It is operated by NPL Management Ltd, a company owned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and is one of the most extensive government laboratories in the United Kingdom.

Under this regime, overhead costs halved, third-party revenues grew by 16% per annum, and the number of peer-reviewed research papers published doubled.

[12] The new laboratory building, which had been maintained by Serco, was transferred back to the DTI in 2004 after the private sector companies involved made losses of over £100M.

[12] It was decided in 2012 to change the operating model for NPL from 2014 onwards to include academic partners and to establish a postgraduate teaching institute on site.

Others who have spent time at NPL include Robert Watson-Watt, generally considered the inventor of radar, Oswald Kubaschewski, the father of computational materials thermodynamics and the numerical analyst James Wilkinson.

[24] Metallurgist Walter Rosenhain appointed the NPL's first female scientific staff members in 1915, Marie Laura Violet Gayler and Isabel Hadfield.

[32] Beginning in the mid-1960s, Donald Davies invented and pioneered the implementation of packet switching, now the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

[40][41][42] NPL sponsors a gallery, opened in 2009, about the development of packet switching and "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing.

[43] NPL internetworking research was led by Davies, Barber and Scantlebury, who were members of the International Network Working Group (INWG).

NPL connected with the European Informatics Network (Barber directed the project and Scantlebury led the UK technical contribution)[49][50][51] by translating between two different host protocols; that is, using a gateway.

Concurrently, the NPL connection to the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service used a common host protocol in both networks.

[53] Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their 1974 paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".

[64] A 2020 study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and NPL successfully used microwaves to measure blood-based molecules known to be influenced by dehydration.