Natural Language Understanding Job Trends

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Natural Language Understanding skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 639 711 731
Rank change year-on-year +72 +20 +274
Permanent jobs citing Natural Language Understanding 12 1 6
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.020% 0.002% 0.011%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.025% 0.002% 0.012%
Number of salaries quoted 2 1 6
10th Percentile - - £75,625
25th Percentile - - £76,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £75,000 £70,000 £78,750
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% -11.11% +21.15%
75th Percentile - - £83,750
90th Percentile - - £103,750
UK excluding London median annual salary - - £77,500
% change year-on-year - - +53.47%

All Process & 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 permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 48,315 48,345 50,335
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 81.00% 90.62% 89.96%
Number of salaries quoted 28,473 23,469 38,401
10th Percentile £28,500 £35,000 £31,250
25th Percentile £37,500 £45,000 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% - -4.00%
75th Percentile £75,000 £80,000 £78,000
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £52,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +5.77% -5.45%

Natural Language Understanding
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Natural Language Understanding relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Natural Language Understanding job vacancy trend in the UK

Natural Language Understanding
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Natural Language Understanding.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Natural Language Understanding

Natural Language Understanding
Top 2 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Natural Language Understanding within the UK over the 6 months to 13 January 2026. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +82 12 £75,000 +7.14% 3
London +66 11 £75,000 +7.14% 3

Natural Language Understanding
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 9 (75.00%) Appian
2 2 (16.67%) nginx
Applications
1 1 (8.33%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 9 (75.00%) Anthropic Claude
1 9 (75.00%) Azure
1 9 (75.00%) Azure AI
1 9 (75.00%) Azure Data Factory
1 9 (75.00%) Power Automate
2 3 (25.00%) GCP
3 2 (16.67%) AWS
3 2 (16.67%) AWS Lambda
3 2 (16.67%) npm
3 2 (16.67%) Serverless
3 2 (16.67%) Yarn
4 1 (8.33%) Dialogflow
4 1 (8.33%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 2 (16.67%) AMQP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (75.00%) Pinecone
1 9 (75.00%) SQL Server
2 2 (16.67%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 9 (75.00%) MLflow
2 2 (16.67%) Cypress.io
2 2 (16.67%) Mocha
2 2 (16.67%) webpack
General
1 10 (83.33%) Social Skills
2 9 (75.00%) Finance
Job Titles
1 10 (83.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
2 9 (75.00%) Automation Engineer
3 2 (16.67%) Developer
3 2 (16.67%) Full-Stack Developer
4 1 (8.33%) Senior
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 11 (91.67%) OAuth
1 11 (91.67%) OpenAPI
2 9 (75.00%) Django
2 9 (75.00%) Faiss
2 9 (75.00%) FastAPI
2 9 (75.00%) Flask
2 9 (75.00%) Hugging Face
2 9 (75.00%) JWT
2 9 (75.00%) NumPy
2 9 (75.00%) Pandas
2 9 (75.00%) pytest
2 9 (75.00%) PyTorch
2 9 (75.00%) REST
2 9 (75.00%) RESTful
2 9 (75.00%) scikit-learn
2 9 (75.00%) Swagger
2 9 (75.00%) TensorFlow
2 9 (75.00%) Web Services
3 2 (16.67%) Node.js
3 2 (16.67%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 9 (75.00%) Legacy Systems
1 9 (75.00%) Low-Code
2 2 (16.67%) Greenfield Project
2 2 (16.67%) Product Ownership
2 2 (16.67%) Self-Motivation
3 1 (8.33%) AI Agents
Processes & Methodologies
1 12 (100.00%) AI
1 12 (100.00%) LLM
1 12 (100.00%) Prompt Engineering
2 10 (83.33%) Generative AI
2 10 (83.33%) Machine Learning
2 10 (83.33%) Natural Language Processing
2 10 (83.33%) Open Source
2 10 (83.33%) Retrieval-Augmented Generation
3 9 (75.00%) A/B Testing
3 9 (75.00%) API Development
3 9 (75.00%) API Integration
3 9 (75.00%) Asynchronous Programming
3 9 (75.00%) Data Cleansing
3 9 (75.00%) Data Engineering
3 9 (75.00%) Data Extraction
3 9 (75.00%) Data Validation
3 9 (75.00%) OCR
3 9 (75.00%) Task Automation
3 9 (75.00%) User Acceptance Testing
3 9 (75.00%) Webhook
Programming Languages
1 12 (100.00%) Python
2 9 (75.00%) SQL
3 2 (16.67%) Java
3 2 (16.67%) JavaScript
3 2 (16.67%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 2 (16.67%) Computer Science Degree
1 2 (16.67%) Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (75.00%) Data Quality
System Software
1 11 (91.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 11 (91.67%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 9 (75.00%) Automation Anywhere
1 9 (75.00%) OpenAI
1 9 (75.00%) UiPath
2 1 (8.33%) Google