Category: Data & Statistics

Who Gets a UKRI Studentship? Diversity Data on UK Doctoral Researchers (2026)

In 2023 to 2024, UKRI recorded 5,165 new funded doctoral studentship starts. 47% reported their gender as female, up from 40% a decade earlier; 10% declared a disability; and 2% were recorded as Black. That last figure sits inside a dataset where ethnicity was not disclosed for 26% of starts and unknown for a further 9% — a gap UKRI itself describes as leaving its understanding “partial”.

All figures on this page are from UKRI’s equalities monitoring for 2023 to 2024 unless stated otherwise. This is the most detailed public dataset on who holds a funded UK doctoral studentship, and it comes with unusually candid limitations that belong beside every number.

The key figures

Measure	Value	Source and year
New UKRI-funded studentship starts	5,165	UKRI equalities monitoring, 2023–24
Reporting gender as female	47% (40% in 2014–15)	UKRI, 2023–24
Declaring a disability (UKRI overall)	10% (500 studentships)	UKRI, 2023–24
— highest by council (AHRC)	15% (80 studentships)	UKRI, 2023–24
— lowest by council (EPSRC, BBSRC)	8% (175 and 45 studentships)	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: White	46%	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: Asian	12%	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: Mixed	4%	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: Black	2%	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: not disclosed	26%	UKRI, 2023–24
Ethnicity: unknown	9%	UKRI, 2023–24
Aged 29 or under	The largest age group at every council; 50% (AHRC) to 93% (STFC)	UKRI, 2023–24

What exactly is this dataset — and what is it not?

Three scope notes, all of them from UKRI’s own text, and all of them load-bearing.

It is not an award rate. UKRI states plainly that “UKRI does not publish data on application and award rates for studentship starts”, because the source data and funding mechanism differ from research grants. What is published is “the distribution of awards as reported by holders of our PhD training grants”. So these numbers describe who started a funded studentship, not who applied, and nothing here tells you any group’s chance of success.

There is no benchmark this year. UKRI’s earlier reports compared studentship figures against HESA student data; the 2023–24 report does not, because “the discrepancies in reporting windows mean that HESA data for 2023 to 2024 was not available when this report was written, so we cannot provide benchmarks in this report.” That is the single most important caveat on this page: without a benchmark you cannot say from these figures alone whether any group is over- or under-represented relative to the doctoral population.

It covers UKRI funding only. The 5,165 starts are UKRI-funded studentships, a minority of all doctoral registrations — the full population figures, with their own caveats, are in our page on how many PhD students there are in the UK. Self-funded, university-funded, charity-funded and internationally funded researchers are all outside this dataset.

Where the funded studentships actually are

Before any characteristic, one structural fact shapes everything else: funded doctoral study in the UK is heavily concentrated by discipline.

Research council	Studentship starts	Share
EPSRC (engineering and physical sciences)	2,230	43%
ESRC (economic and social)	695	13%
BBSRC (biotechnology and biological)	560	11%
AHRC (arts and humanities)	520	10%
NERC (natural environment)	490	9%
MRC (medical)	380	7%
STFC (science and technology facilities)	285	6%
Total UKRI	5,165	100%

One council accounts for 43% of all new UKRI studentships. That matters for reading every figure that follows, because council-level differences in age, disability and ethnicity are partly disciplinary composition rather than anything about funding decisions — and the UKRI aggregate is, by construction, weighted heavily toward EPSRC.

Sex and gender

The share of studentship starts reporting their gender as female has risen from 40% in 2014–15 to 47% in 2023–24 — a decade of steady movement toward parity within the funded population.

Two cautions. UKRI collects this through a system offering male, female or “not disclosed”, and acknowledges directly that “these are not in alignment with data reporting categories for equality monitoring data”, noting it is expanding collection to sex and gender reassignment in its newer funding service. And the comparison people most want to make — against the 55% female share of all UK postgraduate researchers reported by HESA — is exactly the benchmark UKRI declined to publish this year, and involves different populations and reporting windows. The gap between 47% and 55% is worth noticing and not worth quoting as a finding.

A chart with a large hatched segment representing undisclosed data in a diversity dataset — Thirty-five per cent of the ethnicity data is missing. In a dataset where the largest recorded minority group is 12%, the gap is bigger than the thing being measured.

Ethnicity, and the hole in the middle of it

The recorded distribution across UKRI overall is White 46%, Asian 12%, Mixed 4%, Black 2%, Other 1% — with not disclosed 26% and unknown 9%. UKRI’s own summary is that non-disclosure “has been consistently high since 2014 to 2015”, so “our understanding of ethnicity for studentships is partial”.

Take that seriously before quoting any of the group figures. More than a third of the records carry no usable ethnicity, which is nearly three times the size of the largest recorded minority group. Every percentage above is a share of all starts including the undisclosed, so the true composition of the disclosed-plus-undisclosed population could differ materially in either direction.

What can be said with confidence is what UKRI itself says: after the White group, and excluding non-disclosed and unknown, the highest proportion of starts at every council came from the Asian ethnic group. The Black share is low everywhere in the recorded data — 5% at ESRC, 3% at BBSRC and MRC, 2% at EPSRC and NERC, 1% at AHRC, and suppressed at STFC because the count was too small to report.

Adjacent to the studentship data, and about a different population, UKRI’s grant figures show a pattern worth knowing if you are planning an academic career: among principal investigator applicants, those from the White ethnic group had a significantly higher award rate (34%) than Asian (25%) and Black (13%) applicants. UKRI’s own framing is that such differences “reflect systemic patterns rather than biases within the decision-making process itself”. Those are established researchers rather than doctoral candidates, and the numbers must not be blended — but they describe the funding environment a doctoral graduate enters, alongside the destinations data in our page on UK PhD graduate career outcomes.

Disability

10% of UKRI-funded students declared a disability in 2023–24 — 500 studentships — and UKRI reports the proportion has been increasing since 2014–15. The council spread is wide: 15% at AHRC (80 studentships) down to 8% at both EPSRC and BBSRC (175 and 45 studentships respectively).

Read that as a declaration rate rather than a prevalence rate. It measures who told a funder, through a monitoring form, at the point of a studentship start — which is a very different thing from who is disabled. Disclosure is shaped by whether a condition was diagnosed, whether the person identifies with the term, and whether they expect disclosure to help or hurt. The rise since 2014–15 is at least partly a rise in willingness to disclose.

Age

At every council, the largest group was aged 29 or under — but the range is enormous, from 93% at STFC to 50% at AHRC. Half of arts and humanities studentship starts go to people aged 30 or over.

That single contrast explains a good deal that is otherwise mysterious about doctoral life. Arts and humanities cohorts contain far more people with careers, dependants and mortgages, for whom a stipend is a pay cut rather than a first salary — one reason the same disciplines show the highest rates of part-time study and part-time working afterwards. It is also worth holding beside the published stipend rates: the same figure is a reasonable starting income at 23 and an acute problem at 38.

An equality monitoring form with a disclosure option left unticked — Every figure in this dataset is a declaration rate. What a monitoring form captures is who chose to answer it, which is why a quarter of the ethnicity field is empty.

How to cite these figures without overclaiming

Attribute to UKRI equalities monitoring, 2023 to 2024, and name the population precisely: UKRI-funded doctoral studentship starts, not “UK PhD students”. Never present these as award rates, because UKRI does not publish them and the report says so. Always carry the non-disclosure figure alongside any ethnicity percentage. Do not benchmark against HESA using this report, since UKRI withheld the comparison for stated reasons. Note that rates for groups of fewer than five individuals are not reported and suppressed cells are marked, so small-group figures are absent rather than zero. And prefer the council-level tables to the UKRI aggregate wherever your argument is disciplinary, since the aggregate is dominated by EPSRC’s 43% share.

What the data cannot tell you, and where to look instead

This dataset describes who starts. It says nothing about who finishes, who has a good experience, or who leaves. Completion and attrition by characteristic are not published as a routine UK series at all — treat any precise claim about them with suspicion unless it names a study. For experience, the sector’s own instrument is the postgraduate research survey, whose supervision and research-culture findings we cover in our page on PhD wellbeing and supervision satisfaction.

If you are choosing a route rather than analysing the sector, the more actionable question is which funding structures exist and what each year contains — set out in our comparison of integrated and traditional PhD routes, and in our guide to writing the research proposal for a UK studentship. Whichever route you are on, the work that gets you to the end is the same. Tesify keeps the thesis structured and moving — chapters, drafting and bibliography in one workspace, 100% written by you.

Frequently asked questions

How many UKRI studentships are awarded each year?

5,165 new funded studentship starts were reported in the 2023 to 2024 financial year. EPSRC accounted for 43% of them; the other six councils ranged from 13% down to 6%.

What proportion of UKRI-funded PhD students are women?

47% of studentship starts reported their gender as female in 2023–24, up from 40% in 2014–15. This covers UKRI-funded starts only, not the whole doctoral population.

How many Black PhD students get UKRI funding?

2% of studentship starts were recorded as Black at UKRI level, ranging from 5% at ESRC to suppressed counts at STFC. Read it beside the fact that ethnicity was not disclosed for 26% of starts and unknown for a further 9%.

Why is so much of the ethnicity data missing?

UKRI reports persistently high non-disclosure since 2014–15 and concludes that its understanding of ethnicity for studentships is partial. The data comes from monitoring returns made by training-grant holders, and disclosure is voluntary at several points in the chain.

What share of doctoral researchers have a disability?

10% of UKRI-funded students declared one in 2023–24, from 15% at AHRC to 8% at EPSRC and BBSRC. This is a declaration rate rather than a prevalence rate, and it has been rising for a decade.

Are UKRI studentships awarded fairly across groups?

This dataset cannot answer that. UKRI does not publish application or award rates for studentships, so the figures show the composition of those who started, not anyone’s chance of being funded.

Are these figures representative of all UK PhD students?

No. They cover UKRI-funded studentship starts, which are a minority of doctoral registrations, and are weighted heavily toward engineering and physical sciences by the shape of UKRI’s own funding.

How does this compare with the whole doctoral population?

UKRI deliberately did not benchmark against HESA in this report, because comparable HESA data was unavailable when it was written. Anyone drawing the comparison is doing something the funder declined to do, and should say so.

Why do arts and humanities cohorts look so different?

Age is the main driver: 50% of AHRC studentship starts were aged 30 or over, against 7% at STFC. Older cohorts change everything downstream — funding pressure, part-time study, caring responsibilities and career expectations.

Does UKRI publish data on completion by ethnicity or disability?

Not as part of this monitoring, which covers starts. There is no routine UK-wide series on doctoral completion by characteristic, so precise claims about attrition gaps need a named study behind them.

Where can I find the underlying data?

UKRI publishes the equalities monitoring report with an accompanying data dashboard covering financial years from 2014–15 onward, and offers downloadable data for individual figures. Cite that publication rather than any secondary summary, including this page.

August 26, 2026

How Big Should Your Sample Be? Sample Size Rules for Postgraduate Nursing and Health Research (2026)

There is no sector-wide dataset recording what sample sizes UK postgraduate nursing dissertations actually achieve. Anyone who quotes you a national average has invented it. What genuinely exists — and what an examiner will expect you to cite — is a body of published methodological conventions, each with a named source, a year, and a clearly stated boundary beyond which it should not be applied.

This article sets out those conventions in citable form. It is deliberately not a power calculator. The point is that “how many participants do I need?” has no answer until you have specified a design, an outcome and an effect you would consider clinically meaningful — and the honest work is in that specification, not in the arithmetic that follows it.

What is and is not evidenced

Three distinctions worth holding before you read any figure below.

First, methodological conventions are not empirical distributions. Cohen’s effect size benchmarks tell you what counts as a medium effect by convention; they do not tell you what effect sizes occur in nursing research. Cohen himself warned against applying them mechanically where field-specific evidence exists.

Second, rules of thumb encode assumptions. The widely-cited “ten events per variable” rule for logistic regression was derived under specific simulation conditions and has been challenged in later work. Citing it is fine; citing it as a law is not.

Third, a target sample size and an achieved sample size are different numbers, and dissertations are examined on how honestly the gap between them is handled. Recruitment through NHS services routinely runs below projection.

Conventions for quantitative designs

Convention	What it states	Source	Year
Effect size benchmarks	Cohen’s d: 0.2 small, 0.5 medium, 0.8 large; correlation r: 0.1, 0.3, 0.5	Cohen, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences	1988
Conventional power target	80% power at a two-sided alpha of 0.05 as the default minimum	Cohen	1988
Events per variable, logistic regression	Approximately 10 events per candidate predictor	Peduzzi et al., Journal of Clinical Epidemiology	1996
Multiple regression rule of thumb	N ≥ 50 + 8m for testing overall model fit, where m is the number of predictors	Green, Multivariate Behavioral Research	1991
Prediction model sample size	Criteria-based calculation replacing events-per-variable rules	Riley et al., Statistics in Medicine	2019–2020
Measurement property studies	Samples of at least 100 rated as adequate for most psychometric properties	COSMIN methodology	2018

The practical route through this table: identify your primary outcome and its analysis, find the convention that governs that analysis, and state the assumption you are making about the effect you expect. A power calculation reported without its assumed effect size is uninterpretable, and examiners ask about it.

Conventions for pilot and feasibility studies

Many postgraduate nursing dissertations are pilot or feasibility studies, either by design or because recruitment made them so. This is a legitimate design with its own literature, and it is not a consolation prize.

Convention	What it states	Source	Year
Rule of 12	Around 12 participants per group as a general pilot rule of thumb	Julious, Pharmaceutical Statistics	2005
Minimum for variance estimation	At least 30 participants to estimate a parameter with reasonable precision	Browne, Statistics in Medicine	1995
Effect-size-dependent pilot sizing	Pilot size should scale to the effect size anticipated in the main trial	Whitehead et al., Statistical Methods in Medical Research	2016
Pilot trial sizing review	Recommendations vary widely across the literature; no single accepted figure	Teare et al., Trials	2014

The critical point, and the one most often missed: a pilot study is not powered to detect an effect, so it should not report a significance test of effectiveness as a primary finding. Its outcomes are recruitment rate, retention, protocol adherence, acceptability and variance estimates for the main study. Reporting a non-significant p-value from a pilot as evidence of no effect is a substantive error, not a stylistic one.

Conventions for qualitative designs

Qualitative sample size is where the weakest justifications appear, usually as a single unreferenced sentence claiming saturation. The literature here is better than most students realise.

Convention	What it states	Source	Year
Saturation in homogeneous samples	Most themes emerged within 12 interviews; basic elements within 6	Guest, Bunce & Johnson, Field Methods	2006
Information power	Required N depends on study aim, sample specificity, theory use, dialogue quality and analysis strategy	Malterud, Siersma & Guassora, Qualitative Health Research	2016
Saturation is design-dependent	Saturation means different things in grounded theory, content analysis and thematic analysis	Braun & Clarke, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health	2021

Two cautions. Guest and colleagues’ figure of 12 is regularly cited as though it were universal; their own conditions were a homogeneous sample and a relatively narrow objective, and heterogeneous samples need more. And Braun and Clarke have argued directly that saturation is a poor fit for reflexive thematic analysis, since meaning generation does not simply stop. If you are using that method, the information power framework is the safer justification.

If your design involves interviews, budget for transcription as a resource question with its own ethics dimension — the constraints are set out in the comparison of transcription tools for research interviews.

How to write the justification paragraph

Whatever your design, the section your examiner reads should contain four elements. State the primary outcome and the analysis it will receive. State the effect you would consider meaningful, and where that figure came from — a prior study, a published minimal clinically important difference, or a stated convention. State the parameters used, including power, alpha and any assumed attrition. Then state the resulting target, and the software or method used to derive it.

A defensible quantitative example reads roughly as follows: the primary outcome was change in a validated fatigue score; a difference of 4 points was taken as the minimal clinically important difference, based on a named prior study; assuming a standard deviation of 9 points from that study, 80 per cent power and a two-sided alpha of 0.05, 82 participants per group were required; inflating for 15 per cent attrition gave a recruitment target of 190. Every number in that sentence is traceable to a source or a stated assumption.

A defensible qualitative example names the framework rather than asserting saturation: a sample of 15 to 20 was planned on information power grounds, given a narrow aim, a specific sample of advanced practice nurses in one specialty, and an analysis using established theory, with recruitment to continue until the analytic team judged the material sufficient for the stated aim.

The calculation itself is usually trivial in G*Power or in R; the reasoning is what carries marks. Which environment you use for it, and whether the output reaches your thesis cleanly, is covered in the comparison of statistical software for postgraduate dissertations.

When the sample you achieve is smaller than the sample you planned

This is common enough that examiners expect to see it handled well rather than concealed. The strong response has three parts.

Report the recruitment pathway honestly, with numbers: how many were approached, how many were eligible, how many consented, how many completed. Reframe the study to match what you have, most often as a feasibility study or an exploratory analysis. Then state the consequence for interpretation in plain terms — an underpowered study that finds no significant difference has not shown that no difference exists, and saying so explicitly is a mark of methodological maturity rather than a weakness.

Discuss the reframing with your supervisor early, and check whether an ethics amendment is required if the design changes materially. The general principle of writing limitations as analytic judgements rather than apologies is set out in the guide to writing a discussion chapter.

Sample size in a systematic review

If your dissertation is a review rather than a primary study, sample size still matters — but it is a property of the studies you include, not of your own recruitment. A synthesis of seventeen small underpowered trials supports weaker conclusions than one of three adequately powered ones, and saying so is part of the quality appraisal rather than an aside. The procedure is set out in writing a PRISMA systematic review chapter.

Where a portfolio thesis combines a review with an empirical study, the two sample size discussions should speak to each other: the review is often where your effect size assumption legitimately comes from. That structural relationship is one of the things examiners probe, as described in the anatomy of a professional doctorate portfolio.

Get the justification written while the reasoning is fresh

Sample size justifications are almost always written twice — once badly in the proposal, and once properly months later when nobody remembers where the assumed standard deviation came from. Tesify keeps the source, the assumption and the draft paragraph attached to each other in one workspace, so the methods section you submit still cites the study your calculation was actually built on.

Start your dissertation with Tesify

Frequently asked questions

What is the average sample size for a masters nursing dissertation?

No national dataset records this, so any stated average is an estimate without a source. What examiners assess is not the size but the justification: whether the target followed from a stated design, effect and set of assumptions, and whether shortfalls were reported honestly.

Is 12 interviews enough for a qualitative dissertation?

It can be. The figure comes from Guest, Bunce and Johnson (2006), whose conditions were a homogeneous sample and a narrow objective. Heterogeneous samples or broader aims require more, and for reflexive thematic analysis an information power justification is generally stronger than a saturation claim.

Do you need a power calculation for a pilot study?

Not in the conventional sense, because a pilot is not powered to detect effectiveness. You justify the size against the pilot’s own objectives — estimating recruitment rate, retention and variance — citing conventions such as Julious (2005) or Whitehead et al. (2016).

What power and alpha should you use?

Eighty per cent power at a two-sided alpha of 0.05 is the conventional minimum, following Cohen (1988). Ninety per cent power is increasingly expected for definitive trials. State whichever you use and why, rather than leaving it implicit.

Where do you find an effect size to assume?

In order of preference: a published minimal clinically important difference for your outcome measure, a prior study in a comparable population, a meta-analysis, and only then a conventional benchmark. Assuming a large effect purely because it yields a feasible sample size is the failure mode examiners look for.

Is the ten events per variable rule still accepted?

It remains widely cited from Peduzzi et al. (1996) but has been challenged as too simple. For prediction models, the criteria-based approach of Riley and colleagues is now preferred. Citing the older rule is acceptable if you acknowledge the critique.

Can you change your sample size after ethics approval?

Usually yes, but a material change typically requires an amendment to your approval rather than a note in the thesis. Check with your sponsor and research office before recruiting beyond or substantially below an approved target.

Does a small sample mean the dissertation will fail?

No. Dissertations fail on unjustified claims, not on small numbers. A small study reported accurately, reframed appropriately and interpreted within its limits is examined more favourably than a small study whose conclusions outrun its data.

Should you report a post hoc power analysis?

Generally no. Observed power calculated from your own non-significant result is a direct function of the p-value and adds no information, a point made repeatedly in the statistical literature. Report confidence intervals instead, which show the range of effects your data remain compatible with.

August 24, 2026

What Do UK PhD Graduates Actually Do? Career Destinations and Earnings (2026 Data)

Fifteen months after graduating, 91% of UK doctoral graduates were working and under 3% were unemployed, with median earnings of £42,000 — but only 41% were employed in higher education, down from roughly half in every previous analysis in the series, and just 7% of those in higher education research held an open-ended contract.

Those figures come from What do researchers do? Employment, earnings and activities of recent doctoral graduates 2026, published by Vitae (the Careers Research and Advisory Centre) in March 2026. Every number on this page is from that report unless stated otherwise, and the scope notes are kept attached because this is the dataset most often quoted loosely.

The key figures

Measure	Value	Source and year
Doctoral graduates with recorded outcomes	10,690 (45% of 23,665 known graduates)	Vitae WDRD 2026, 2022/23 cohort
In work of some kind	91%	Vitae WDRD 2026
— full-time work	73%	Vitae WDRD 2026
— part-time work	10%	Vitae WDRD 2026
— work combined with further study	8%	Vitae WDRD 2026
Unemployed	under 3%	Vitae WDRD 2026
Median earnings, 15 months after graduation	£42,000	Vitae WDRD 2026
Median earnings, first-degree graduates at the same point	£29,000	Vitae WDRD 2026
Working in higher education	41%	Vitae WDRD 2026
In research roles outside higher education	14%	Vitae WDRD 2026
Open-ended contract, all employed doctoral graduates	60%	Vitae WDRD 2026
Open-ended contract, those in HE research	7%	Vitae WDRD 2026
Said the doctorate was required for their job	just under 60%	Vitae WDRD 2026

What is this survey, and what are its limits?

The underlying instrument is HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey, which since 2019 has replaced the older Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey. Two consequences matter for anyone citing trends. Graduate Outcomes runs 15 months after graduation rather than DLHE’s six months, so the two series are not directly comparable — a point Vitae makes explicitly. And several doctorate-specific questions now sit in optional question banks, which reduces the numbers behind some findings.

Coverage for this wave: outcomes recorded for 10,690 doctoral graduates, 45% of the 23,665 known graduates, split 57% of UK graduates and 32% of international ones. Vitae is candid that response rates are lower than DLHE achieved historically, while noting the analysis rests on “a larger sample of graduates than any other UK outcomes study”. Both halves of that sentence should travel with the numbers.

One further scope note: this measures the population’s early destinations, not the doctoral population itself. For how many postgraduate researchers there are in the first place, the enrolment series is a different dataset with different caveats — set out in our page on the HESA figures for PhD student numbers, which deliberately does not carry outcome data.

Is a doctorate still employable?

On this evidence, markedly so, and more resiliently than other qualification levels. Against the doctoral 73% in full-time work and under 3% unemployed, HESA’s figures for 2022/23 first-degree graduates were 55% in full-time work, 12% part-time, 18% in further study and 7% unemployed. Taught postgraduates sat between the two at 69%, 11%, 11% and 3%.

Vitae also notes that doctoral employment outcomes have “changed less than for first-degree graduates over the last five years”, holding steady through and after the pandemic-affected labour market that visibly dented the 2018/19 and 2019/20 cohorts. Whatever else is true about doctoral careers, mass unemployment is not the shape of the problem.

Where do they actually go?

This is where the headline of the 2026 report sits. 41% of working doctoral graduates were employed in higher education — lower than the roughly half recorded in all previous analyses in this series, with decreases in every disciplinary group and the largest driven by fewer physical- and biological-science graduates going into HE research.

The disciplinary split is stark and stable. Higher education absorbed 61% of social science graduates and 56% of arts and humanities graduates, against much lower shares in STEM. The nature of those HE jobs also differs: most STEM graduates working in higher education were in research posts, while in the social sciences and arts and humanities most were in teaching roles.

Meanwhile 14% went into research jobs outside higher education, up on the 2018/19 cohort in most disciplines — a reminder that “research career” and “academic career” have not been synonyms for some time. Arts and humanities remain the outlier at the other end: a quarter of them were in a miscellaneous “other occupations” category, twice the proportion of any other discipline.

A research laboratory and a commercial office in one frame, representing two doctoral career paths — Fourteen per cent went into research outside higher education, and that share is rising. The academic route is one destination among several rather than the default one.

What do they earn?

Median earnings 15 months after graduation reached £42,000, which Vitae describes as having “risen consistently”, against £29,000 for first-degree graduates at the same point. The premium is real; where it sits, however, is instructive.

Higher education research: £38,000 — the lowest of the named clusters.
Research outside higher education: £41,000.
Other common doctoral occupations: £50,000.
Higher education teaching: higher than HE research, which Vitae attributes to different doctoral study trajectories rather than to teaching being better paid in itself.

The point worth carrying away is not that academia pays badly in absolute terms but that the lowest-paid cluster in this dataset is the one most doctoral candidates are aiming at. Set against the studentship figures in our stipends and funding roundup, an HE research post is still a substantial rise on a stipend — just the smallest available rise.

The finding that defines the academic route

Of doctoral graduates working in higher education research, only 7% had an open-ended contract. The remainder were on fixed terms: 81% on contracts of twelve months or more, and 11% on something shorter than a year. Vitae notes this “had not changed materially since 2018/19”.

The contrast inside the same dataset is what makes the figure land. Across all employed doctoral graduates, 60% held open-ended contracts — up from 46% for the 2018/19 cohort and 55% for 2019/20. Open-ended contracts rose in every occupational cluster except HE research. Over three quarters of those in HE teaching and in every non-HE cluster had open-ended contracts. Zero-hours and supply arrangements were rare: 1% among those in HE teaching and lecturing.

So the precarity that dominates conversation about doctoral careers is real, specific and located — it is a property of postdoctoral research employment, not of having a doctorate. Anyone planning an academic research career should read the 7% as the base rate for their first job, and plan finances, visas and housing around a fixed end date. If you are weighing that route, the institutional incentives shaping who gets hired are worth understanding too: our explainer on the REF and PhD students covers why departments hire toward a submission, and publishing from your thesis is the currency that market runs on.

A fixed-term employment contract on a desk beside a calendar — Seven per cent open-ended. The single most useful number in the dataset for anyone planning a postdoctoral career, and the one least often quoted with its cluster attached.

Was the doctorate worth it, according to the graduates?

Just under 60% of employed doctoral graduates said their doctorate was required for their job, and only 14% said it had not been at least advantageous — meaning at least two thirds felt it advantageous in every occupational cluster, including those well outside research.

The skills findings point the same way. Doctoral research skills were regularly used by 77% and at least occasionally by 93%; 62% were conducting research or working with research findings; three quarters reported working with a high degree of autonomy, while over half also worked in a team most of the time. Around a third had done a placement or internship during doctoral study, most lasting over a month — the clearest actionable finding in the report for anyone still mid-candidature.

Where do they work, geographically?

Two directions, both moving. Among UK-domiciled doctoral graduates whose work location was known, 6% were working outside the UK — down from 10% for the 2018/19 cohort. In the other direction, just over 60% of international doctoral graduates remained in the UK to work, which was higher than previously recorded.

How to cite these figures

Attribute to Vitae, What do researchers do? Employment, earnings and activities of recent doctoral graduates (CRAC, 2026), and name the cohort — 2022/23 doctoral graduates, surveyed 15 months after graduation via HESA’s Graduate Outcomes. Always attach the base: percentages of working graduates for the occupational clusters, of employed graduates for the contract figures, and of all graduates for the headline employment rate. Do not splice these against DLHE-era numbers, since the surveys differ in timing and coverage. And treat Vitae’s occupational clusters as its own analytical construction — they are built from groups of SIC and SOC codes precisely because standard categories cannot separate a research-only post from a teaching post in the same institution.

What this means if you are still writing

Three reframings the data supports. The academic route is a minority destination and shrinking, so building a plan that assumes it is planning against the evidence. Research careers outside universities are growing, better paid than HE research, and overwhelmingly on open-ended contracts. And the doctorate itself is doing work in the labour market well beyond academia, since a majority of graduates report it was required for the job they hold.

All of which is downstream of one thing: finishing. Whatever destination you are aiming at, the variable you control is whether the thesis gets written on time — and an unfunded overrun year costs more than any career decision in this dataset. Tesify keeps the thesis structured and moving — chapters, drafting and an automatic bibliography in one workspace, 100% written by you.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of PhD graduates get academic jobs?

41% of working UK doctoral graduates were employed in higher education 15 months after graduation, across research, teaching and other HE roles — lower than the roughly half found in every earlier report in the series (Vitae, 2026).

How much do PhD graduates earn in the UK?

Median earnings were £42,000 fifteen months after graduation for 2022/23 doctoral graduates, against £29,000 for first-degree graduates at the same point (Vitae, 2026).

Do postdocs get permanent contracts?

Rarely at this stage. Only 7% of doctoral graduates working in higher education research held an open-ended contract; 81% were on fixed terms of twelve months or more and 11% on shorter contracts (Vitae, 2026).

Are PhD graduates unemployed?

Very few — under 3% of 2022/23 doctoral graduates, against 7% of first-degree graduates in the same year. Doctoral employment outcomes have also been more stable across the last five years.

Which subjects have the best doctoral career outcomes?

It depends what you are measuring. STEM graduates entered full-time work at higher rates; earnings were strongest for biomedical sciences and social sciences and weakest for arts and humanities, which Vitae attributes largely to the occupations each group enters rather than to the disciplines themselves.

Do arts and humanities PhDs struggle?

Their pattern differs rather than simply being worse. Part-time working is much higher — 25% overall, and a third of those actually working — self-employment runs at about 10%, and a quarter end up in a miscellaneous “other occupations” category. Unemployment is only slightly above other disciplines, at around 3%.

How many UK PhD graduates work abroad?

6% of UK-domiciled working doctoral graduates were outside the UK, down from 10% for the 2018/19 cohort. Conversely, just over 60% of international doctoral graduates stayed in the UK to work.

Is a PhD worth it financially?

On these figures the earnings premium at 15 months is substantial, and just under 60% of employed graduates said the doctorate was required for their job. The report measures early outcomes rather than lifetime earnings, so it cannot answer the question in full.

What is the Graduate Outcomes survey?

HESA’s survey of graduates 15 months after they qualify, which replaced the older DLHE survey from the 2017/18 cohort onwards. It covers international as well as UK graduates, but its timing and coverage mean its results are not directly comparable with DLHE figures.

Should I do an internship during my PhD?

Around a third of graduates had, mostly for over a month, and it is one of the few destination-relevant variables that is entirely within your control during candidature. Check whether your funder mandates or funds placements — some research council schemes do.

Where can I find the full report?

Vitae publishes What do researchers do? on its own site; that publication, rather than any secondary summary including this page, is the version to cite in academic or policy writing.

August 24, 2026

Have You Cited a Retracted Paper? The Retraction Data, and How to Audit Your Own Bibliography (2026)
There is no published figure for how many retracted papers are cited in UK doctoral theses, and no UK body collects one. What does exist is an open, free, machine-readable register of retractions covering roughly 50,000 records at the point it was consolidated in 2023 — which means that unlike almost every other integrity question in a doctorate, this one you can simply check.

Most candidates never do. The purpose of this page is to give you the evidence that exists, be honest about the evidence that does not, and leave you with an audit you can run on your own bibliography this afternoon.

What is actually evidenced

The single most important development is administrative rather than scientific. On 12 September 2023 Crossref announced that it had acquired the Retraction Watch database and made it a public resource. Its own arithmetic at the time was precise about scale and about overlap: “Crossref retractions number 14k, and the Retraction Watch database currently numbers 43k. There is some overlap, making a total of around 50k retractions.”

Two things follow, and both matter to you.

The register is open. The full dataset was released through Crossref’s Labs API, “initially as a .csv file to download directly”, and subsequently in a git repository, with the arrangement committing Retraction Watch “to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref”. You do not need a subscription, an institutional login or a commercial tool to find out whether something you have cited has been withdrawn.

Neither source was complete on its own. Crossref held 14,000; Retraction Watch held 43,000; the union was around 50,000. That gap is the useful lesson. A retraction is recorded when a publisher registers it or when a curator notices it, and before 2023 those two streams were separate and each was partial. If your literature search predates the merge, it was run against a less complete picture than the one available now.

What is not evidenced, and will not be found

Three questions people expect this page to answer, which the published record does not support.

There is no UK national retraction statistic. The UK Research Integrity Office promotes good practice, supports investigations and publishes a procedure for the investigation of misconduct in research, and the Concordat to Support Research Integrity is described as the UK’s national policy statement on research integrity — but none of that amounts to a published national count of retractions or misconduct findings by UK institution. If you see a “UK retraction rate” quoted, ask where the denominator came from.

There is no measured rate of retracted citations in theses. Studies of retracted-citation persistence exist in the journal literature, but no sector body samples UK doctoral bibliographies, so any figure presented as “X% of PhD theses cite a retracted paper” is not drawn from a UK collection.

A retraction is not a finding of misconduct. Papers are withdrawn for honest error, unreproducible results, duplicate publication, authorship disputes and publisher error as well as for fabrication and plagiarism. Treating every retraction as fraud misreads the register badly, and it will make you sound naive if an examiner asks. This is a different object entirely from student academic misconduct, which is governed by your institution’s own disciplinary procedure rather than by the scholarly record.

The problem is rarely the retracted paper you read. It is the review article you trusted, which is still resting on it.

Why this reaches a doctoral thesis specifically

A taught-degree essay cites recent, well-known work over a few weeks. A doctorate does something structurally riskier: it accumulates a bibliography over four or more years, much of it read in the first eighteen months, and then submits it as a single document long after the reading happened.

That creates three exposures a shorter piece of work does not have.
1. Time. Retraction typically lags publication by years. A paper you read and stored in your first year can be withdrawn in your fourth, and nothing will tell you unless something is watching your library.
2. Inheritance. You rarely cite a fraudulent primary study directly. You cite a review, or a meta-analysis, or a methods paper that rests on it — and the retraction propagates into your argument without ever appearing in your reference list.
3. Examination. Your thesis is read closely by two people chosen because they know this literature better than you do, and an external examiner who has followed a controversy in their own field will recognise a withdrawn study on sight. This is exactly the kind of specific, checkable question that an examination probing your original contribution to knowledge is well designed to surface.
The audit: four steps, about an hour

Step 1: Let your reference manager do the first pass. Zotero has checked libraries against retraction data since version 5.0.67, announced on 14 June 2019 — the feature “can now help you avoid relying on retracted publications in your research by automatically checking your database”, flagging retracted items in the list and warning when you try to cite one, using Retraction Watch data. If you already run Zotero, open it, let it sync, and look for the flags. If you use something else, this is a genuine point of difference worth weighing in our comparison of Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote at doctoral scale.

Step 2: Check the register directly for anything load-bearing. The Crossref and Retraction Watch data is open, so the ten or fifteen sources your argument genuinely depends on deserve an individual look rather than reliance on an automated flag. Search by DOI where you have one. Note that an automated check is only as current as its last sync, which is a reason to run this again immediately before submission rather than only once.

Step 3: Check the publisher’s page for your key sources. Retraction notices, expressions of concern and corrections are published by the journal, and an expression of concern — a formal signal that a paper is under question but not yet withdrawn — will not always appear in a retraction register at all. If a study carries your argument, open its current publisher page rather than the PDF you downloaded in year one, because the PDF on your disk will never update itself.

Step 4: Check upstream in your key reviews. For the two or three secondary sources doing the most work in your literature chapter, spend twenty minutes on what they rest on. Citation-context tools of the kind covered in our roundup of AI research assistants for doctoral work can help here, though none of them removes the need to look.

An hour, once in the final year and once again before submission. It is the cheapest integrity check available to a doctoral researcher.

You found one. Now what?

Do not quietly delete it. Deletion is the worst available response, because it leaves a gap in the argument, it loses the reason you cited the work in the first place, and it forfeits an opportunity to demonstrate exactly the critical judgement your examiners are assessing. Work out which of four situations you are in.

The claim rested on it and nothing else supports the claim. This is the serious case and it needs your supervisor this week, not next month. Either find independent support for the claim or qualify it down to what your own evidence carries.

The claim rested on it but other work supports the claim independently. Recite the claim to the surviving sources, and remove the retracted one from that sentence.

You cited it as part of the field’s history. Keep it, and cite it as retracted. Referring to a withdrawn paper is legitimate when you are describing what a field believed and why; the requirement is that you say so, so that no reader mistakes it for live evidence.

The retraction is itself interesting. In some fields a prominent withdrawal changed the direction of research, and saying so is a contribution rather than an embarrassment. A candidate who can explain what was retracted, when, on what grounds, and what it did to the literature is displaying precisely the command of the field that a viva tests.

In every case, write two sentences about it into your notes for the examination. Being asked about a retracted citation you have already thought about is a prepared answer; being asked about one you have not noticed is the moment the examination changes tone. It sits in the same category as the other things worth knowing before you walk in, which our analysis of UK viva outcomes across 127 institutions sets out in full.

The habit that prevents it

Everything above is remedial. The preventive version costs nothing: store every source with its DOI, in a manager that checks retractions, from your first reading. A bibliography built that way audits itself continuously, and the check before submission takes minutes rather than an evening.

The same discipline pays off after the award, because the reference list travels with you when you publish a paper from the thesis — and journal editors and peer reviewers run exactly this check, with less patience than an examiner.

Keeping the bibliography clean and consistent across 80,000 words is the mechanical half of this problem. Tesify holds the chapter structure and formats your references as you cite them, so the reference list stays in step with the argument instead of drifting from it across four years. The reading, the judgement and every sentence remain 100% written by you. It is free to start.

Frequently asked questions

How many papers have been retracted?

Around 50,000 as of the 2023 consolidation, on Crossref’s own arithmetic: 14,000 Crossref retractions and 43,000 in the Retraction Watch database, with some overlap. The register grows continuously, so treat that as a floor rather than a current total.

Where can I check whether a paper has been retracted, for free?

The Retraction Watch database became an open Crossref resource in September 2023, released through Crossref’s Labs API as a downloadable CSV and later in a git repository, with a commitment to keep it “always open”. You can also check the publisher’s current page for the article, which is where notices and expressions of concern appear first.

Does Zotero tell me if I have cited a retracted paper?

Yes. Since Zotero 5.0.67, announced in June 2019, it checks your database automatically against Retraction Watch data, flags retracted items and warns you when you attempt to cite one. Let it sync before you rely on the result.

Is citing a retracted paper academic misconduct?

No, not in itself. Citing a withdrawn study unknowingly is an error of currency, not of integrity, and it is distinct from your institution’s academic misconduct regime. What would be a problem is knowing a paper is retracted and continuing to present it as live evidence.

Does a retraction always mean fraud?

No. Papers are retracted for honest error, unreproducible findings, duplicate publication, authorship disputes and publisher error as well as for misconduct. The grounds are stated in the retraction notice, and reading it is part of deciding what to do.

What is an expression of concern?

A formal notice from a journal that questions have been raised about a paper without a retraction having been issued. It may not appear in a retraction register, which is why the publisher’s own page is worth checking for sources your argument depends on.

What if a paper is retracted after I submit my thesis?

It is not held against you — you cited the record as it stood. If it happens before your viva, mention it yourself rather than waiting to be asked, because volunteering it demonstrates that you are still monitoring your field.

Should I remove a retracted reference from my bibliography?

Only if the claim it supported is supported elsewhere or has been withdrawn. Where the paper genuinely forms part of the story you are telling about the field, keep it and label it as retracted. Silent deletion loses the reasoning and leaves the argument with an unexplained gap.

How many UK theses cite retracted work?

Unknown. No UK body samples doctoral bibliographies for this, so no national figure exists. Any percentage you see quoted for UK theses specifically is not drawn from a UK collection.

Do UK universities publish retraction or misconduct statistics?

Not as a national series. UKRIO supports investigations and publishes guidance, and the Concordat to Support Research Integrity is the UK’s national policy statement, but neither produces an aggregate public count of retractions by institution.

Will my examiners check my references for retractions?

Not systematically, but they do not need to. An external examiner is chosen because they know the literature, and a withdrawn study in their own area is the kind of thing they recognise without looking. That asymmetry is the reason to run the check yourself.

How often should I run this check?

Twice at minimum: once when you begin assembling the final bibliography, and once in the fortnight before submission. Retraction lags publication by years, so the register moves underneath a long project in a way it never does under a short one.
August 22, 2026

PhD Wellbeing and Supervision Satisfaction: What PRES 2025 Actually Shows (2026)

In the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2025, run by Advance HE and reported in February 2026, 83 per cent of the 35,475 responding postgraduate researchers were satisfied with their experience overall; 89 per cent were positive about their supervision; but only 63 per cent were positive about their institution’s research culture — and among those who had considered leaving their programme, mental or emotional health was the most cited reason, at 20 per cent, ahead of financial concerns at 14 per cent.

PRES is the closest thing UK doctoral education has to a sector-wide experience dataset, and its 2025 wave is the one to quote this year. This page gives the figures in citable form and — because this survey is routinely misquoted — the scope notes that keep your citations honest.

The key figures

Measure	Value	Source and year
Responses	35,475 postgraduate researchers	PRES 2025 (Advance HE, Feb 2026)
Participating institutions	93 — including 4 Australian institutions	PRES 2025
Overall satisfaction	83%	PRES 2025
Positive about supervision	89%	PRES 2025
Positive about research culture	63%	PRES 2025
Considered leaving: mental or emotional health cited	20%	PRES 2025
Considered leaving: financial concerns cited	14%	PRES 2025

What is PRES, exactly?

The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey is a sector benchmarking survey run by Advance HE, in which participating institutions invite their PGR students to report on supervision, resources, research culture, progression, wellbeing and skills development. Institutions use it to benchmark themselves against the aggregate; researchers and journalists use the aggregate as the sector’s experience barometer. It is an opt-in instrument at both levels — institutions choose to run it, students choose to answer — which is exactly where the caveats start.

The caveats that keep you honest

Three scope notes belong next to any quoted figure. The 2025 wave includes four Australian institutions among its 93, so it is not a purely UK snapshot — describe it as a survey of participating institutions, not “UK PhD students” simpliciter. The response rate was not published with the headline reporting, so you cannot say what fraction of the invited population answered, and self-selection cuts in unknowable directions — the burnt-out may answer disproportionately, or may be precisely the people with no evening to spare for a survey. And participation varies wave to wave, so cross-year comparisons are between overlapping but not identical sets of institutions. None of this makes PRES weak — 35,475 responses is a serious dataset — but each limits the sentences it can support, and the strategy of quoting the survey’s own numbers with its own scope attached is the one that survives review.

A walk through a university park — The pattern to explain: high satisfaction with the closest relationship, much cooler ratings of the culture around it.

The supervision–culture gap is the finding

Read the three satisfaction figures together and the story is not “doctoral researchers are satisfied” or “doctoral education is in crisis” — it is a 26-point gap between supervision (89 per cent positive) and research culture (63 per cent). The relationship candidates have most control over, and institutions structure most tightly, scores highest; the diffuse institutional layer — community, seminar life, belonging, how researchers are treated between milestones — scores lowest. That gap is why sector attention (including the developing people-and-culture strand of research assessment) keeps moving toward environment, and it has a personal corollary: if your experience is good with your supervisors but thin everywhere else, you are not an outlier — you are the modal data point. The supervision side of that equation is the manageable one, and our guide to managing your supervisory team is about keeping it at the 89 per cent end.

The leaving question deserves its precise reading

The most quoted PRES numbers are the most misquoted. The 20 per cent and 14 per cent figures describe the reasons given by researchers who had considered leaving — mental or emotional health first, finances second — not the share of all PGR students in mental-health difficulty or financial hardship. Quote them as what they are: among doctoral researchers who thought about quitting, personal wellbeing outranks money as the stated driver. That ordering matters for policy (a stipend rise, tracked in our funding and stipends roundup, addresses the second reason, not the first) and for candidates: the sector’s own data says the pressure point is health, which makes treating wellbeing as a project-management variable — not an indulgence — the evidence-based position.

How institutions use PRES — and how you can use that

Inside a university, PRES results land on graduate school desks as benchmarked scores against the sector, broken down by faculty and question domain, and they feed action plans precisely because low outliers are visible to senior committees. That machinery is usable from below. If your graduate school runs the survey, answering it is one of the few costless levers a candidate has — free-text comments in these surveys are read, and a specific, fixable observation travels further than a general grievance. If you sit on a staff–student committee or a PGR forum, asking “what did our PRES results show and what changed” is a legitimate, precise question that administrators can answer and are often glad someone asked. And if you are choosing between institutions for a doctorate, whether a graduate school publishes or discusses its PRES results openly is itself a signal about the research culture the survey measures.

Using this data in your own writing

Attribute to the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2025, Advance HE (reported February 2026), and name the base for every percentage: all respondents for the satisfaction figures, considered-leavers for the reasons figures. Pair it with population data rather than substituting one for the other — PRES describes experience across ~35,000 respondents; the HESA enrolment statistics describe the full 121,175-person population — and resist deriving cross-survey trends unless you have checked that the question wording and participating institutions match. For institution-level claims, use your own university’s published PRES results if it releases them; the aggregate cannot speak for any single graduate school.

What the data suggests you actually do

Three evidence-aligned moves. Invest in the supervision relationship deliberately — it is the component with the highest satisfaction and the clearest management levers. Build culture locally where the institution’s is thin: writing groups, reading circles and peer review among candidates are research culture at the scale you control, and the 63 per cent figure is a licence to stop waiting for it to be provided. And treat steady progress as a wellbeing intervention: stalled writing and unclear milestones are exactly the chronic stressors a structured workflow removes. Tesify keeps the thesis visibly moving — chapters, drafts and bibliography structured in one place, 100% written by you — which is the controllable end of the mental-load problem the sector’s own survey keeps surfacing.

Frequently asked questions

What is PRES?

The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey — Advance HE’s recurring benchmarking survey of postgraduate researchers at participating institutions, covering supervision, resources, research culture, progression and wellbeing.

How many people answered PRES 2025?

35,475 postgraduate researchers across 93 participating institutions, four of them Australian. The response rate was not published with the headline reporting.

Are PhD students satisfied with their PhDs?

83 per cent of PRES 2025 respondents were satisfied overall — with the usual opt-in caveats. Satisfaction is highest for supervision (89 per cent) and much lower for research culture (63 per cent).

What proportion of PhD students have mental health problems?

PRES 2025 does not measure that. Its figure is narrower: among respondents who had considered leaving, 20 per cent cited mental or emotional health — the most common reason. Prevalence claims need clinical or dedicated wellbeing studies, not this survey.

Is supervision really the strongest part of the doctoral experience?

In the sector’s self-report data, consistently yes — 89 per cent positive in 2025. Individual experiences vary enormously, which is why the aggregate should never be used to dismiss a specific supervision problem.

Why is research culture rated so much lower?

The survey reports the gap rather than explaining it, but the pattern — strong dyadic supervision, weak surrounding community — recurs across waves and institutions, and is a stated driver of sector initiatives on research culture and environment.

Does PRES cover only the UK?

No — 2025’s institutions include four Australian participants. For strictly UK claims, either note the scope or use your institution’s own results.

Can I see PRES results for my university?

Institutions receive their own benchmarked results; some publish summaries internally or publicly. Ask your graduate school — and if you answered the survey, you have standing to ask what changed because of it.

How does PRES differ from the NSS?

The National Student Survey covers final-year undergraduates and is quasi-census; PRES covers postgraduate researchers at opt-in institutions. They measure different populations with different instruments and cannot be spliced.

Where is the full PRES 2025 report?

Advance HE publishes the aggregate reporting — the version to cite in academic or policy writing, and the place to check question wording before building any argument on a single percentage.

August 21, 2026

How Long Does a UK PhD Actually Take? Registration Periods, Continuation Status and the Fees Nobody Mentions (2026)

Three years is the normal period of enrolment for a full-time UK PhD and four years is the maximum at most institutions. The year between them is not slack — it is a formally defined continuation period with its own fee, its own restrictions on what research you may do, and a hard deadline at the end of it. There is no national dataset on how long candidates actually take, because the UK Performance Indicators that once tracked research degree completion were discontinued after 2020/21.

What follows is the clock as four named universities publish it. Every figure is from their own regulations, and every one of them differs from the others in at least one consequential way.

Two clocks, and only one of them can end your candidature

The number most candidates quote is their funded period — three years, three and a half, four, whatever the studentship says. That is a money clock. It determines when the stipend stops.

The clock that determines whether you still have a degree to submit for is the registration period, set by your institution’s research degree regulations and unrelated to who is paying. A self-funded candidate and a research-council-funded candidate in the same department are on the same registration clock. Funded candidates are frequently surprised by this, because the funding conversation happens at admission and the registration conversation happens nowhere at all.

The normal and maximum periods, from four sets of regulations

Institution	Normal period (full-time)	Maximum period (full-time)	Part-time
University of York	3 years (36 months); also 3.5-year and 4-year PhD variants	4 years	Pro rata — 6, 7 or 8 years
University of Dundee	3 calendar years from first matriculation	4 years	Normal 5 years; maximum 6 (or 5 for a combined full-time and part-time route)
London School of Economics	MPhil/PhD “involves four years of enrolment as a research student”	Adjustable only under stated regulations	Programmes “are designed to be followed through a programme of full-time study”

Two details in that table are easy to miss and expensive to discover late.

York runs three different PhD variants with three different normal periods — 36, 42 and 48 months — but the maximum is four years for all of them. A candidate on the four-year variant therefore has a normal period that already equals the maximum, and no continuation year at all.

LSE sets a floor as well as a ceiling: “the absolute minimum period of enrolment for a research degree is two calendar years of full-time study, or the equivalent in part-time study”, except by special permission of its Research Degrees Sub-Committee. You cannot finish early by simply working faster.

What the continuation period actually is

York’s research degree policy defines it precisely: the continuation period sits between the normal and the maximum period and “provides a contingency against the research project not going according to plan”.

Three things change when you enter it, and none of them is obvious from the outside.

Your enrolment status changes. York states that during the continuation period PGRs are “not formally enrolled at the University”. You retain “access to the Library and IT facilities”, but departmental facilities require “the written permission of your Graduate School Board”.

Your research is supposed to stop. This is the restriction candidates most often do not know exists. York’s policy states that PGRs “should not normally undertake any primary research (e.g. laboratory, archival or field work) during their continuation period” and should instead “focus on the production of the thesis”, with access to practical facilities requiring approval in exceptional circumstances. If your plan for the extra year is to collect the data you did not manage to collect in year three, that plan may not be permitted.

You start paying. York charges a continuation fee for PhD, MPhil and EngD candidates — £460 full-time and £230 part-time for 2025/26, charged once per calendar year, with no fee for MA or MSc by Research candidates. There is a grace period: “the University offers a three-month grace period for Full-Time PGRs and six-month grace period for Part-Time PGRs; if you submit your thesis within this period then you will not be liable to pay the Continuation Fee.”

And the sentence that matters most to anyone on a studentship: “You are personally liable for any continuation fees, regardless of your funding status.” Your funder’s obligation ended with your funded period. The invoice is yours.

An empty lab during a researcher's continuation period, when primary research normally stops — The continuation year is for writing, not for collecting. Where a policy says so, an extra year does not buy you extra fieldwork.

What happens when you reach the maximum

Here the institutions diverge sharply, and the divergence is about money and about risk.

Dundee builds in a bounded discretion: a School Board may “extend the candidate’s maximum period of research or course of study by not more than one year” for good cause, with anything further going to the Senatus Academicus. So the four-year maximum is a four-year maximum with a defined, one-step appeal above it.

LSE is considerably harder. Registration beyond the maximum — which it calls “extension” — “is only permitted in exceptional circumstances by application to the Chair of the Research Degrees Sub Committee”, and it adds a warning that catches people out: “Retrospective consideration of issues will not normally be permitted and students are responsible for ensuring issues are raised at the appropriate time.” Raise the problem while it is happening, not once you have missed the deadline.

Where an LSE extension is granted, the cost is not a modest continuation fee: “students enrolled beyond the maximum period of enrolment will be charged full fees for the extension period.” And where submission does not happen at all, the consequence is stated as plainly as anything in UK research degree regulation: “Submission of the thesis for examination is required by the School’s stated deadline. Non-submission will result in de-registration and the candidate no longer being eligible for examination or award.”

That is the real answer to how long a UK PhD takes. Not a statistic — a deadline, after which the work you have done stops being examinable.

The other deadline: examination entry

One more date sits inside the registration period and is invisible until you go looking for it. Most UK institutions require formal notice of your intention to submit — commonly called examination entry — a set number of months before submission, because that notice is what triggers the appointment of your examiners. Three to four months is a common notice period, and some institutions also set an absolute deadline for entry counted in months from your initial registration.

The practical consequence is that your effective writing deadline is earlier than your submission deadline. Find the notice period in your own regulations in year three, not year four, because no notice means no examiners and no examiners means no viva.

What the national data can and cannot tell you

There is no current UK-wide series on doctoral submission or completion times. HESA’s UK Performance Indicators, which once carried research degree completion measures, were discontinued after 2020/21, and nothing has replaced them at that level of granularity. Any figure you see quoted as “the average UK PhD takes X years” is therefore either an estimate, a single institution’s internal number, or a foreign dataset repurposed.

What can be said with published evidence is the scale of the population and its shape — the enrolment series is in our page on how many PhD students there are in the UK. And what the sector’s own experience survey shows is that time pressure and money are entangled: among researchers who had considered leaving their programme, financial difficulties sat behind mental and emotional health as a reason, as our summary of PhD wellbeing and supervision satisfaction records. An unfunded continuation year is precisely where those two pressures meet.

A continuation fee statement arriving after the funded period ends — The stipend stops before the registration does. Where the continuation fee lands, it lands on the candidate personally.

How to read your own clock, in four steps

Find your normal period and your maximum period, as separate numbers, in your research degree regulations. If your programme is a four-year variant, check whether you have a continuation period at all.
Find the continuation fee and any grace period. A three-month grace period is a real incentive to submit in month 37 rather than month 40, and it is worth knowing about in month 30.
Find what you may not do during continuation. If primary research is restricted, any remaining data collection has to finish inside the normal period, which moves your real fieldwork deadline forward by a year.
Find the examination entry deadline and count backwards from it. That, not the submission date, is the date that governs your final year.

Two related decisions sit alongside these. The funding route you took shapes how affordable an overrun is — the fee positions are in our comparison of a UKRI studentship and self-funding, and the published stipend and fee figures are in our roundup of UK PhD stipends and studentship funding. And the progression gate that sits early in the clock, the upgrade or confirmation review, is the point at which a project running late is still cheap to fix.

Overrun is almost never caused by the research. It is caused by writing that starts too late, which is why candidates who draft chapters from year one submit on time and candidates who wait until they feel ready do not. Tesify holds the chapter structure and the bibliography across the whole candidature so the thesis is being assembled while the research is still happening, rather than afterwards. Everything stays 100% written by you, and it is free to start. When you do reach the end, our guide to completing corrections covers the stage after the viva that has its own, shorter clock.

Frequently asked questions

How long is a UK PhD?

Three years is the normal full-time period at most institutions and four years the maximum. Dundee sets three calendar years as normal and four as the maximum; York runs 36, 42 and 48-month variants all capped at four years; LSE describes its MPhil/PhD as involving four years of enrolment as a research student.

What is the maximum registration period for a PhD?

Typically four years full-time, with part-time roughly double — Dundee allows six years part-time and York’s part-time periods run pro rata to six, seven or eight years depending on the variant. Your own regulations are the authority.

What is writing-up or continuation status?

The period between the end of your normal enrolment and the maximum period. York describes it as a contingency “against the research project not going according to plan”, during which candidates are not formally enrolled but retain library and IT access.

How much is a PhD continuation fee?

Institutional. York charges £460 full-time and £230 part-time for 2025/26, once per calendar year, for PhD, MPhil and EngD candidates. LSE takes a different approach entirely and charges full fees for any extension beyond the maximum period.

Do funders pay the continuation fee?

Generally not. York states that “you are personally liable for any continuation fees, regardless of your funding status”. Budget for it as a personal cost from the point your funded period ends.

Can I collect data during my writing-up period?

Often not. York’s policy says PGRs “should not normally undertake any primary research (e.g. laboratory, archival or field work) during their continuation period” and should focus on producing the thesis, with facility access needing exceptional-circumstances approval.

Is there a grace period before the continuation fee applies?

At York, yes — three months for full-time and six months for part-time candidates, with no fee if the thesis is submitted inside it. Check whether your institution operates one, because it changes the value of submitting a few weeks earlier.

Can my registration period be extended?

Only through a formal process and normally only in exceptional circumstances. Dundee allows a School Board to extend by not more than one year for good cause; LSE requires application to the Chair of its Research Degrees Sub-Committee and warns that “retrospective consideration of issues will not normally be permitted”.

What happens if I do not submit by the deadline?

At LSE, “non-submission will result in de-registration and the candidate no longer being eligible for examination or award”. Other institutions word it differently, but the mechanism is the same: the right to be examined is attached to registration, and registration ends.

Is there a minimum time before I can submit?

Yes at some institutions. LSE sets an absolute minimum enrolment of two calendar years of full-time study, or the part-time equivalent, except by special permission.

What is the average time to submission for a UK PhD?

No current national figure exists. HESA’s UK Performance Indicators, which carried research degree completion measures, were discontinued after 2020/21 and nothing equivalent has replaced them, so any quoted average is not drawn from a national collection.

Does part-time study double the maximum period?

Roughly, and not exactly. York describes part-time periods as pro rata to full-time study; Dundee allows six years for a part-time PhD against four full-time, and five where a candidate has combined the two modes. Read the specific figures rather than doubling.

August 21, 2026

How Many PhD Students Are There in the UK? The HESA Data (2026)

The UK had 121,175 postgraduate research (PGR) students in 2024/25, of whom 110,455 were registered on research doctorates — the PhD and its equivalents — according to HESA’s Higher Education Student Statistics (SB273, released 27 January 2026). 55 per cent of postgraduate researchers are female.

Those are the citable headline numbers for the UK’s doctoral population, and this page keeps them attached to the caveats that make them safe to quote. HESA — the higher education statistics agency, now part of Jisc — publishes the underlying bulletin annually; every figure below is from SB273 unless stated otherwise.

The key figures

Measure	Value	Source and year
Total postgraduate research students, 2024/25	121,175	HESA SB273 (Jan 2026)
— of whom on research doctorates	110,455	HESA SB273
— other postgraduate research (research master’s, MPhil and similar)	10,635	HESA SB273
Female share of PGR students	55%	HESA SB273
PGR total, 2020/21	114,405	HESA SB273 series
PGR total, 2021/22	113,310	HESA SB273 series
PGR total, 2022/23	123,660	HESA SB273 series
PGR total, 2023/24	119,015	HESA SB273 series
PGR total, 2024/25	121,175	HESA SB273 series

What counts as a “PhD student” in these numbers?

HESA’s category is postgraduate research — students whose programme is primarily research-based. Inside it, research doctorates (110,455 in 2024/25) cover the PhD/DPhil and doctorates of equivalent standing, while the remainder (10,635) covers research master’s degrees, the standalone MPhil and similar. Two boundary cases catch quoters out. Professional doctorates vary in classification depending on their research component, so “PhD students” and “doctoral candidates” are not perfectly interchangeable with the 110,455. And candidates registered MPhil pending upgrade are inside PGR throughout — the MPhil-to-PhD upgrade moves a student between rows, not into the population.

What does the five-year shape tell you?

The series is not a smooth line: roughly flat through the pandemic years, a spike to 123,660 in 2022/23 as delayed starts landed, a drop to 119,015, then a partial recovery to 121,175. Two implications for anyone citing it. First, pick your comparison year deliberately — “PGR numbers are falling” and “PGR numbers are rising” are both supportable by cherry-picking within this window, which is exactly why you should quote the series rather than a pair of points. Second, the volatility is concentrated in entry cohorts, which respond to funding rounds and international conditions faster than the stock of continuing students; the size of the funded pipeline — mapped in our stipends and studentship funding roundup — is the mechanism behind much of it.

Students crossing a historic UK university quad — About one UK student in twenty is a postgraduate researcher — a small population that produces most of the sector’s research output.

Reading enrolment data critically

Enrolment counts are a stock: everyone registered in the census snapshot, whether they started six weeks or six years ago. That has three consequences worth understanding before you build an argument on the numbers. A stock moves slowly — a dramatic fall in new starts takes years to show fully in the total, because continuing students dominate the count; so a flat total can conceal a shrinking pipeline, and the entrant figures elsewhere in the same bulletin are the earlier warning light. Multi-year programmes mechanically inflate stocks relative to one-year degrees — doctoral candidates each appear in three to five consecutive snapshots, a taught master’s student in one, so comparing PGR and PGT headcounts as if they measured annual demand misleads. And part-time and dormant registrations sit inside the same total as full-time candidates, which matters whenever you translate headcount into anything like research capacity. None of this is a flaw in the data; it is what enrolment data is. The errors come from quoting it as if it were something else.

How international is the UK doctorate?

Here is the caveat this page exists to enforce: SB273 does not break down domicile to the PGR level in its headline tables. A widely circulated figure — about 65 per cent of full-time postgraduates being non-EU internationally domiciled — describes all full-time postgraduates, taught and research combined, and must not be presented as a doctoral statistic. The honest sentence is that international recruitment matters substantially to UK doctoral education, and that anyone needing a precise PGR-level domicile split should pull it from HESA’s detailed tables for the year in question rather than quoting the postgraduate-wide number.

What these numbers do not tell you

Enrolment data measures the population, not its experience or outcomes. It says nothing about completion rates or times — which HESA does not publish as a PGR headline series — nothing about funding status (the same bulletin does not split self-funded from studentship-funded candidates), and nothing about examination outcomes, where the sector-wide dataset simply does not exist and the best available architecture data comes from institutional-documentation research covered in our viva outcomes analysis. Doctoral candidates are also invisible in undergraduate-facing statistics: degree classifications, for instance, end at the taught level — the classification data we compile on our undergraduate site has no doctoral column because a PhD is pass/fail.

How to cite these figures

Attribute to HESA, Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2024/25 (SB273, released 27 January 2026), and name the category precisely: “postgraduate research students” for the 121,175; “students on research doctorates” for the 110,455. Use academic years, not calendar years. If you are writing about “PhD students” loosely, the doctorate figure is the defensible anchor; if about research students broadly, the PGR total is. And resist the temptation to divide or combine HESA numbers into derived statistics the bulletin does not itself publish — every transformation you perform becomes your claim, not HESA’s.

Three worked sentences you can adapt directly. For a thesis introduction: “In 2024/25 the UK’s postgraduate research population stood at 121,175, of whom 110,455 were registered on research doctorates (HESA, 2026).” For a trend claim: “PGR enrolments have fluctuated within a band of roughly 113,000–124,000 over the five years to 2024/25 (HESA, 2026).” For a composition claim: “Women make up 55 per cent of UK postgraduate researchers (HESA, 2026).” Each names the population, the year and the source — the three elements markers and reviewers check first.

Why the population size matters to you

If you are one of the 121,175, the number reframes two common doctoral feelings. The isolation is structural, not personal: you are one of a hundred-odd thousand people doing the least standardised degree in the system, most of whom also believe everyone else got an instruction manual. And the competition framing is mostly wrong: the relevant comparison group for your thesis is not 121,174 rivals but the handful of examiners who will read it against the criteria of your own institution. The work that moves you through that examination — a structured thesis, written steadily — is the same regardless of cohort size. Tesify keeps that structure and the writing moving — chapters, drafts and bibliography in one workspace, 100% written by you.

Frequently asked questions

How many PhD students are there in the UK?

110,455 students were registered on research doctorates in 2024/25, within a total postgraduate research population of 121,175 (HESA SB273, January 2026).

Is the UK doctoral population growing or shrinking?

Neither cleanly: 114,405 (2020/21), 113,310, 123,660, 119,015, then 121,175 (2024/25). A spike, a correction, a partial recovery — quote the series, not two hand-picked points.

What share of UK PhD students are women?

55 per cent of postgraduate research students are female (HESA SB273, 2024/25).

How many international PhD students does the UK have?

SB273’s headline tables do not split domicile at the PGR level. The often-quoted ~65 per cent non-EU figure covers all full-time postgraduates including taught master’s students — citing it as a doctoral statistic is a misquote. Use HESA’s detailed tables for a PGR-level split.

What is the difference between PGR and PhD in the statistics?

PGR (postgraduate research) is the umbrella: research doctorates (110,455) plus research master’s, MPhil and similar (10,635). All PhDs are PGR; not all PGR students are PhD candidates.

How many PhDs are awarded in the UK each year?

That is a qualifications-obtained figure, published separately in HESA’s qualifications tables rather than the enrolment series quoted here. Take it from the same bulletin’s qualifications section for the year you need.

What proportion of UK students are doctoral candidates?

Postgraduate researchers are a small minority of the student body — on the order of one in twenty — which is why PGR-specific policy and data so often lag the undergraduate-focused headlines.

Does HESA publish PhD completion rates?

Not as a routine headline series. Completion and submission-time analyses come from funders and one-off studies; be suspicious of any precise “UK PhD completion rate” quoted without a named source and year.

Where does HESA’s data come from?

From statutory data returns made by higher education providers each year, compiled by HESA (part of Jisc) — it is administrative data covering the sector, not a survey estimate.

Where do I find the numbers for one university?

HESA publishes provider-level open data alongside the bulletin — enrolments by level of study per institution — and universities repeat headline counts in annual reports. For anything finer, the institution’s planning office is the source.

August 19, 2026

UK PhD Stipends and Studentship Funding in 2026: The Published Figures

The UKRI minimum doctoral stipend rises to £21,805 from 1 October 2026, up from £20,780 for 2025 to September 2026. Where a London weighting applies, the figures are £23,805 and £22,780 respectively. The minimum fee for academic year 2026 to 2027 is £5,238.

Those are the published minimums for studentships funded through UKRI training grants. What follows sets out what they cover, what they do not, and the one figure everybody quotes that UKRI does not actually publish.

The figures

Item	2025 to September 2026	From 1 October 2026
Minimum stipend (full-time)	£20,780	£21,805
Stipend with London weighting	£22,780	£23,805
Minimum fee	—	£5,238 (academic year 2026 to 2027)

Source: UK Research and Innovation, support for UKRI-funded students, page last updated 11 August 2026.

Four qualifications matter, and each one changes what an individual researcher actually receives.

These are minimums, not standard rates. UKRI notes that grant holders may offer higher stipends within their budget regardless of location. Some disciplines and doctoral training entities pay above the floor.

The London weighting is not universal. UKRI states explicitly that the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council does not offer a London weighting. If you are applying to an EPSRC-funded studentship in London, do not budget for it.

Part-time awards are pro-rated. The figures above are for full-time students; part-time students receive a proportionate amount.

The fee is not paid to you. The minimum fee is drawn by your research organisation from the UKRI grant. UKRI contributes only up to the value of home fee rates, so international students may need to make a contribution towards their fees depending on the arrangement.

The figure UKRI does not publish

Ask how long a UKRI studentship lasts and you will be told 3.5 years or 4 years with great confidence. UKRI publishes no sector-wide duration.

Its training grant terms and conditions devolve the decision, stating that research organisations can decide the duration of a studentship provided this accords with the awarding council’s specifications, and its guidance repeats that duration must fall within any parameters specified by the awarding council. There is no single UKRI-wide number to cite.

The practical consequence: the only authoritative source for your funded period is the advert and your offer letter. This matters more than it sounds, because your funded period is what your writing-up timeline has to fit inside — and UKRI’s guidance sets the expectation that research organisations support students to complete their doctoral training, including submission of the thesis, within their funded period.

Monthly budgeting worked out against a doctoral stipend — The stipend is paid tax-free, which changes how it compares with an advertised salary — but it is not indexed to your costs.

What else a UKRI studentship includes

Beyond stipend and fees, UKRI’s published terms set out entitlements that candidates frequently do not know they have:

Sick leave, with the stipend continuing during periods of illness.
Family leave, including where you or your partner is pregnant or you are adopting.
Additional leave, for example for bereavement or jury service.
A phased return to study after a period of leave, on your normal stipend, with the non-studying time taken as leave.
Changes of mode between full-time and part-time, which you can request at any time; UKRI does not limit how many times you can request one.

UKRI is also explicit about what your provider cannot do: it cannot ask you to do work that is not part of your studentship in return for your stipend, use training grant funds to employ you, make you do extra work even if paid separately, or charge additional tuition fees during your funded period beyond some international fees.

Those provisions are worth reading in full if you are being asked to take on teaching or lab duties in a way that feels like a condition of your funding rather than a paid opportunity.

If your funding is not from UKRI

A substantial share of UK doctoral researchers are funded by something other than a research council training grant, and none of the figures above bind those routes. University-funded studentships, charity and trust funding, industry-sponsored projects, overseas government scholarships and self-funding each set their own terms.

Some of these match or exceed UKRI rates deliberately, because departments benchmark against them to compete for candidates. Others do not, and there is no floor. The questions worth asking of any non-UKRI offer are the same ones UKRI answers in published form: what is the stipend, is it index-linked or fixed for the duration, what is the funded period, what happens to leave entitlements, and is there a research training support grant for fieldwork and conference travel.

Get the answers in writing before accepting. An offer that is generous on headline stipend but silent on sick leave and overrun is not obviously better than one paying the UKRI minimum with published terms behind it.

The part the figures do not capture

A stipend is paid tax-free, which makes direct comparison with an advertised graduate salary misleading in your favour. Against that, it is not a salary: it does not build pension entitlement, and it is fixed while your costs are not.

The sector’s own survey data indicates this bites. Advance HE’s Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2025, which gathered 35,475 responses from 93 institutions, found that among researchers who had considered leaving their programme, 14% cited financial difficulties — behind mental or emotional health at 20%, and ahead of balancing research with other commitments at 13%.

Two honest caveats on that survey, since this article is about being precise with numbers: PRES 2025 included four Australian institutions, so it is not a pure UK snapshot, and it publishes absolute response counts rather than a response rate.

How many doctoral researchers are there in the UK?

HESA — now part of Jisc — published Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2024/25 on 27 January 2026. It records 121,175 postgraduate research enrolments, comprising 110,455 at doctorate research level, 10,635 at other postgraduate research level and 85 studying institutional credit.

Academic year	Total PGR enrolments
2020/21	114,405
2021/22	113,310
2022/23	123,660
2023/24	119,015
2024/25	121,175

Source: HESA (part of Jisc), Higher Education Student Statistics: UK, 2024/25, released 27 January 2026.

The bulletin also reports that 55% of postgraduate research students were female in 2024/25, a share it notes has increased annually since 2019/20.

One correction worth making, because the error is widespread. You will see it stated that 65% of UK doctoral researchers are international. The published 65% figure refers to full-time postgraduate students from non-EU countries — taught and research combined. The bulletin does not break domicile down to postgraduate research level, so there is no published figure for the international share of PGR specifically. Do not repeat the 65% as a doctoral statistic.

What to check before you accept an offer

The stipend amount and whether it exceeds the minimum. Some awards do.
Whether a London weighting applies — remembering the EPSRC exception.
The funded duration, from the advert and offer letter, since no national figure exists.
What happens if you overrun. An unfunded writing-up period is a common and under-discussed part of the UK doctorate.
Whether a research training support grant is included for fieldwork, conferences and equipment, and how much.
For international applicants, the fee position, since UKRI contributes only up to home fee rates.

The funded duration is the one that shapes everything else, because it determines how much time your plan can allocate to writing up. That timeline is assessed at application stage — our guide to writing a PhD research proposal covers how panels read it — and again at your upgrade or confirmation review. Build the correction period into it too: as our data on UK viva outcomes shows, two-thirds of institutions allow up to three months for minor corrections, and that time is not optional.

If the deadline is real and the writing is what stands between you and submission, you can draft your chapters in Tesify from your own research — 100% written by you.

Frequently asked questions

How much do PhD students get paid in the UK?

Where funding comes through a UKRI training grant, at least £21,805 from 1 October 2026, or £23,805 where a London weighting applies. Non-UKRI studentships set their own rates, and self-funded researchers receive no stipend at all.

Is a PhD stipend taxable?

Doctoral stipends are paid as tax-free maintenance rather than as salary, which is why the headline figure compares more favourably with a taxed salary than it first appears. Check your offer documentation for the specific arrangement.

Does every London-based studentship pay a London weighting?

No. UKRI states that the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council does not offer one. Confirm from the advert rather than assuming it applies.

How long is a UKRI-funded PhD?

There is no single published answer. UKRI devolves duration to research organisations within the awarding council’s specifications, so your advert and offer letter are the only authoritative sources.

What happens if I do not submit within my funded period?

You generally continue without a stipend, often described as a writing-up period, and institutional rules govern registration status and fees. UKRI’s guidance sets the expectation that providers support submission within the funded period, so plan your timeline against it from the start.

Can I work alongside a funded PhD?

Institutional and funder rules vary, and visa conditions may restrict international researchers further. Note that UKRI states your provider cannot require unpaid work outside your studentship in return for your stipend — paid teaching offered as a genuine opportunity is a different matter.

Do I keep my stipend during sick or family leave?

Under UKRI terms, yes — the stipend continues during periods of leave, and you can request a phased return afterwards. Discuss the process with your provider before taking leave.

How many people are doing a PhD in the UK?

HESA recorded 121,175 postgraduate research enrolments in 2024/25, of which 110,455 were at doctorate research level.

Is the stipend the same across all research councils?

The minimum is common across UKRI, but councils and individual training entities may pay above it, and the London weighting is not offered by every council. Two studentships advertised in the same city in the same year can legitimately differ.

Does the stipend increase during my PhD?

UKRI sets the minimum annually, and providers normally apply the new minimum to continuing students from the date it takes effect. That is why the table above shows two figures — an award that began under the 2025 rate moves to the higher rate from 1 October 2026.

August 16, 2026

PhD Viva Outcomes in the UK: What the Data From 127 Institutions Actually Shows (2026)

There is no sector-wide UK dataset of PhD viva outcomes. No body publishes a national breakdown of how many candidates pass outright, receive minor or major corrections, are referred, or fail — and any figure presented as “the UK PhD pass rate” is not drawn from one.

That is an unsatisfying headline, so it is worth being precise about how it was established and what can be evidenced instead — because a great deal can.

Why no national pass rate exists

The organisations that would hold such data do not collect it.

HESA, now part of Jisc, collects student and qualification records but no examination-outcome field for research degrees. The UK Performance Indicators that once carried research-degree measures were discontinued after 2020/21, and the research-output indicator was last released in 2014 for the 2012/13 year.

The UK Council for Graduate Education publishes postgraduate sector data covering enrolments, not outcomes. The QAA sets out what the doctoral examination involves without publishing frequencies. And individual universities publish their research degree regulations — which list the outcomes available — rather than statistics on how often each is used.

A caution about the figure you may have seen. A pass rate of roughly 96% circulates widely. It traces to a commercial website reporting freedom-of-information requests to 14 UK universities covering 2006 to 2017. That is not peer-reviewed, not sector-wide, drawn from a small and self-selected group of institutions, and in part up to two decades old — and the source itself concedes that institutions did not all supply comparable corrections data. It should not be cited as a UK pass rate, and we are not citing it as one here.

What is actually evidenced: the outcomes available to examiners

The best available UK evidence comes from Stan Taylor’s study Developments in the Doctoral Examination in the UK, published by the UK Council for Graduate Education in August 2022. It examined the published documentation of UK degree-awarding institutions; documentation was publicly available for 127 institutions, 98% of those with their own research degree awarding powers (access was restricted to internal staff at four others).

Read the table below for what it is: a census of what examiners may recommend, not how often they do.

Outcome available to examiners	Institutions	Share of 127
Outright pass, no further changes	127	100%
Pass subject to minor corrections	121	95%
Pass subject to major corrections	80	66%
Corrections with no minor/major distinction	6	5%
Pass subject to a satisfactory viva or further test	34	28%
Refer and resubmit	124	98%
Award of a lower degree	127	100%
No degree awarded, no resubmission	127	100%
Published procedure where examiners disagree	92	75%

Source: Taylor, S. (2022), Developments in the Doctoral Examination in the UK, UK Council for Graduate Education.

Two readings are worth drawing out. Every single institution retains both the best outcome and the worst — an outright pass and no award — which is why no one can promise you the viva is a formality. And a third of institutions do not offer a “major corrections” category at all, which means the same body of work could be classified differently at two universities. When someone tells you they got major corrections, that label is institution-relative.

How long you get to make corrections

The same study recorded the time limits attached to each outcome. These are the most practically useful figures in this article, because they tell you what to plan for.

Outcome	Time allowed	Institutions
Minor corrections (of the 121 offering it)	One to two months	24 (20%)
	Up to three months	79 (66%)
	More than three months	11 (9%)
Major corrections (of the 80 offering it)	Six months	64 (80%)
Major corrections (of the 80 offering it)	More than six months	11 (14%)
Refer and resubmit (of the 124 offering it)	Up to 12 months	97 (78%)
	Up to 18 months	18 (15%)
	24 months	4 (3%)

This aligns closely with the QAA’s account, which notes that providers define these terms differently, particularly in the length of time candidates are given, but that three to six months for minor changes and six to twelve months for major changes are not uncommon.

Two operational details from the same study. Minor corrections were in most cases signed off by the internal examiner alone, with no further viva. Major corrections were normally signed off by both examiners, again without a further viva. For resubmissions, a second viva was mandatory at 12 institutions (10%) and at the examiners’ discretion at 89 (72%).

A bound doctoral thesis awaiting examination — Corrections are the normal outcome, not the exception — and the timescale is set by your institution, not by convention.

What the QAA says about failure

On the question candidates actually worry about, the QAA is reassuring without being specific: the oral examination is a difficult experience for some and may lead to a recommendation that the candidate should not be awarded a doctoral degree, but only a minority of candidates fail the doctoral assessment outright.

It adds that in most providers, examiners have the option of awarding a different qualification such as an MPhil where that is more appropriate to the candidate’s achievements — which the UKCGE data confirms is available at all 127 institutions. Note that this is a different decision from being registered for MPhil before an upgrade, a distinction covered in our guide to the MPhil to PhD upgrade.

Two further points from the QAA that shape expectations usefully. Corrections leave no trace: once amendments are made, there is no indication in the award certification of the corrections the examiners required, and the UK doctorate is not graded or classified in any way — it is pass or fail only. And on the day itself, in the UK examiners do not normally reveal the outcome to the candidate in advance of the oral examination, because one of its purposes is to check both the authorship of the thesis and the candidate’s engagement with the research process.

What this means for you

Expect corrections. They are available at nearly every institution and are the ordinary result of doctoral examination, not a mark against you. Planning as though an outright pass is the default sets you up to read a normal outcome as a failure.

Find your own institution’s outcome list. Because a third of institutions have no major-corrections category and time limits vary substantially, only your own research degree regulations tell you what can happen and how long you will have. Read them before your viva, not after.

Budget for the correction period. If your funding, visa or employment plans assume submission is the end, check the timescales above. Three months of minor corrections is the single most common allowance, and it is not optional time.

Do not benchmark yourself against a pass rate. There is not one. What determines your outcome is whether the thesis demonstrates an original contribution and whether you can defend it — the standard examined in our guide to what counts as an original contribution to knowledge, and argued most directly in your discussion chapter.

If corrections have landed and turning examiner comments into revised chapters is the task in front of you, you can work through them in Tesify from your own thesis and your own responses — 100% written by you.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of PhD students pass their viva?

No reliable UK-wide figure exists, because no body collects examination outcomes nationally. The QAA states only that a minority of candidates fail the doctoral assessment outright. Figures circulating online derive from small freedom-of-information samples rather than national data.

Can you fail a PhD viva?

Yes. All 127 institutions in the UKCGE study retained the outcome of no degree awarded with no opportunity to resubmit, and all retained the option of awarding a lower degree. It is not the common outcome, but it is a real one.

What is the difference between minor and major corrections?

Broadly, minor corrections address typographical errors and small changes to text or tables, while major corrections involve more substantive changes to the thesis. The definitions are institution-specific, and 6 of the 127 institutions surveyed made no distinction at all — so your own regulations are the only authority.

How long do minor corrections take?

Two-thirds of institutions offering minor corrections allow up to three months, a fifth allow one to two months, and around one in ten allow longer. Check your regulations for your own limit.

Will I have a second viva after corrections?

Usually not for corrections — minor corrections are typically signed off by the internal examiner and major corrections by both examiners, without a further oral. For a resubmission, a second viva was mandatory at 10% of institutions and at the examiners’ discretion at 72%.

Do corrections appear on my certificate?

No. The QAA states that once amendments are made there is no indication in the award certification of the corrections required, and that the UK doctorate is pass or fail only with no grading or classification.

Will the examiners tell me the outcome before the viva?

Not normally in the UK. The QAA notes that examiners do not usually reveal the outcome in advance, since part of the viva’s purpose is to verify authorship and your engagement with the research.

What happens if my examiners disagree?

Three-quarters of institutions in the study had a published procedure for examiner disagreement, typically involving an additional independent examiner or a referral to a higher committee. If this concerns you, the procedure will be set out in your institution’s research degree regulations.

Is “refer and resubmit” a failure?

No. It is a judgement that the thesis is not yet at the required standard but is capable of reaching it. It was available at 124 of the 127 institutions, with 78% allowing up to twelve months to revise. It extends the process; it does not end it.

August 16, 2026

Category: Data & Statistics

The key figures

What exactly is this dataset — and what is it not?

Where the funded studentships actually are

Sex and gender

Ethnicity, and the hole in the middle of it

Disability

Age

How to cite these figures without overclaiming

What the data cannot tell you, and where to look instead

Frequently asked questions

How many UKRI studentships are awarded each year?

What proportion of UKRI-funded PhD students are women?

How many Black PhD students get UKRI funding?

Why is so much of the ethnicity data missing?

What share of doctoral researchers have a disability?

Are UKRI studentships awarded fairly across groups?

Are these figures representative of all UK PhD students?

How does this compare with the whole doctoral population?

Why do arts and humanities cohorts look so different?

Does UKRI publish data on completion by ethnicity or disability?

Where can I find the underlying data?

What is and is not evidenced

Conventions for quantitative designs

Conventions for pilot and feasibility studies

Conventions for qualitative designs

How to write the justification paragraph

When the sample you achieve is smaller than the sample you planned

Sample size in a systematic review

Get the justification written while the reasoning is fresh

Frequently asked questions

What is the average sample size for a masters nursing dissertation?

Is 12 interviews enough for a qualitative dissertation?

Do you need a power calculation for a pilot study?

What power and alpha should you use?

Where do you find an effect size to assume?

Is the ten events per variable rule still accepted?

Can you change your sample size after ethics approval?

Does a small sample mean the dissertation will fail?

Should you report a post hoc power analysis?

The key figures

What is this survey, and what are its limits?

Is a doctorate still employable?

Where do they actually go?

What do they earn?

The finding that defines the academic route

Was the doctorate worth it, according to the graduates?

Where do they work, geographically?

How to cite these figures

What this means if you are still writing

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of PhD graduates get academic jobs?

How much do PhD graduates earn in the UK?

Do postdocs get permanent contracts?

Are PhD graduates unemployed?

Which subjects have the best doctoral career outcomes?

Do arts and humanities PhDs struggle?

How many UK PhD graduates work abroad?

Is a PhD worth it financially?

What is the Graduate Outcomes survey?

Should I do an internship during my PhD?

Where can I find the full report?

What is actually evidenced

What is not evidenced, and will not be found

Why this reaches a doctoral thesis specifically

The audit: four steps, about an hour

You found one. Now what?

The habit that prevents it

Frequently asked questions

How many papers have been retracted?

Where can I check whether a paper has been retracted, for free?

Does Zotero tell me if I have cited a retracted paper?

Is citing a retracted paper academic misconduct?

Does a retraction always mean fraud?

What is an expression of concern?

What if a paper is retracted after I submit my thesis?

Should I remove a retracted reference from my bibliography?

How many UK theses cite retracted work?

Do UK universities publish retraction or misconduct statistics?

Will my examiners check my references for retractions?