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 7 February 2026, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 341 327 359
Rank change year-on-year -14 +32 +72
Contract jobs citing PhD 41 30 43
As % of all contract jobs in London 0.28% 0.22% 0.23%
As % of the Qualifications category 0.94% 0.87% 0.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 21 11 24
10th Percentile £450 £500 £325
25th Percentile £625 £529 £403
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £675 £700 £613
Median % change year-on-year -3.57% +14.29% -27.94%
75th Percentile £1,000 £931 £791
90th Percentile - £1,000 £895
England median daily rate £650 £650 £550
% change year-on-year - +18.18% -30.82%

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 4,345 3,462 4,582
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in London 29.21% 25.37% 24.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,056 2,155 3,066
10th Percentile £358 £350 £325
25th Percentile £430 £450 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £650
90th Percentile £750 £775 £763
England median daily rate £520 £525 £545
% change year-on-year -0.95% -3.67% -0.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 75 62 130
10th Percentile £19.94 £21.55 £14.27
25th Percentile £25.15 £24.93 £19.99
Median hourly rate £28.00 £39.00 £35.25
Median % change year-on-year -28.21% +10.64% +0.71%
75th Percentile £65.00 £59.69 £64.31
90th Percentile £76.58 £78.40 £83.75
England median hourly rate £25.15 £50.00 £46.18
% change year-on-year -49.70% +8.27% +2.62%

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 7 February 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 7 February 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 -4 7 £650 -19.38% 29
West London - 3 £773 - 3
East London - 1 £1,000 - 1
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 12 (29.27%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.44%) Apache Airflow
Cloud Services
1 14 (34.15%) Azure
2 10 (24.39%) AWS
3 4 (9.76%) Azure AI
3 4 (9.76%) Cloud Computing
4 3 (7.32%) Amazon ECS
4 3 (7.32%) Amazon S3
4 3 (7.32%) Amazon SageMaker
4 3 (7.32%) AWS Lambda
4 3 (7.32%) Azure Machine Learning
4 3 (7.32%) Serverless
4 3 (7.32%) Snowflake
5 2 (4.88%) GCP
6 1 (2.44%) Amazon Bedrock
6 1 (2.44%) Dagster
6 1 (2.44%) GitHub
6 1 (2.44%) GitHub Copilot
6 1 (2.44%) IBM Cloud
6 1 (2.44%) Prefect
6 1 (2.44%) SuccessFactors
6 1 (2.44%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 2 (4.88%) 3GPP
1 2 (4.88%) HTTP
1 2 (4.88%) Intelligent Network
1 2 (4.88%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (7.32%) Big Data
2 1 (2.44%) DB2
2 1 (2.44%) MongoDB
2 1 (2.44%) NoSQL
2 1 (2.44%) Pinecone
2 1 (2.44%) PostgreSQL
2 1 (2.44%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 3 (7.32%) Git
1 3 (7.32%) Jenkins
2 1 (2.44%) MLflow
2 1 (2.44%) Visual Studio
General
1 16 (39.02%) Social Skills
2 15 (36.59%) Finance
3 12 (29.27%) Banking
4 10 (24.39%) Front Office
5 7 (17.07%) Financial Institution
6 6 (14.63%) Investment Banking
7 5 (12.20%) Analytical Skills
8 3 (7.32%) Influencing Skills
8 3 (7.32%) Marketing
9 2 (4.88%) Aviation
9 2 (4.88%) Telecoms
10 1 (2.44%) Law
10 1 (2.44%) Legal
10 1 (2.44%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 11 (26.83%) Data Scientist
2 10 (24.39%) Lead
3 9 (21.95%) Machine Learning Engineer
4 5 (12.20%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
4 5 (12.20%) Developer
4 5 (12.20%) Quantitative Developer
5 4 (9.76%) Lead Data Scientist
5 4 (9.76%) Senior Data Scientist
6 3 (7.32%) AWS Engineer
7 2 (4.88%) Agentic Artificial Intelligence Engineer
7 2 (4.88%) Gen AI Engineer
7 2 (4.88%) Python Developer
8 1 (2.44%) Java Developer
8 1 (2.44%) Java Quantitative Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (21.95%) Pandas
2 7 (17.07%) PyTorch
2 7 (17.07%) TensorFlow
3 6 (14.63%) Dask
3 6 (14.63%) NumPy
4 5 (12.20%) Hugging Face
4 5 (12.20%) LangChain
4 5 (12.20%) Model Context Protocol
5 4 (9.76%) LangGraph
6 3 (7.32%) pydantic
6 3 (7.32%) scikit-learn
6 3 (7.32%) SciPy
7 2 (4.88%) A2A Protocol
8 1 (2.44%) Backbone.js
8 1 (2.44%) Bootstrap
8 1 (2.44%) Faiss
8 1 (2.44%) Google JAX
8 1 (2.44%) JAX
8 1 (2.44%) Keras
8 1 (2.44%) React
Miscellaneous
1 11 (26.83%) Distributed Computing
2 10 (24.39%) Derivative
3 9 (21.95%) Algorithms
3 9 (21.95%) Equities
4 7 (17.07%) Cloud Native
5 6 (14.63%) Fixed Income
5 6 (14.63%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
5 6 (14.63%) Hedge funds
6 4 (9.76%) Equity Derivative
7 3 (7.32%) Multi-touch
8 2 (4.88%) AI Agents
8 2 (4.88%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (4.88%) Distributed Systems
8 2 (4.88%) Synthetic Data
9 1 (2.44%) Enterprise Cloud
9 1 (2.44%) Onboarding
9 1 (2.44%) Reference Data
9 1 (2.44%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 1 (2.44%) Android
1 1 (2.44%) Apple iOS
1 1 (2.44%) Linux
1 1 (2.44%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 33 (80.49%) Machine Learning
2 32 (78.05%) AI
2 32 (78.05%) Computer Science
3 23 (56.10%) Mathematics
4 21 (51.22%) LLM
5 17 (41.46%) Generative AI
6 14 (34.15%) Data Science
7 13 (31.71%) Deep Learning
8 12 (29.27%) Statistics
9 11 (26.83%) Data Pipeline
9 11 (26.83%) Risk Management
10 10 (24.39%) Data Engineering
10 10 (24.39%) Physics
10 10 (24.39%) Prompt Engineering
11 9 (21.95%) Analytics
11 9 (21.95%) Natural Language Processing
12 8 (19.51%) Open Source
13 7 (17.07%) Decision-Making
13 7 (17.07%) MLOps
13 7 (17.07%) Software Engineering
Programming Languages
1 34 (82.93%) Python
2 6 (14.63%) Bash
2 6 (14.63%) PowerShell
2 6 (14.63%) SQL
3 4 (9.76%) C++
4 3 (7.32%) C#
4 3 (7.32%) Java
4 3 (7.32%) R
Qualifications
1 41 (100.00%) Degree
2 37 (90.24%) Master's Degree
3 4 (9.76%) Computer Science Degree
4 3 (7.32%) Microsoft Certified Professional
5 1 (2.44%) BPSS Clearance
5 1 (2.44%) MBA
5 1 (2.44%) MPhil
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (7.32%) QA
2 1 (2.44%) ISO/IEC 42001
2 1 (2.44%) NIST
2 1 (2.44%) SLA
System Software
1 4 (9.76%) Docker
Systems Management
1 6 (14.63%) Terraform
2 4 (9.76%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 6 (14.63%) Databricks
2 3 (7.32%) Google
3 1 (2.44%) IBM
3 1 (2.44%) SAP
3 1 (2.44%) Workday