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 31 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 179 441 429
Rank change year-on-year +262 -12 +18
Permanent jobs citing PhD 991 561 707
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 1.77% 0.54% 0.74%
As % of the Qualifications category 3.65% 2.01% 2.20%
Number of salaries quoted 154 335 262
10th Percentile £40,000 £37,700 £42,500
25th Percentile £52,000 £50,000 £51,875
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £65,000 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year +23.08% -13.33% +7.14%
75th Percentile £133,750 £88,125 £99,375
90th Percentile £175,000 £115,000 £130,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £63,652 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +6.09% - +9.09%

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 27,184 27,860 32,185
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 48.68% 26.87% 33.60%
Number of salaries quoted 11,043 17,264 14,482
10th Percentile £31,750 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £43,364 £38,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £53,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +2.80% -10.83% +9.09%
75th Percentile £68,750 £71,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £82,500 £87,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% +5.00%

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 31 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 31 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 +256 894 £80,000 +28.00% 680
Work from Home +370 802 £67,905 +13.18% 350
UK excluding London +224 626 £63,652 +6.09% 339
London +156 240 £125,000 +38.89% 396
North of England +194 229 £45,000 -43.75% 50
South East +35 125 £65,810 +13.47% 86
Midlands +153 107 £31,000 -43.64% 25
Yorkshire +145 107 £63,652 +69.74% 7
North West +71 95 £45,000 -43.75% 29
East of England +55 68 £50,000 -28.57% 96
West Midlands +102 59 £31,000 -43.64% 15
Scotland +98 49 £65,726 -6.11% 41
East Midlands +87 48 - - 10
South West +133 38 £50,000 -35.48% 26
North East +72 27 - - 14
Wales +49 10 £80,000 -20.00% 12

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 11 (1.11%) Apache Spark
2 3 (0.30%) SAS
3 2 (0.20%) Apache
3 2 (0.20%) Apache Airflow
3 2 (0.20%) ArcGIS
Applications
1 489 (49.34%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.20%) OrCAD
3 1 (0.10%) Photoshop
3 1 (0.10%) Pipeline Pilot
Business Applications
1 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 256 (25.83%) AWS
2 242 (24.42%) Azure
3 224 (22.60%) GCP
4 219 (22.10%) Serverless
5 217 (21.90%) AWS Lambda
6 16 (1.61%) Amazon EC2
6 16 (1.61%) Amazon SageMaker
7 4 (0.40%) Azure DevOps
7 4 (0.40%) Power Platform
8 2 (0.20%) Amazon S3
8 2 (0.20%) Azure Machine Learning
8 2 (0.20%) Dynamics 365
8 2 (0.20%) GitHub
8 2 (0.20%) SaaS
9 1 (0.10%) AWS CloudFormation
9 1 (0.10%) AWS Elastic Beanstalk
9 1 (0.10%) Cloud Computing
9 1 (0.10%) Datadog
9 1 (0.10%) Google Workspace
9 1 (0.10%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 215 (21.70%) Broadband
2 2 (0.20%) Network Security
3 1 (0.10%) Ethernet
3 1 (0.10%) TCP/IP
3 1 (0.10%) Wideband
Database & Business Intelligence
1 15 (1.51%) PostgreSQL
2 8 (0.81%) Hadoop
3 4 (0.40%) Amazon Redshift
3 4 (0.40%) Apache Hive
4 3 (0.30%) Big Data
4 3 (0.30%) Power BI
4 3 (0.30%) Relational Database
5 2 (0.20%) GIS
5 2 (0.20%) Metadata
5 2 (0.20%) QGIS
5 2 (0.20%) RDBMS
5 2 (0.20%) Tableau
6 1 (0.10%) Data Warehouse
6 1 (0.10%) DynamoDB
6 1 (0.10%) MongoDB
6 1 (0.10%) MySQL
6 1 (0.10%) NoSQL
6 1 (0.10%) Pinecone
6 1 (0.10%) SQL Server
6 1 (0.10%) Weaviate
Development Applications
1 22 (2.22%) Git
2 14 (1.41%) IntelliJ
3 4 (0.40%) Jenkins
3 4 (0.40%) Subversion
4 2 (0.20%) GitLab
4 2 (0.20%) Maven
4 2 (0.20%) MLflow
5 1 (0.10%) Qt Creator
5 1 (0.10%) Visual Studio
General
1 537 (54.19%) Analytical Skills
2 71 (7.16%) Finance
3 61 (6.16%) Social Skills
4 28 (2.83%) Pharmaceutical
5 27 (2.72%) Aerospace
5 27 (2.72%) Law
6 24 (2.42%) Front Office
7 21 (2.12%) Legal
7 21 (2.12%) Manufacturing
8 19 (1.92%) Games
9 17 (1.72%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 15 (1.51%) Publishing
10 15 (1.51%) Retail
11 14 (1.41%) Banking
12 11 (1.11%) Agriculture
12 11 (1.11%) Presentation Skills
13 10 (1.01%) Automotive
14 7 (0.71%) Aeronautics
14 7 (0.71%) Electronics
14 7 (0.71%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 487 (49.14%) Trainer
2 254 (25.63%) Senior
3 221 (22.30%) Machine Learning Engineer
4 40 (4.04%) Analyst
5 36 (3.63%) Data Scientist
6 33 (3.33%) Developer
7 31 (3.13%) Lead
8 23 (2.32%) Research Scientist
9 21 (2.12%) Software Engineer
10 18 (1.82%) Biostatistician
10 18 (1.82%) Java Engineer
11 16 (1.61%) Lecturer
11 16 (1.61%) Statistician
12 15 (1.51%) Qualitative Analyst
12 15 (1.51%) Quantitative Analyst
12 15 (1.51%) Senior Java Engineer
13 12 (1.21%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
13 12 (1.21%) Mathematician
13 12 (1.21%) Senior Data Scientist
14 11 (1.11%) Quantitative Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 46 (4.64%) PyTorch
2 42 (4.24%) NumPy
3 34 (3.43%) TensorFlow
4 25 (2.52%) Pandas
5 22 (2.22%) SciPy
6 21 (2.12%) React
7 20 (2.02%) OpenCV
7 20 (2.02%) scikit-learn
8 15 (1.51%) REST
9 14 (1.41%) Keras
10 8 (0.81%) AngularJS
10 8 (0.81%) Flask
11 7 (0.71%) Plotly
12 5 (0.50%) Google JAX
12 5 (0.50%) HTML
12 5 (0.50%) JAX
13 4 (0.40%) Hugging Face
13 4 (0.40%) SpaCy
14 3 (0.30%) Kafka
14 3 (0.30%) Qt
Miscellaneous
1 230 (23.21%) Self-Motivation
2 102 (10.29%) Algorithms
3 44 (4.44%) Robotics
4 21 (2.12%) Life Science
4 21 (2.12%) Molecular Biology
5 20 (2.02%) Virtual Team
6 8 (0.81%) Derivative
7 7 (0.71%) Manufacturing Execution System
8 6 (0.61%) Data Structures
8 6 (0.61%) Distributed Systems
9 5 (0.50%) Cloud Native
9 5 (0.50%) FPGA
10 4 (0.40%) Embedded Systems
10 4 (0.40%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 4 (0.40%) VHDL
11 3 (0.30%) Blockchain
11 3 (0.30%) Data Centre
11 3 (0.30%) Device Driver
11 3 (0.30%) e-Learning
11 3 (0.30%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 39 (3.94%) Linux
2 10 (1.01%) Unix
3 5 (0.50%) Windows
4 3 (0.30%) Debian
5 2 (0.20%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.10%) Android
6 1 (0.10%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 600 (60.54%) Artificial Intelligence
2 489 (49.34%) Conversational UI
3 326 (32.90%) Data Science
4 317 (31.99%) Machine Learning
5 298 (30.07%) Mathematics
6 292 (29.47%) Problem-Solving
7 264 (26.64%) Chemistry
8 254 (25.63%) Agile
9 242 (24.42%) Computer Science
10 236 (23.81%) CI/CD
11 234 (23.61%) Mentoring
12 233 (23.51%) Creative Thinking
13 223 (22.50%) Statistics
14 215 (21.70%) Clean Code
14 215 (21.70%) Performance Metrics
14 215 (21.70%) Personalization
15 165 (16.65%) Physics
16 107 (10.80%) Analytics
17 71 (7.16%) Software Engineering
18 54 (5.45%) Visualisation
Programming Languages
1 381 (38.45%) Python
2 219 (22.10%) TypeScript
3 66 (6.66%) C++
4 34 (3.43%) Java
5 30 (3.03%) SQL
6 29 (2.93%) C
7 21 (2.12%) MATLAB
8 15 (1.51%) C#
9 12 (1.21%) Fortran
10 11 (1.11%) Bash
10 11 (1.11%) R
11 7 (0.71%) C-shell
11 7 (0.71%) Korn
11 7 (0.71%) PL/SQL
11 7 (0.71%) Shell Script
12 6 (0.61%) Rust
13 5 (0.50%) Go
13 5 (0.50%) JavaScript
14 3 (0.30%) Embedded C
14 3 (0.30%) Perl
Qualifications
1 971 (97.98%) Degree
2 704 (71.04%) Master's Degree
3 23 (2.32%) Security Cleared
4 18 (1.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (1.31%) DV Cleared
6 12 (1.21%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (1.21%) SC Cleared
7 8 (0.81%) Chartered Engineer
8 6 (0.61%) Numerate Degree
8 6 (0.61%) Postgraduate
9 1 (0.10%) DBS Check
9 1 (0.10%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 15 (1.51%) ISO/IEC 15288
2 6 (0.61%) Data Quality
3 3 (0.30%) GDPR
4 2 (0.20%) Accessibility
4 2 (0.20%) HIPAA
5 1 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
System Software
1 29 (2.93%) Docker
2 4 (0.40%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 30 (3.03%) Kubernetes
2 2 (0.20%) Grafana
2 2 (0.20%) Prometheus
3 1 (0.10%) Bugsnag
3 1 (0.10%) Kubeflow
3 1 (0.10%) Terraform
Vendors
1 487 (49.14%) PayPal
2 7 (0.71%) Microsoft
2 7 (0.71%) Oracle
3 3 (0.30%) Databricks
4 2 (0.20%) Google
4 2 (0.20%) SAP
4 2 (0.20%) Xilinx
5 1 (0.10%) Adobe
5 1 (0.10%) Capita
5 1 (0.10%) Facebook
5 1 (0.10%) Genesys
5 1 (0.10%) IBM
5 1 (0.10%) OpenAI
5 1 (0.10%) YouTube