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 4 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 436 502 549
Rank change year-on-year +66 +47 +155
Contract jobs citing Natural Language Processing 115 93 131
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.36% 0.21% 0.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.40% 0.25% 0.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 66 65 99
10th Percentile £419 £343 £425
25th Percentile £463 £425 £481
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £508 £575
Median % change year-on-year +8.37% -11.74% -4.17%
75th Percentile £597 £630 £769
90th Percentile £750 £775 £1,064
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £503
% change year-on-year +8.11% -8.05% -14.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £25.25 - -
Median hourly rate £25.50 £75.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -66.00% - -
75th Percentile £25.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
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 28,676 37,017 50,286
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.74% 85.22% 89.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,067 23,615 34,636
10th Percentile £300 £300 £325
25th Percentile £405 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £505 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -3.81% -4.55% +1.38%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,409 2,525 1,716
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.75 £12.00
25th Percentile £17.35 £16.06 £16.59
Median hourly rate £25.15 £37.50 £37.42
Median % change year-on-year -32.93% +0.21% +43.92%
75th Percentile £53.75 £61.30 £65.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.66 £38.12 £35.00
% change year-on-year -35.31% +8.91% +64.71%

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 4 July 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 14 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 4 July 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 +73 89 £550 - 941
London +29 57 £550 -4.35% 613
UK excluding London +55 44 £500 +8.11% 363
Work from Home +38 37 £531 -3.41% 412
North of England +18 15 £508 +1.86% 90
Scotland +4 14 £467 -1.68% 29
North West +11 10 £550 +10.39% 62
East of England - 7 £600 - 76
South West +41 5 £513 +13.89% 46
Yorkshire +6 3 £525 - 24
South East +36 2 £575 +43.75% 99
North East - 2 £400 - 4
West Midlands +11 1 £315 -16.00% 20
Midlands +8 1 £315 -16.00% 25

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 8 (6.96%) Jupyter
2 5 (4.35%) Apache Spark
3 2 (1.74%) Drupal
4 1 (0.87%) CMS
4 1 (0.87%) Confluence
4 1 (0.87%) SharePoint
Applications
1 17 (14.78%) Chatbot
2 3 (2.61%) Sketch
3 2 (1.74%) Microsoft Office
4 1 (0.87%) MadCap Flare
Business Applications
1 1 (0.87%) SAP S/4HANA
1 1 (0.87%) Shopify
1 1 (0.87%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 43 (37.39%) AWS
2 36 (31.30%) Azure
3 19 (16.52%) GCP
4 14 (12.17%) Cloud Computing
5 10 (8.70%) Azure AI
6 9 (7.83%) Serverless
7 8 (6.96%) Amazon S3
7 8 (6.96%) AWS Lambda
7 8 (6.96%) Figma
8 7 (6.09%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 7 (6.09%) Power Platform
9 6 (5.22%) GitHub
9 6 (5.22%) Snowflake
10 5 (4.35%) Google Gemini
11 4 (3.48%) Amazon SageMaker
11 4 (3.48%) Anthropic Claude
11 4 (3.48%) Azure AKS
11 4 (3.48%) Microsoft Copilot
11 4 (3.48%) Vertex AI
12 3 (2.61%) Copilot Studio
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (6.96%) Big Data
2 7 (6.09%) DynamoDB
3 6 (5.22%) Data Lake
3 6 (5.22%) PostgreSQL
3 6 (5.22%) Power BI
4 4 (3.48%) Neo4j
5 3 (2.61%) Data Mining
5 3 (2.61%) Tableau
6 2 (1.74%) BigQuery
6 2 (1.74%) SQL Server
7 1 (0.87%) Amazon RDS
7 1 (0.87%) BusinessObjects
7 1 (0.87%) Elasticsearch
7 1 (0.87%) Metadata
7 1 (0.87%) MongoDB
7 1 (0.87%) NoSQL
7 1 (0.87%) OLAP
7 1 (0.87%) OLTP
7 1 (0.87%) Oracle OLAP
Development Applications
1 11 (9.57%) Git
2 9 (7.83%) MLflow
3 4 (3.48%) Jenkins
4 3 (2.61%) GitLab
4 3 (2.61%) JIRA
5 1 (0.87%) Code Climate
5 1 (0.87%) ERwin
5 1 (0.87%) SonarQube
General
1 41 (35.65%) Social Skills
2 37 (32.17%) Finance
3 23 (20.00%) Analytical Skills
4 11 (9.57%) Banking
4 11 (9.57%) Investment Banking
5 7 (6.09%) Legal
6 6 (5.22%) Pharmaceutical
6 6 (5.22%) Public Sector
7 5 (4.35%) Manufacturing
7 5 (4.35%) Retail
7 5 (4.35%) Telecoms
8 2 (1.74%) Marketing
8 2 (1.74%) Publishing
9 1 (0.87%) Aerospace
9 1 (0.87%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 27 (23.48%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 19 (16.52%) Architect
3 16 (13.91%) Data Scientist
4 14 (12.17%) Senior
5 13 (11.30%) Python Engineer
6 12 (10.43%) Developer
7 10 (8.70%) JavaScript Engineer
8 8 (6.96%) Artificial Intelligence Architect
8 8 (6.96%) Machine Learning Engineer
9 7 (6.09%) AWS Architect
9 7 (6.09%) Designer
9 7 (6.09%) Solutions Architect
10 4 (3.48%) Artificial Intelligence Developer
10 4 (3.48%) Cloud Architect
10 4 (3.48%) Data Engineer
10 4 (3.48%) Gen AI Engineer
11 3 (2.61%) Automation Architect
11 3 (2.61%) QA Engineer
12 2 (1.74%) Enterprise Architect
12 2 (1.74%) HTML Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (21.74%) PyTorch
2 24 (20.87%) TensorFlow
3 12 (10.43%) Hugging Face
4 9 (7.83%) LangChain
4 9 (7.83%) Pandas
5 8 (6.96%) scikit-learn
6 7 (6.09%) Regular Expression
7 6 (5.22%) REST
7 6 (5.22%) SpaCy
8 4 (3.48%) AWS CDK
8 4 (3.48%) Keras
8 4 (3.48%) React
9 3 (2.61%) FastAPI
9 3 (2.61%) Kafka
9 3 (2.61%) NumPy
9 3 (2.61%) OpenCV
10 2 (1.74%) AngularJS
10 2 (1.74%) CSS
10 2 (1.74%) HTML
10 2 (1.74%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 19 (16.52%) Distributed Systems
2 16 (13.91%) Algorithms
3 10 (8.70%) AI Agents
3 10 (8.70%) Management Information System
4 8 (6.96%) Data Protection Act
5 5 (4.35%) Greenfield Project
6 4 (3.48%) Data Structures
6 4 (3.48%) Public Cloud
6 4 (3.48%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (2.61%) Enterprise Software
7 3 (2.61%) Oculus
7 3 (2.61%) Onboarding
7 3 (2.61%) Product Ownership
7 3 (2.61%) Virtual Reality
7 3 (2.61%) Virtual Team
7 3 (2.61%) Wiki
8 2 (1.74%) Analytical Mindset
8 2 (1.74%) Cloud Native
8 2 (1.74%) Life Science
9 1 (0.87%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 1 (0.87%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 97 (84.35%) Artificial Intelligence
2 91 (79.13%) Machine Learning
3 50 (43.48%) LLM
4 48 (41.74%) Data Science
5 44 (38.26%) Generative AI
6 37 (32.17%) Problem-Solving
7 25 (21.74%) Decision-Making
8 24 (20.87%) CI/CD
8 24 (20.87%) Deep Learning
8 24 (20.87%) MLOps
9 23 (20.00%) Conversational UI
10 20 (17.39%) Computer Vision
11 19 (16.52%) Agile
12 16 (13.91%) SDLC
12 16 (13.91%) Statistical Analysis
13 15 (13.04%) Data-Driven Decision Making
14 14 (12.17%) Analytics
14 14 (12.17%) Data Security
15 13 (11.30%) DevOps
15 13 (11.30%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 89 (77.39%) Python
2 24 (20.87%) JavaScript
3 21 (18.26%) TypeScript
4 16 (13.91%) SQL
5 15 (13.04%) Java
6 7 (6.09%) R
6 7 (6.09%) Scala
7 4 (3.48%) Clojure
7 4 (3.48%) Elixir
7 4 (3.48%) Rust
8 3 (2.61%) C#
8 3 (2.61%) Shell Script
9 2 (1.74%) PHP
10 1 (0.87%) Bash
10 1 (0.87%) PL/SQL
10 1 (0.87%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 14 (12.17%) Degree
2 9 (7.83%) Master's Degree
3 7 (6.09%) Security Cleared
4 6 (5.22%) SC Cleared
5 4 (3.48%) PhD
6 3 (2.61%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.74%) DV Cleared
8 1 (0.87%) AWS Certification
8 1 (0.87%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.87%) ISEB
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (6.09%) QA
2 3 (2.61%) Accessibility
2 3 (2.61%) GDPR
3 1 (0.87%) Data Quality
3 1 (0.87%) HIPAA
System Software
1 13 (11.30%) Docker
2 2 (1.74%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 18 (15.65%) Kubernetes
2 3 (2.61%) Kubeflow
3 2 (1.74%) Terraform
Vendors
1 18 (15.65%) Microsoft
2 14 (12.17%) Databricks
3 11 (9.57%) Google
4 7 (6.09%) Genesys
4 7 (6.09%) OpenAI
5 4 (3.48%) IBM
6 2 (1.74%) Oracle
6 2 (1.74%) SAP
6 2 (1.74%) UiPath
7 1 (0.87%) Adobe
7 1 (0.87%) Ariba
7 1 (0.87%) Automation Anywhere
7 1 (0.87%) Citrix
7 1 (0.87%) Dataiku
7 1 (0.87%) DataRobot
7 1 (0.87%) Foundry
7 1 (0.87%) Informatica
7 1 (0.87%) Salesforce
7 1 (0.87%) Sitecore
7 1 (0.87%) Sparx