A new survey into pay trends claims to have revealed the top-paying industries for contractors.

The research, which was carried out by crowdsourced salary comparison website Emolument.com, suggests that the finance sector tends to offer the highest-value contracts to freelancers, with Risk Modelling and Quant jobs regularly offering a daily rate of £760 and Model Validation jobs paying around £610 a day.

Most financial sector jobs centred around risk management were revealed to be of particularly high value for contractors and freelancers.

Credit Risk Management roles tend to pay a daily rate of around £520, while Operational Risk Management and Risk Analytics roles pay around £505, the research found.

Jobs focusing on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategies were also ranked as ‘high-paying’, with an average daily rate of £495.

Alice Leguay, Co-Founder and CMO of Emolument.com, said that an increasing number of British business were seeking contractors who possess “specific skills and competencies.”

She said that many companies were fully “prepared to pay up for a targeted solution” when selecting contractors to tackle specific, specialist tasks within their organisation.