R-symmetry leads to a distinct realisation of SUSY with a significantly modified coloured sector featuring a Dirac gluino and a scalar colour octet (sgluon). We present the impact of R-symmetry on squark production at the 13 TeV LHC. We study the total cross sections and their NLO corrections from all strongly interacting states, their dependence on the Dirac gluino mass and sgluon mass as well as their systematics for selected benchmark points. We find that tree-level cross sections in the R-symmetric model are reduced compared to the MSSM but the NLO K-factors are generally larger in the order of ten to twenty per cent. In the course of this work we derive the required DREG → DRED transition counterterms and necessary on-shell renormalisation constants. The real corrections are treated using FKS subtraction, with results cross checked against an independent calculation employing the two cut phase space slicing method.