Natural Language Processing Contracts

Natural Language Processing (NLP)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Natural Language Processing skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Natural Language Processing over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 430 502 598
Rank change year-on-year +72 +96 +73
Contract jobs citing Natural Language Processing 90 80 120
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.31% 0.18% 0.20%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.34% 0.21% 0.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 56 52 80
10th Percentile £416 £350 £425
25th Percentile £454 £450 £455
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £516 £517 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.05% -6.09% -8.33%
75th Percentile £623 £630 £678
90th Percentile £788 £724 £1,055
UK excluding London median daily rate £471 £463 £508
% change year-on-year +1.84% -8.96% +5.28%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.25 - -
Median hourly rate £25.50 £75.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -66.00% - -
75th Percentile £26.13 - -
90th Percentile £26.35 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Natural Language Processing falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,594 37,597 53,655
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.84% 86.31% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,149 24,227 37,238
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £743 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,443 1,746
10th Percentile £14.41 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.21 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%
75th Percentile £60.38 £59.98 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
% change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%

Natural Language Processing
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Natural Language Processing as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Natural Language Processing in the UK

Natural Language Processing
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Natural Language Processing.

Daily rate trend for Natural Language Processing in the UK

Natural Language Processing
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Natural Language Processing over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Natural Language Processing in the UK

Natural Language Processing
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Natural Language Processing.

Hourly rate trend for Natural Language Processing in the UK

Natural Language Processing
Top 11 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Natural Language Processing within the UK over the 6 months to 1 May 2025. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +56 69 £520 -7.14% 372
London +25 48 £520 -9.17% 271
Work from Home +42 37 £516 +1.62% 186
UK excluding London +78 29 £471 +1.84% 152
North of England - 13 £473 - 25
Scotland +15 12 £467 +0.97% 12
North West - 11 £473 - 18
South West +48 3 £558 +23.89% 16
Yorkshire - 1 £525 - 5
North East - 1 £350 - 2
Wales - 1 £144 -

Natural Language Processing
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

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

Application Platforms
1 5 (5.56%) Jupyter
2 2 (2.22%) Drupal
3 1 (1.11%) Apache Spark
3 1 (1.11%) CMS
3 1 (1.11%) Confluence
3 1 (1.11%) Mattermost
Applications
1 8 (8.89%) Chatbot
2 1 (1.11%) MadCap Flare
2 1 (1.11%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (1.11%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (1.11%) Shopify
1 1 (1.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 30 (33.33%) AWS
2 20 (22.22%) Azure
3 15 (16.67%) Serverless
4 13 (14.44%) Amazon SageMaker
4 13 (14.44%) Cloud Computing
5 11 (12.22%) AWS Lambda
6 10 (11.11%) Amazon S3
6 10 (11.11%) AWS CodeCommit
6 10 (11.11%) Cloud9 IDE
6 10 (11.11%) Textract
7 9 (10.00%) GCP
8 7 (7.78%) Azure AI
9 6 (6.67%) GitHub
9 6 (6.67%) Power Platform
10 5 (5.56%) Azure Machine Learning
11 4 (4.44%) Anthropic Claude
11 4 (4.44%) GitHub Actions
11 4 (4.44%) Google Gemini
11 4 (4.44%) Vertex AI
12 3 (3.33%) Azure Cognitive Services
Communications & Networking
1 1 (1.11%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (15.56%) PostgreSQL
2 9 (10.00%) Oracle Database
3 6 (6.67%) Power BI
4 5 (5.56%) Tableau
5 4 (4.44%) Data Mining
5 4 (4.44%) Neo4j
6 2 (2.22%) NoSQL
6 2 (2.22%) Relational Database
6 2 (2.22%) SQL Server
7 1 (1.11%) Amazon QuickSight
7 1 (1.11%) Big Data
7 1 (1.11%) BusinessObjects
7 1 (1.11%) Data Lake
7 1 (1.11%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (1.11%) KDB
7 1 (1.11%) MongoDB
7 1 (1.11%) OLAP
7 1 (1.11%) OLTP
7 1 (1.11%) Oracle OLAP
7 1 (1.11%) Oracle Reports
Development Applications
1 12 (13.33%) Git
2 3 (3.33%) MLflow
3 2 (2.22%) GitLab
3 2 (2.22%) JIRA
4 1 (1.11%) ERwin
4 1 (1.11%) Jenkins
General
1 25 (27.78%) Social Skills
2 18 (20.00%) Finance
3 17 (18.89%) Analytical Skills
4 13 (14.44%) Public Sector
5 9 (10.00%) Banking
5 9 (10.00%) Investment Banking
6 6 (6.67%) Manufacturing
6 6 (6.67%) Pharmaceutical
7 4 (4.44%) Legal
8 3 (3.33%) Military
8 3 (3.33%) Retail
9 2 (2.22%) Marketing
10 1 (1.11%) Financial Institution
10 1 (1.11%) Retail Banking
10 1 (1.11%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 29 (32.22%) Data Scientist
2 18 (20.00%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 13 (14.44%) Developer
4 12 (13.33%) Python Engineer
5 10 (11.11%) Senior
6 8 (8.89%) JavaScript Engineer
7 7 (7.78%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 5 (5.56%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
9 4 (4.44%) Gen AI Engineer
10 3 (3.33%) Architect
10 3 (3.33%) Lead
10 3 (3.33%) Product Lead
10 3 (3.33%) QA Engineer
11 2 (2.22%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
11 2 (2.22%) Front-End Developer (Client-Side Developer)
11 2 (2.22%) HTML CSS Developer
11 2 (2.22%) HTML Developer
11 2 (2.22%) JavaScript Developer
11 2 (2.22%) Machine Learning Developer
11 2 (2.22%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (25.56%) PyTorch
2 22 (24.44%) TensorFlow
3 16 (17.78%) scikit-learn
4 15 (16.67%) Pandas
5 13 (14.44%) NumPy
6 11 (12.22%) LangChain
6 11 (12.22%) pydantic
7 10 (11.11%) OpenCV
7 10 (11.11%) SciPy
8 7 (7.78%) Regular Expression
9 6 (6.67%) React
10 4 (4.44%) Hugging Face
10 4 (4.44%) REST
11 3 (3.33%) CSS
11 3 (3.33%) HTML
11 3 (3.33%) JSON
11 3 (3.33%) Matplotlib
11 3 (3.33%) OpenTelemetry
11 3 (3.33%) Plotly
11 3 (3.33%) XGBoost
Miscellaneous
1 17 (18.89%) Algorithms
2 16 (17.78%) Distributed Systems
3 8 (8.89%) Management Information System
4 6 (6.67%) Data Structures
5 4 (4.44%) Product Ownership
5 4 (4.44%) Public Cloud
6 3 (3.33%) AI Agents
6 3 (3.33%) Data Protection Act
6 3 (3.33%) Greenfield Project
6 3 (3.33%) Legacy Systems
7 2 (2.22%) Educational Technology
7 2 (2.22%) Enterprise Software
7 2 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
8 1 (1.11%) Analytical Mindset
8 1 (1.11%) Hedge funds
8 1 (1.11%) Life Science
8 1 (1.11%) Linux Command Line
8 1 (1.11%) Taxonomies
8 1 (1.11%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1 (1.11%) Linux
1 1 (1.11%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 75 (83.33%) Artificial Intelligence
2 73 (81.11%) Machine Learning
3 56 (62.22%) Data Science
4 31 (34.44%) LLM
5 25 (27.78%) Problem-Solving
6 24 (26.67%) CI/CD
6 24 (26.67%) Decision-Making
7 23 (25.56%) Generative AI
8 21 (23.33%) Computer Vision
8 21 (23.33%) Deep Learning
8 21 (23.33%) Visualisation
9 18 (20.00%) Data Visualisation
10 16 (17.78%) Agile
11 15 (16.67%) Data-Driven Decision Making
11 15 (16.67%) Statistical Analysis
12 13 (14.44%) Data Security
13 11 (12.22%) Critical Thinking
13 11 (12.22%) Mathematics
13 11 (12.22%) Risk Management
13 11 (12.22%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 74 (82.22%) Python
2 23 (25.56%) SQL
3 17 (18.89%) TypeScript
4 14 (15.56%) Java
4 14 (15.56%) JavaScript
5 7 (7.78%) Scala
6 5 (5.56%) R
7 4 (4.44%) Clojure
7 4 (4.44%) Elixir
7 4 (4.44%) Rust
8 2 (2.22%) PHP
9 1 (1.11%) Bash
9 1 (1.11%) C#
9 1 (1.11%) C++
9 1 (1.11%) Go
9 1 (1.11%) PL/SQL
9 1 (1.11%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 19 (21.11%) Security Cleared
2 15 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 8 (8.89%) Degree
4 3 (3.33%) Master's Degree
5 2 (2.22%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.11%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.11%) DV Cleared
6 1 (1.11%) ISEB
6 1 (1.11%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (6.67%) Data Quality
2 5 (5.56%) QA
3 4 (4.44%) Accessibility
4 1 (1.11%) GDPR
System Software
1 11 (12.22%) Docker
Systems Management
1 17 (18.89%) Kubernetes
2 6 (6.67%) Terraform
Vendors
1 12 (13.33%) Oracle
2 11 (12.22%) Microsoft
3 5 (5.56%) Google
4 3 (3.33%) Databricks
4 3 (3.33%) OpenAI
5 2 (2.22%) SAP
6 1 (1.11%) Adobe
6 1 (1.11%) Ariba
6 1 (1.11%) Informatica
6 1 (1.11%) Salesforce
6 1 (1.11%) Sitecore
6 1 (1.11%) Sparx