 117 148
10th Percentile £343 £328 £314
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 £785 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £461 £413
% change year-on-year -2.44% +11.82% -5.71%
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% -35.11%
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% -29.71%

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 12,924 9,956 12,842
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 28.18% 34.08% 29.19%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,607 6,723 9,121
10th Percentile £354 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £418 £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 £713 £763 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £476 £476 £489
% change year-on-year - -2.66% -2.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 545 240 479
10th Percentile £41.94 £22.50 £31.13
25th Percentile £55.00 £35.00 £46.22
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £67.38
90th Percentile £77.50 £85.00 £75.00
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 10 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 10 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 10 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 -96 154 £510 -2.86% 187
London -54 89 £525 -4.55% 62
Work from Home -11 68 £525 +8.81% 40
UK excluding London -118 61 £450 -2.44% 154
South East -45 16 £588 +60.41% 39
Midlands -64 14 £395 -3.54% 23
North of England -69 14 £475 +4.40% 34
North West -27 9 £530 +16.51% 14
East Midlands -28 9 £385 +31.40% 15
South West -30 9 £450 -5.26% 22
East of England -44 7 £413 -36.54% 21
West Midlands -68 5 £438 +1.39% 8
Yorkshire -51 4 £425 +21.43% 13
Wales -12 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 36 (20.57%) Apache Spark
2 11 (6.29%) Apache
3 7 (4.00%) SAS
4 5 (2.86%) SharePoint
5 4 (2.29%) 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 (8.57%) 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 (36.00%) Power Platform
2 51 (29.14%) AWS
3 47 (26.86%) Azure
4 20 (11.43%) GCP
5 8 (4.57%) Power Automate
5 8 (4.57%) PowerApps
6 7 (4.00%) Snowflake
7 6 (3.43%) Azure Data Factory
8 5 (2.86%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (2.86%) Microsoft Purview
9 3 (1.71%) Azure Synapse Analytics
9 3 (1.71%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.71%) dbt
9 3 (1.71%) OpenShift
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon EMR
10 2 (1.14%) Amazon Kinesis
10 2 (1.14%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.14%) Cloud Computing
10 2 (1.14%) Google Analytics
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 (36.00%) Power BI
2 48 (27.43%) Tableau
3 33 (18.86%) Big Data
4 24 (13.71%) Hadoop
5 21 (12.00%) Data Warehouse
6 11 (6.29%) Looker
7 9 (5.14%) Power Query
8 8 (4.57%) Relational Database
9 7 (4.00%) Delta Lake
9 7 (4.00%) Metadata
9 7 (4.00%) Mixpanel
9 7 (4.00%) Spark SQL
10 6 (3.43%) Data Lake
11 5 (2.86%) NoSQL
11 5 (2.86%) SQL Server
12 4 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
12 4 (2.29%) Data Mining
13 3 (1.71%) Amazon Athena
13 3 (1.71%) BigQuery
14 2 (1.14%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 10 (5.71%) Git
2 3 (1.71%) Jenkins
3 2 (1.14%) MLflow
4 1 (0.57%) Bitbucket
4 1 (0.57%) JIRA
4 1 (0.57%) RStudio
General
1 53 (30.29%) Analytical Skills
2 51 (29.14%) Social Skills
3 37 (21.14%) Finance
4 32 (18.29%) Public Sector
5 12 (6.86%) Pharmaceutical
6 11 (6.29%) Marketing
7 10 (5.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 7 (4.00%) Telecoms
9 4 (2.29%) Banking
10 3 (1.71%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.71%) Presentation Skills
11 2 (1.14%) Documentation Skills
11 2 (1.14%) Financial Institution
11 2 (1.14%) Retail
11 2 (1.14%) Social Science
12 1 (0.57%) Billing
12 1 (0.57%) Front Office
12 1 (0.57%) Local Government
12 1 (0.57%) Manufacturing
12 1 (0.57%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 54 (30.86%) Data Scientist
2 31 (17.71%) Analyst
3 27 (15.43%) Data Analyst
4 26 (14.86%) Senior
5 19 (10.86%) Data Engineer
6 17 (9.71%) Developer
7 16 (9.14%) Senior Data Scientist
8 11 (6.29%) Lead
9 10 (5.71%) Architect
10 8 (4.57%) Consultant
11 6 (3.43%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
11 6 (3.43%) Business Intelligence Developer
11 6 (3.43%) Lead Data Scientist
12 5 (2.86%) Azure Engineer
12 5 (2.86%) Data Consultant
12 5 (2.86%) Java Developer
12 5 (2.86%) Power BI Developer
12 5 (2.86%) Senior Analyst
12 5 (2.86%) Software Engineer
13 4 (2.29%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (7.43%) TensorFlow
2 11 (6.29%) Pandas
3 10 (5.71%) PyTorch
4 9 (5.14%) PySpark
4 9 (5.14%) scikit-learn
5 8 (4.57%) JSON
6 6 (3.43%) Keras
6 6 (3.43%) Shiny
7 5 (2.86%) YAML
8 4 (2.29%) LangChain
8 4 (2.29%) Matplotlib
8 4 (2.29%) NumPy
8 4 (2.29%) Seaborn
9 3 (1.71%) Kafka
9 3 (1.71%) Plotly
10 2 (1.14%) FastAPI
10 2 (1.14%) NLTK
10 2 (1.14%) Node.js
10 2 (1.14%) Prophet
10 2 (1.14%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 16 (9.14%) Algorithms
2 8 (4.57%) Cloud Native
3 7 (4.00%) CRISPR
4 6 (3.43%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.86%) Credit Risk
5 5 (2.86%) Self-Motivation
6 4 (2.29%) Data Structures
6 4 (2.29%) Multi-touch
7 3 (1.71%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.71%) Data Protection Act
7 3 (1.71%) Hybrid Cloud
7 3 (1.71%) Management Information System
7 3 (1.71%) Onboarding
8 2 (1.14%) Analytical Mindset
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%) Legacy Systems
9 1 (0.57%) Virtual Reality
Operating Systems
1 2 (1.14%) Linux
1 2 (1.14%) Unix
2 1 (0.57%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 94 (53.71%) Analytics
2 93 (53.14%) Data Science
3 74 (42.29%) Visualisation
4 69 (39.43%) Machine Learning
5 63 (36.00%) Business Intelligence
6 50 (28.57%) Decision-Making
7 43 (24.57%) Data Pipeline
8 42 (24.00%) Data Visualisation
9 40 (22.86%) Problem-Solving
10 38 (21.71%) Actionable Insight
11 37 (21.14%) Data Analysis
12 36 (20.57%) Data Modelling
13 35 (20.00%) Statistical Modelling
14 34 (19.43%) Agile
15 32 (18.29%) AI
15 32 (18.29%) Data Analytics
16 29 (16.57%) Data Governance
17 26 (14.86%) Statistics
18 25 (14.29%) Dashboard Development
18 25 (14.29%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 166 (94.86%) Python
2 129 (73.71%) SQL
3 13 (7.43%) Java
4 11 (6.29%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 7 (4.00%) JavaScript
5 7 (4.00%) Scala
6 6 (3.43%) C#
6 6 (3.43%) C++
7 3 (1.71%) TypeScript
8 2 (1.14%) Ada
8 2 (1.14%) VBA
9 1 (0.57%) LookML
9 1 (0.57%) SAS Macro
Qualifications
1 48 (27.43%) Security Cleared
2 41 (23.43%) SC Cleared
3 32 (18.29%) Degree
4 7 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (3.43%) Master's Degree
5 6 (3.43%) Microsoft Certification
5 6 (3.43%) PhD
6 4 (2.29%) BPSS Clearance
7 3 (1.71%) Azure Certification
8 2 (1.14%) Tableau Certification
9 1 (0.57%) CIMA
9 1 (0.57%) CTC Cleared
9 1 (0.57%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.57%) DV Cleared
9 1 (0.57%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 23 (13.14%) Data Quality
2 11 (6.29%) Actionable Recommendations
3 8 (4.57%) QA
4 7 (4.00%) GDPR
5 3 (1.71%) 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 4 (2.29%) Docker
2 2 (1.14%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 9 (5.14%) Kubernetes
2 6 (3.43%) Terraform
Vendors
1 22 (12.57%) Databricks
2 17 (9.71%) Microsoft
3 7 (4.00%) Amplitude
4 5 (2.86%) OpenAI
4 5 (2.86%) Pega
5 4 (2.29%) Google
5 4 (2.29%) ServiceNow
6 3 (1.71%) Informatica
6 3 (1.71%) Oracle
6 3 (1.71%) Red Hat
6 3 (1.71%) SAP
7 2 (1.14%) Splunk
8 1 (0.57%) Adobe
8 1 (0.57%) Alteryx
8 1 (0.57%) Cognos
8 1 (0.57%) Salesforce
8 1 (0.57%) UiPath