Natural Language Understanding Contracts

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Natural Language Understanding skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Natural Language Understanding over the 6 months leading up to 17 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 545 579 680
Rank change year-on-year +34 +101 +180
Contract jobs citing Natural Language Understanding 8 1 5
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.025% 0.002% 0.009%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.027% 0.003% 0.010%
Number of daily rates quoted 5 1 3
10th Percentile £480 - -
25th Percentile £525 £704 £688
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £708 £725
Median % change year-on-year -22.26% -2.41% +20.83%
75th Percentile £575 £711 £763
90th Percentile £605 - -
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 - -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Natural Language Understanding 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 29,443 36,038 50,014
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.37% 85.40% 89.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 18,490 23,058 34,451
10th Percentile £300 £303 £325
25th Percentile £405 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% -4.55% -
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 1,553 2,324 1,670
10th Percentile £14.20 £13.00 £13.41
25th Percentile £17.30 £16.30 £17.72
Median hourly rate £25.15 £38.12 £40.25
Median % change year-on-year -34.02% -5.29% +52.19%
75th Percentile £51.65 £61.70 £65.00
90th Percentile £69.75 £73.43 £77.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.00 £38.12 £40.00
% change year-on-year -37.04% -4.70% +86.05%

Natural Language Understanding
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for Natural Language Understanding in the UK

Natural Language Understanding
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for Natural Language Understanding in the UK

Natural Language Understanding
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Natural Language Understanding over the 6 months to 17 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Natural Language Understanding in the UK

Natural Language Understanding
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for Natural Language Understanding in the UK

Natural Language Understanding
Top 7 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 Understanding within the UK over the 6 months to 17 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 +64 8 £550 -22.26% 13
UK excluding London - 4 £550 - 1
London +35 3 £550 -22.26% 13
East of England - 3 £525 -
North of England - 1 £550 -
North West - 1 £550 -
Work from Home - 1 £450 - 1

Natural Language Understanding
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:

Applications
1 7 (87.50%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 4 (50.00%) AWS
1 4 (50.00%) AWS Lambda
1 4 (50.00%) Serverless
2 3 (37.50%) Amazon S3
2 3 (37.50%) Figma
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (37.50%) Amazon RDS
General
1 3 (37.50%) Finance
1 3 (37.50%) Legal
2 2 (25.00%) Analytical Skills
Job Titles
1 4 (50.00%) AWS Developer
1 4 (50.00%) Developer
2 3 (37.50%) Designer
3 1 (12.50%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 1 (12.50%) Voice Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (37.50%) Node.js
2 1 (12.50%) LangChain
2 1 (12.50%) PyTorch
2 1 (12.50%) TensorFlow
2 1 (12.50%) Unity (Game Engine)
2 1 (12.50%) Unreal Engine
2 1 (12.50%) WebGL
Miscellaneous
1 1 (12.50%) Animation
1 1 (12.50%) Cloud Native
Processes & Methodologies
1 8 (100.00%) Artificial Intelligence
1 8 (100.00%) Conversational UI
2 7 (87.50%) LLM
3 6 (75.00%) Conversational AI
4 4 (50.00%) Generative AI
4 4 (50.00%) Machine Learning
5 3 (37.50%) Agile
5 3 (37.50%) Emotional Intelligence
5 3 (37.50%) Natural Language Processing
5 3 (37.50%) Performance Metrics
5 3 (37.50%) Project Management
5 3 (37.50%) Sentiment Analysis
5 3 (37.50%) Strategic Thinking
5 3 (37.50%) User Experience
5 3 (37.50%) User-Centered Design (UCD)
5 3 (37.50%) UX Design
5 3 (37.50%) UX Research
6 2 (25.00%) HOOD
6 2 (25.00%) Prototyping
6 2 (25.00%) Workshop Facilitation
Programming Languages
1 4 (50.00%) Python
2 3 (37.50%) Java
2 3 (37.50%) JavaScript
Vendors
1 3 (37.50%) Genesys
2 1 (12.50%) NVIDIA