PhD Contract Job Trends in London

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil, EngD, Doctorate)
England > London

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in London with a requirement for PhD qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered over the 6 months leading up to 24 April 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 380 324 347
Rank change year-on-year -56 +23 +61
Contract jobs citing PhD 43 32 45
As % of all contract jobs in London 0.25% 0.25% 0.25%
As % of the Qualifications category 0.85% 0.98% 1.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 20 10 28
10th Percentile £450 £499 £333
25th Percentile £537 £528 £482
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £650 £658 £600
Median % change year-on-year -1.14% +9.58% -33.33%
75th Percentile £752 £763 £738
90th Percentile £1,015 £865 £825
England median daily rate £614 £650 £600
% change year-on-year -5.58% +8.33% -26.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 1
10th Percentile £31.85 - -
25th Percentile £33.09 - £76.25
Median hourly rate £38.28 - £77.50
75th Percentile £45.59 - £78.75
90th Percentile £48.08 - -
England median hourly rate £38.28 - £65.00
% change year-on-year - - +217.54%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
London

PhD falls under the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications in London.

Contract vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 5,042 3,250 4,337
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 28.78% 25.51% 24.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,612 2,199 2,925
10th Percentile £363 £350 £325
25th Percentile £438 £436 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year - -2.78% -6.09%
75th Percentile £638 £653 £656
90th Percentile £750 £754 £775
England median daily rate £520 £525 £538
% change year-on-year -0.95% -2.33% -2.27%
Number of hourly rates quoted 91 61 116
10th Percentile £20.82 £20.00 £14.26
25th Percentile £25.36 £22.27 £20.43
Median hourly rate £51.44 £30.00 £26.00
Median % change year-on-year +71.47% +15.38% -39.53%
75th Percentile £76.58 £55.25 £49.06
90th Percentile £88.75 £67.50 £71.88
England median hourly rate £47.50 £47.50 £40.00
% change year-on-year - +18.75% -23.81%

PhD
Job Vacancy Trend in London

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

PhD job vacancy trend in London

PhD
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing PhD.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing PhD

PhD
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing PhD in London over the 6 months to 24 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for PhD in London

PhD
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing PhD.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in London citing PhD

PhD
Contract Job Locations in London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing PhD within the London region over the 6 months to 24 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
Central London -7 10 £650 -13.33% 13
West London - 3 £773 - 2
PhD
England

PhD
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in 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 10 (23.26%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.33%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 1 (2.33%) CPLEX
Cloud Services
1 15 (34.88%) Azure
2 12 (27.91%) AWS
3 5 (11.63%) GCP
4 4 (9.30%) AWS Lambda
4 4 (9.30%) Serverless
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon ECS
5 3 (6.98%) Amazon S3
5 3 (6.98%) Azure AI
5 3 (6.98%) Azure Machine Learning
5 3 (6.98%) GitHub
5 3 (6.98%) GitHub Copilot
5 3 (6.98%) Snowflake
6 1 (2.33%) Amazon SageMaker
6 1 (2.33%) AWS Fargate
6 1 (2.33%) Cloud Computing
6 1 (2.33%) Dagster
6 1 (2.33%) IBM Cloud
6 1 (2.33%) Power Platform
6 1 (2.33%) Prefect
Communications & Networking
1 2 (4.65%) 3GPP
1 2 (4.65%) HTTP
1 2 (4.65%) Intelligent Network
1 2 (4.65%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.98%) Big Data
1 3 (6.98%) DB2
1 3 (6.98%) MongoDB
1 3 (6.98%) NoSQL
1 3 (6.98%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (4.65%) Data Mining
3 1 (2.33%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 3 (6.98%) Git
1 3 (6.98%) Jenkins
2 2 (4.65%) MLflow
General
1 15 (34.88%) Social Skills
2 13 (30.23%) Finance
3 9 (20.93%) Banking
4 6 (13.95%) Analytical Skills
4 6 (13.95%) Front Office
4 6 (13.95%) Marketing
5 5 (11.63%) Financial Institution
6 3 (6.98%) Aviation
6 3 (6.98%) Influencing Skills
6 3 (6.98%) Investment Banking
6 3 (6.98%) Retail
6 3 (6.98%) Telecoms
7 2 (4.65%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 19 (44.19%) Data Scientist
2 7 (16.28%) Lead
2 7 (16.28%) Senior Data Scientist
3 6 (13.95%) Machine Learning Engineer
4 4 (9.30%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 4 (9.30%) Developer
4 4 (9.30%) Lead Data Scientist
4 4 (9.30%) Quantitative Developer
5 3 (6.98%) AWS Engineer
5 3 (6.98%) Senior
6 2 (4.65%) Agentic Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 2 (4.65%) Research Engineer
7 1 (2.33%) Associate Director
7 1 (2.33%) Hardware Engineer
7 1 (2.33%) Java Developer
7 1 (2.33%) Java Quantitative Developer
7 1 (2.33%) Machine Learning Scientist
7 1 (2.33%) Python Developer
7 1 (2.33%) Research Software Engineer
7 1 (2.33%) Security Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (25.58%) Pandas
1 11 (25.58%) PyTorch
2 9 (20.93%) TensorFlow
3 7 (16.28%) Hugging Face
3 7 (16.28%) NumPy
4 6 (13.95%) scikit-learn
5 5 (11.63%) Keras
5 5 (11.63%) Model Context Protocol
6 3 (6.98%) AngularJS
6 3 (6.98%) Backbone.js
6 3 (6.98%) Bootstrap
6 3 (6.98%) Dask
6 3 (6.98%) Ember.js
6 3 (6.98%) jQuery
6 3 (6.98%) LangChain
6 3 (6.98%) LangGraph
6 3 (6.98%) pydantic
6 3 (6.98%) React
6 3 (6.98%) SciPy
7 2 (4.65%) Prophet
Miscellaneous
1 8 (18.60%) Algorithms
2 6 (13.95%) Derivative
2 6 (13.95%) Distributed Computing
2 6 (13.95%) Equities
3 4 (9.30%) Cloud Native
3 4 (9.30%) Multi-touch
4 3 (6.98%) Equity Derivative
4 3 (6.98%) Fixed Income
4 3 (6.98%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
4 3 (6.98%) Hedge funds
5 2 (4.65%) AI Agents
5 2 (4.65%) Distributed Systems
5 2 (4.65%) Product Ownership
5 2 (4.65%) Synthetic Data
5 2 (4.65%) Tandem
6 1 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
6 1 (2.33%) Enterprise Cloud
6 1 (2.33%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 3 (6.98%) Android
1 3 (6.98%) Apple iOS
1 3 (6.98%) Linux
1 3 (6.98%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 34 (79.07%) Machine Learning
2 32 (74.42%) AI
3 30 (69.77%) Computer Science
4 24 (55.81%) Mathematics
5 20 (46.51%) Data Science
6 17 (39.53%) LLM
6 17 (39.53%) Statistics
7 15 (34.88%) Analytics
7 15 (34.88%) Generative AI
8 11 (25.58%) Decision-Making
9 9 (20.93%) Deep Learning
9 9 (20.93%) MLOps
10 8 (18.60%) Model Validation
10 8 (18.60%) Natural Language Processing
10 8 (18.60%) Prompt Engineering
11 7 (16.28%) Data Engineering
11 7 (16.28%) Data Pipeline
11 7 (16.28%) Physics
12 6 (13.95%) Applied Mathematics
12 6 (13.95%) Data Analysis
Programming Languages
1 35 (81.40%) Python
2 12 (27.91%) SQL
3 6 (13.95%) R
4 3 (6.98%) Bash
4 3 (6.98%) C#
4 3 (6.98%) C++
4 3 (6.98%) Java
4 3 (6.98%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 43 (100.00%) Degree
2 32 (74.42%) Master's Degree
3 7 (16.28%) Computer Science Degree
4 3 (6.98%) Microsoft Certified Professional
5 2 (4.65%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (2.33%) MBA
6 1 (2.33%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (6.98%) QA
2 1 (2.33%) Data Quality
2 1 (2.33%) ISO/IEC 42001
2 1 (2.33%) NIST
System Software
1 5 (11.63%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (11.63%) Kubernetes
2 4 (9.30%) Terraform
Vendors
1 8 (18.60%) Databricks
2 3 (6.98%) Google
3 1 (2.33%) IBM