User Research Contract Job Trends in the City of London

User Research
Central London > City of London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the City of London requiring User Research skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 103 110 121
Rank change year-on-year +7 +11 +41
Contract jobs citing User Research 26 16 19
As % of all contract jobs in the City of London 1.43% 0.78% 0.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.58% 0.84% 0.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 22 9 12
10th Percentile £401 £493 £419
25th Percentile £425 £525 £501
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £580 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year +0.87% - +9.52%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £631
90th Percentile £753 £675 £710
Central London median daily rate £580 £575 £575
% change year-on-year +0.87% - +9.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £52.25 - £71.25
Median hourly rate £54.50 - £72.50
75th Percentile £56.75 - £73.75
90th Percentile - - -
Central London median hourly rate £54.50 - £72.50

All Process and Methodology Skills
City of London

User Research falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the City of London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,650 1,897 2,284
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London 90.76% 92.04% 89.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,167 1,158 1,637
10th Percentile £340 £363 £363
25th Percentile £424 £465 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £575 £575
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% - -0.86%
75th Percentile £675 £688 £688
90th Percentile £756 £788 £804
Central London median daily rate £550 £575 £575
% change year-on-year -4.35% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 15 11
10th Percentile £19.98 £15.80 £17.00
25th Percentile £24.36 £22.00 £17.97
Median hourly rate £31.00 £42.50 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -27.06% +70.00% -41.86%
75th Percentile £43.33 £102.25 £42.38
90th Percentile £55.25 £127.30 £73.75
Central London median hourly rate £26.57 £35.00 £25.50
% change year-on-year -24.09% +37.25% -37.04%

User Research
Job Vacancy Trend in the City of London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing User Research relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the City of London.

User Research job vacancy trend in the City of London

User Research
Daily Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing User Research.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing User Research

User Research
Daily Rate Histogram in the City of London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing User Research in the City of London over the 6 months to 19 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for User Research in the City of London

User Research
Hourly Rate Trend in the City of London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing User Research.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the City of London citing User Research

User Research
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the City of London 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 1 (3.85%) Apache
1 1 (3.85%) Apache Airflow
1 1 (3.85%) Confluence
1 1 (3.85%) SharePoint
Applications
1 1 (3.85%) Sketch
Cloud Services
1 3 (11.54%) AWS
1 3 (11.54%) ChatGPT
1 3 (11.54%) GitHub
2 2 (7.69%) Anthropic Claude
2 2 (7.69%) AWS Elastic Beanstalk
2 2 (7.69%) Figma
2 2 (7.69%) Power Platform
3 1 (3.85%) Amazon Bedrock
3 1 (3.85%) Amazon S3
3 1 (3.85%) AWS CloudFormation
3 1 (3.85%) AWS Lambda
3 1 (3.85%) Azure AI
3 1 (3.85%) Dagster
3 1 (3.85%) dbt
3 1 (3.85%) Microsoft Copilot
3 1 (3.85%) Miro
3 1 (3.85%) Prefect
3 1 (3.85%) SaaS
3 1 (3.85%) Serverless
3 1 (3.85%) Vertex AI
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (3.85%) Amazon Athena
1 1 (3.85%) Amazon QuickSight
1 1 (3.85%) Amazon Redshift
1 1 (3.85%) Data Lake
1 1 (3.85%) Data Warehouse
1 1 (3.85%) MySQL
1 1 (3.85%) PostgreSQL
1 1 (3.85%) Power BI
1 1 (3.85%) Relational Database
1 1 (3.85%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 1 (3.85%) Git
1 1 (3.85%) JIRA
General
1 10 (38.46%) Public Sector
2 9 (34.62%) Social Skills
3 5 (19.23%) Analytical Skills
4 2 (7.69%) Finance
4 2 (7.69%) Legal
5 1 (3.85%) Influencing Skills
5 1 (3.85%) Local Government
5 1 (3.85%) Pharmaceutical
5 1 (3.85%) Retail
Job Titles
1 7 (26.92%) Senior
2 6 (23.08%) Designer
2 6 (23.08%) User Researcher
3 4 (15.38%) Developer
4 3 (11.54%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
5 2 (7.69%) Analyst
5 2 (7.69%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
5 2 (7.69%) Business Analyst
5 2 (7.69%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
5 2 (7.69%) Senior Analyst
5 2 (7.69%) Senior Business Analyst
5 2 (7.69%) Senior Designer
5 2 (7.69%) Senior User Researcher
5 2 (7.69%) Service Designer
5 2 (7.69%) UX Designer
6 1 (3.85%) Lead
6 1 (3.85%) Procurement Business Analyst
6 1 (3.85%) Product Designer
6 1 (3.85%) Senior Product Designer
6 1 (3.85%) Workday Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (7.69%) AngularJS
1 2 (7.69%) D3.js
1 2 (7.69%) FastAPI
1 2 (7.69%) React
1 2 (7.69%) SQLAlchemy
1 2 (7.69%) Vue
2 1 (3.85%) AWS CDK
2 1 (3.85%) LangChain
2 1 (3.85%) LangGraph
Miscellaneous
1 5 (19.23%) Product Ownership
2 2 (7.69%) Data Structures
3 1 (3.85%) Analytical Mindset
3 1 (3.85%) Low-Code
3 1 (3.85%) Security Posture
Processes & Methodologies
1 12 (46.15%) Agile
2 8 (30.77%) AI
3 5 (19.23%) Decision-Making
3 5 (19.23%) LLM
3 5 (19.23%) Qualitative Research
3 5 (19.23%) Roadmaps
3 5 (19.23%) Service Design
3 5 (19.23%) Storytelling
3 5 (19.23%) User-Centered Design (UCD)
3 5 (19.23%) Visualisation
4 4 (15.38%) Analytics
4 4 (15.38%) Data Pipeline
4 4 (15.38%) Data Science
4 4 (15.38%) Data Visualisation
4 4 (15.38%) Generative AI
4 4 (15.38%) Prompt Engineering
4 4 (15.38%) Quantitative Research
4 4 (15.38%) Usability Testing
4 4 (15.38%) User Experience
5 3 (11.54%) Front End Development
Programming Languages
1 5 (19.23%) Python
2 2 (7.69%) JavaScript
3 1 (3.85%) SQL
Qualifications
1 12 (46.15%) Security Cleared
2 11 (42.31%) SC Cleared
3 3 (11.54%) Degree
4 2 (7.69%) BPSS Clearance
4 2 (7.69%) Computer Science Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (19.23%) Accessibility
2 3 (11.54%) WCAG
3 2 (7.69%) Data Quality
Systems Management
1 1 (3.85%) Terraform
Vendors
1 1 (3.85%) Adobe
1 1 (3.85%) Foundry
1 1 (3.85%) Microsoft
1 1 (3.85%) Qualtrics
1 1 (3.85%) Salesforce
1 1 (3.85%) Workday