Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil, EngD, Doctorate)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for permanent job vacancies with a requirement for PhD qualifications. It includes a benchmarking guide to the salaries offered over the 6 months leading up to 16 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 207 438 419
Rank change year-on-year +231 -19 +27
Permanent jobs citing PhD 870 546 764
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 1.57% 0.55% 0.77%
As % of the Qualifications category 3.17% 1.99% 2.33%
Number of salaries quoted 182 341 269
10th Percentile £40,750 £37,500 £42,019
25th Percentile £45,000 £48,000 £48,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £62,500 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year +20.00% -16.67% +5.26%
75th Percentile £119,063 £87,500 £97,500
90th Percentile £142,250 £110,000 £124,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,000 £60,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year -13.33% +4.35% -

All Academic and Professional Certifications
UK

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

Permanent vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 27,423 27,421 32,843
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 49.39% 27.65% 32.94%
Number of salaries quoted 11,388 17,236 14,741
10th Percentile £32,500 £28,500 £31,277
25th Percentile £44,000 £38,500 £41,875
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £54,000 £59,600
Median % change year-on-year +1.85% -9.40% +8.36%
75th Percentile £68,750 £71,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £83,750 £87,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,000 £50,000 £51,959
% change year-on-year +4.00% -3.77% +3.92%

PhD
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing PhD as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for PhD in the UK

PhD
Salary Trend

3-month moving average salary quoted in jobs citing PhD.

Salary trend for PhD in the UK

PhD
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing PhD over the 6 months to 16 May 2025.

Salary histogram for PhD in the UK

PhD
Top 16 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing PhD within the UK over the 6 months to 16 May 2025. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +239 789 £80,000 +28.00% 903
Work from Home +360 676 £55,565 -7.39% 615
UK excluding London +194 510 £52,000 -13.33% 597
London +166 243 £120,000 +37.14% 452
North of England +176 176 £45,000 -43.75% 125
South East +49 112 £72,500 +25.00% 179
Yorkshire +142 89 £45,000 +20.00% 41
Midlands +124 78 £31,000 -40.95% 53
North West +48 64 £45,500 -43.13% 65
East of England +39 60 £50,000 -28.57% 131
Scotland +80 42 £45,000 -47.06% 66
West Midlands +85 40 £31,000 -43.64% 31
East Midlands +64 38 - - 21
South West +126 33 £45,000 -34.55% 45
North East +62 23 - - 19
Wales +45 9 £80,000 -20.00% 15

PhD
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 9 (1.03%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.34%) Jupyter
2 3 (0.34%) SAS
3 2 (0.23%) Apache
3 2 (0.23%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (0.23%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 339 (38.97%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.11%) OrCAD
2 1 (0.11%) Photoshop
2 1 (0.11%) Pipeline Pilot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 263 (30.23%) AWS
2 247 (28.39%) Azure
3 230 (26.44%) GCP
4 219 (25.17%) Serverless
5 217 (24.94%) AWS Lambda
6 16 (1.84%) Amazon EC2
6 16 (1.84%) Amazon SageMaker
7 4 (0.46%) Azure DevOps
7 4 (0.46%) Power Platform
8 2 (0.23%) Amazon S3
8 2 (0.23%) Azure Machine Learning
8 2 (0.23%) Dynamics 365
8 2 (0.23%) GitHub
8 2 (0.23%) SaaS
9 1 (0.11%) AWS CloudFormation
9 1 (0.11%) AWS Elastic Beanstalk
9 1 (0.11%) Cloud Computing
9 1 (0.11%) Datadog
9 1 (0.11%) Google Workspace
9 1 (0.11%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 215 (24.71%) Broadband
2 1 (0.11%) Ethernet
2 1 (0.11%) Network Security
2 1 (0.11%) TCP/IP
2 1 (0.11%) Wideband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (1.72%) PostgreSQL
2 8 (0.92%) Hadoop
3 5 (0.57%) Big Data
4 4 (0.46%) Amazon Redshift
4 4 (0.46%) Apache Hive
5 3 (0.34%) GIS
5 3 (0.34%) Power BI
5 3 (0.34%) Relational Database
5 3 (0.34%) SQL Server
6 2 (0.23%) Metadata
6 2 (0.23%) QGIS
6 2 (0.23%) RDBMS
7 1 (0.11%) Data Lake
7 1 (0.11%) DynamoDB
7 1 (0.11%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.11%) MongoDB
7 1 (0.11%) NoSQL
7 1 (0.11%) Pinecone
7 1 (0.11%) Spatial Data
7 1 (0.11%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 20 (2.30%) Git
2 14 (1.61%) IntelliJ
3 3 (0.34%) Subversion
4 2 (0.23%) GitLab
4 2 (0.23%) Jenkins
4 2 (0.23%) MLflow
5 1 (0.11%) Qt Creator
5 1 (0.11%) Visual Studio
General
1 459 (52.76%) Analytical Skills
2 80 (9.20%) Finance
3 71 (8.16%) Social Skills
4 33 (3.79%) Legal
5 28 (3.22%) Banking
5 28 (3.22%) Pharmaceutical
6 26 (2.99%) Manufacturing
7 24 (2.76%) Law
8 22 (2.53%) Aerospace
9 21 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 17 (1.95%) Front Office
10 17 (1.95%) Games
11 16 (1.84%) Retail
12 15 (1.72%) Publishing
13 12 (1.38%) Agriculture
14 9 (1.03%) Presentation Skills
15 7 (0.80%) Aeronautics
15 7 (0.80%) Automotive
15 7 (0.80%) Telecoms
16 6 (0.69%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 340 (39.08%) Trainer
2 255 (29.31%) Senior
3 223 (25.63%) Machine Learning Engineer
4 47 (5.40%) Analyst
5 36 (4.14%) Data Scientist
6 34 (3.91%) Developer
7 27 (3.10%) Lead
8 21 (2.41%) Graduate
8 21 (2.41%) Qualitative Analyst
8 21 (2.41%) Quantitative Analyst
9 20 (2.30%) Research Scientist
10 18 (2.07%) Software Engineer
11 16 (1.84%) Java Engineer
12 14 (1.61%) Senior Java Engineer
13 13 (1.49%) Biostatistician
14 12 (1.38%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
14 12 (1.38%) Quantitative Developer
14 12 (1.38%) Senior Data Scientist
15 10 (1.15%) Data Science Graduate
15 10 (1.15%) Lecturer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 50 (5.75%) PyTorch
2 45 (5.17%) NumPy
3 38 (4.37%) TensorFlow
4 28 (3.22%) Pandas
5 25 (2.87%) scikit-learn
6 22 (2.53%) SciPy
7 21 (2.41%) React
8 20 (2.30%) OpenCV
9 15 (1.72%) Keras
9 15 (1.72%) REST
10 8 (0.92%) AngularJS
10 8 (0.92%) Flask
11 7 (0.80%) Plotly
12 5 (0.57%) Google JAX
12 5 (0.57%) JAX
13 4 (0.46%) .NET
13 4 (0.46%) HTML
13 4 (0.46%) SpaCy
14 3 (0.34%) Kafka
14 3 (0.34%) Qt
Miscellaneous
1 232 (26.67%) Self-Motivation
2 114 (13.10%) Algorithms
3 45 (5.17%) Robotics
4 20 (2.30%) Virtual Team
5 19 (2.18%) Learning Management System
5 19 (2.18%) Molecular Biology
6 18 (2.07%) Life Science
7 10 (1.15%) Credit Risk
8 9 (1.03%) Hackathon
8 9 (1.03%) Manufacturing Execution System
8 9 (1.03%) Mobile App
9 6 (0.69%) Data Structures
10 5 (0.57%) Cloud Native
10 5 (0.57%) Derivative
10 5 (0.57%) Distributed Systems
10 5 (0.57%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 5 (0.57%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (0.57%) Management Information System
11 4 (0.46%) FPGA
11 4 (0.46%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 37 (4.25%) Linux
2 10 (1.15%) Unix
3 5 (0.57%) Debian
3 5 (0.57%) Windows
4 2 (0.23%) Mac OS
5 1 (0.11%) Android
5 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 474 (54.48%) Artificial Intelligence
2 345 (39.66%) Data Science
3 339 (38.97%) Conversational UI
4 331 (38.05%) Machine Learning
5 292 (33.56%) Problem-Solving
6 267 (30.69%) Agile
7 241 (27.70%) Mathematics
8 235 (27.01%) CI/CD
9 231 (26.55%) Mentoring
10 230 (26.44%) Creative Thinking
11 215 (24.71%) Clean Code
11 215 (24.71%) Performance Metrics
11 215 (24.71%) Personalization
12 203 (23.33%) Computer Science
13 175 (20.11%) Chemistry
14 174 (20.00%) Statistics
15 160 (18.39%) Physics
16 113 (12.99%) Analytics
17 78 (8.97%) Software Engineering
18 62 (7.13%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 409 (47.01%) Python
2 218 (25.06%) TypeScript
3 70 (8.05%) C++
4 42 (4.83%) Java
5 38 (4.37%) SQL
6 30 (3.45%) C#
7 27 (3.10%) C
8 21 (2.41%) MATLAB
9 13 (1.49%) JavaScript
10 12 (1.38%) Fortran
11 11 (1.26%) Bash
12 10 (1.15%) R
13 9 (1.03%) C-shell
13 9 (1.03%) Korn
13 9 (1.03%) Kotlin
13 9 (1.03%) Shell Script
14 7 (0.80%) PL/SQL
15 6 (0.69%) Rust
16 5 (0.57%) Go
17 3 (0.34%) Perl
Qualifications
1 850 (97.70%) Degree
2 587 (67.47%) Master's Degree
3 21 (2.41%) Security Cleared
4 19 (2.18%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (1.84%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (1.38%) SC Cleared
7 11 (1.26%) DV Cleared
8 7 (0.80%) Chartered Engineer
9 6 (0.69%) Numerate Degree
10 5 (0.57%) Postgraduate
11 3 (0.34%) AWS Certification
12 2 (0.23%) MPhil
13 1 (0.11%) DBS Check
13 1 (0.11%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (1.72%) ISO/IEC 15288
2 6 (0.69%) Data Quality
3 2 (0.23%) Accessibility
3 2 (0.23%) GDPR
3 2 (0.23%) HIPAA
4 1 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 29 (3.33%) Docker
2 3 (0.34%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 31 (3.56%) Kubernetes
2 2 (0.23%) Grafana
2 2 (0.23%) Prometheus
3 1 (0.11%) Bugsnag
3 1 (0.11%) Kubeflow
3 1 (0.11%) Terraform
Vendors
1 337 (38.74%) PayPal
2 16 (1.84%) Microsoft
3 14 (1.61%) Google
4 10 (1.15%) IBM
5 9 (1.03%) Oracle
6 4 (0.46%) ANSYS
7 2 (0.23%) SAP
7 2 (0.23%) Xilinx
8 1 (0.11%) Adobe
8 1 (0.11%) Capita
8 1 (0.11%) Databricks
8 1 (0.11%) ESRI
8 1 (0.11%) Facebook
8 1 (0.11%) Genesys
8 1 (0.11%) OpenAI
8 1 (0.11%) YouTube