Test Automation Contract Job Trends in England

Automated Testing
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Test Automation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 1 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 50 49
Rank change year-on-year +3 -1 +3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,971 1,243 1,356
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.32% 4.51% 4.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.09% 4.97% 4.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,255 857 916
10th Percentile £327 £313 £353
25th Percentile £409 £388 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £520
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -3.85% -5.45%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £612
90th Percentile £669 £700 £725
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £501
% change year-on-year -5.00% -0.10% -4.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 35 21
10th Percentile £38.35 £37.34 £42.50
25th Percentile £59.25 £47.62 £51.25
Median hourly rate £69.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +25.45% - -24.66%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.00 £71.88
90th Percentile £74.00 £72.40 £85.00
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +27.27% - -21.29%

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

Test Automation 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 in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 38,738 25,035 28,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.83% 90.79% 85.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,882 15,942 18,107
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £631 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,595 1,467 1,443
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.25 £14.16
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.87 £18.63
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.09 £25.15 £42.50
% change year-on-year +63.39% -40.82% +2.41%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Test Automation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Test Automation job vacancy trend in England

Test Automation
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Test Automation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation in England over the 6 months to 1 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in England

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Test Automation.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram in England

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation in England over the 6 months to 1 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in England

Test Automation
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Test Automation within the England region over the 6 months to 1 September 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London +8 909 £500 - 1,202
North of England +3 397 £463 +0.60% 290
Midlands +9 244 £450 -2.44% 140
West Midlands +21 229 £450 -12.62% 86
South East -23 218 £455 -9.10% 289
Yorkshire -9 156 £475 -5.00% 71
North West -14 145 £492 +16.17% 164
South West +1 114 £475 -2.56% 236
North East +9 103 £450 +1.12% 57
East of England +15 78 £450 +17.65% 144
East Midlands -40 15 £418 +19.29% 54
Test Automation
UK

Test Automation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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
1 168 (8.52%) Confluence
2 50 (2.54%) Apache Airflow
3 40 (2.03%) SharePoint
4 35 (1.78%) Apache Spark
5 29 (1.47%) SAS
6 21 (1.07%) Apache
7 13 (0.66%) CMS
8 11 (0.56%) Camunda
9 10 (0.51%) WebLogic
10 6 (0.30%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
12 4 (0.20%) Jupyter
12 4 (0.20%) nginx
12 4 (0.20%) OpenStack
12 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
12 4 (0.20%) Tomcat
13 3 (0.15%) Kentico
14 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
14 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
14 2 (0.10%) Mule
Applications
1 23 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 5 (0.25%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.20%) Simulink
6 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.15%) Trello
7 2 (0.10%) Mingle
7 2 (0.10%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (1.32%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.86%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.71%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.66%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.41%) Findur
6 7 (0.36%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.30%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.30%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.25%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.25%) SAP GRC
9 4 (0.20%) Shopify
10 3 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
11 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
12 1 (0.051%) FLEXCUBE
12 1 (0.051%) Misys Equation
12 1 (0.051%) Misys Midas
12 1 (0.051%) SAP QM
12 1 (0.051%) Summit
12 1 (0.051%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 599 (30.39%) AWS
2 591 (29.98%) Azure
3 346 (17.55%) GitHub
4 277 (14.05%) Azure DevOps
5 215 (10.91%) GitHub Actions
6 159 (8.07%) Serverless
7 151 (7.66%) GCP
8 117 (5.94%) AWS Lambda
9 94 (4.77%) Power Platform
10 90 (4.57%) Amazon S3
11 74 (3.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 66 (3.35%) Amazon ECS
12 66 (3.35%) OpenShift
13 57 (2.89%) dbt
14 54 (2.74%) Amazon EKS
15 53 (2.69%) Snowflake
16 52 (2.64%) GitHub Copilot
17 45 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
17 45 (2.28%) AWS CloudFormation
18 41 (2.08%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.17%) HTTP
2 20 (1.01%) Firewall
3 19 (0.96%) 4G
3 19 (0.96%) DNS
4 17 (0.86%) 5G
5 16 (0.81%) 2G
5 16 (0.81%) 3G
5 16 (0.81%) Diameter Protocol
5 16 (0.81%) Network Security
5 16 (0.81%) SIGTRAN
5 16 (0.81%) SS7
5 16 (0.81%) TCP/IP
6 14 (0.71%) WAN
7 12 (0.61%) LAN
7 12 (0.61%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.51%) BGP
8 10 (0.51%) SAN
9 9 (0.46%) DHCP
10 8 (0.41%) Ethernet VPN
10 8 (0.41%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 112 (5.68%) Data Warehouse
2 110 (5.58%) PostgreSQL
3 98 (4.97%) NoSQL
4 89 (4.52%) MongoDB
5 82 (4.16%) SQL Server
6 80 (4.06%) Power BI
7 73 (3.70%) Relational Database
8 44 (2.23%) DynamoDB
9 34 (1.73%) Metadata
9 34 (1.73%) Oracle Reports
10 33 (1.67%) Data Lake
11 31 (1.57%) Amazon Athena
12 30 (1.52%) Big Data
13 29 (1.47%) Amazon Redshift
14 28 (1.42%) Pentaho
15 27 (1.37%) Amazon RDS
15 27 (1.37%) MySQL
16 26 (1.32%) Redis
17 23 (1.17%) Oracle Database
18 22 (1.12%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 403 (20.45%) Git
2 335 (17.00%) JIRA
3 314 (15.93%) Jenkins
4 269 (13.65%) GitLab
5 250 (12.68%) Selenium
6 137 (6.95%) Postman
7 128 (6.49%) Cucumber
8 105 (5.33%) JUnit
9 101 (5.12%) Cypress.io
10 87 (4.41%) REST Assured
11 79 (4.01%) JMeter
12 75 (3.81%) SonarQube
13 60 (3.04%) Zephyr
14 54 (2.74%) Gatling
15 49 (2.49%) Gradle
16 47 (2.38%) WebDriver
17 41 (2.08%) Maven
18 40 (2.03%) Bitbucket
19 36 (1.83%) Mockito
20 24 (1.22%) LoadRunner
General
1 556 (28.21%) Social Skills
2 387 (19.63%) Finance
3 283 (14.36%) Analytical Skills
4 251 (12.73%) Public Sector
5 181 (9.18%) Banking
6 63 (3.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 40 (2.03%) Telecoms
8 36 (1.83%) Documentation Skills
9 32 (1.62%) Retail
10 30 (1.52%) Front Office
11 29 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
12 28 (1.42%) Investment Banking
13 22 (1.12%) Financial Institution
14 21 (1.07%) Military
15 18 (0.91%) Aerospace
15 18 (0.91%) Law
16 17 (0.86%) Back Office
17 15 (0.76%) Legal
17 15 (0.76%) Marketing
18 14 (0.71%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 412 (20.90%) Developer
2 319 (16.18%) Senior
3 195 (9.89%) Lead
4 192 (9.74%) Test Engineer
5 155 (7.86%) Tester
6 127 (6.44%) Java Developer
7 120 (6.09%) Data Engineer
7 120 (6.09%) Software Engineer
8 107 (5.43%) Analyst
9 97 (4.92%) DevOps Engineer
10 89 (4.52%) Test Automation Engineer
11 88 (4.46%) QA Engineer
11 88 (4.46%) Senior Developer
12 82 (4.16%) Architect
13 70 (3.55%) Test Leader
14 69 (3.50%) Full-Stack Developer
15 67 (3.40%) Automation Engineer
15 67 (3.40%) Test Analyst
16 64 (3.25%) Java Engineer
17 58 (2.94%) Automation Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 291 (14.76%) Terraform
2 289 (14.66%) REST
3 221 (11.21%) Playwright
4 196 (9.94%) Kafka
5 192 (9.74%) RESTful
6 185 (9.39%) React
7 178 (9.03%) Spring
8 148 (7.51%) Spring Boot
9 138 (7.00%) .NET
10 115 (5.83%) HTML
11 101 (5.12%) Node.js
12 98 (4.97%) CSS
13 93 (4.72%) AngularJS
14 62 (3.15%) OAuth
15 54 (2.74%) JSON
16 50 (2.54%) XML
17 48 (2.44%) pytest
18 46 (2.33%) Gherkin
19 44 (2.23%) Middleware
19 44 (2.23%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 302 (15.32%) Cloud Native
2 158 (8.02%) Product Ownership
3 144 (7.31%) Distributed Systems
4 79 (4.01%) Enterprise Software
5 57 (2.89%) Onboarding
6 48 (2.44%) Data Protection Act
7 47 (2.38%) Legacy Systems
8 46 (2.33%) AI Agents
9 43 (2.18%) Self-Motivation
10 40 (2.03%) Mobile App
11 32 (1.62%) Virtual Team
12 25 (1.27%) Embedded Systems
13 22 (1.12%) Security Posture
14 20 (1.01%) Data Structures
15 19 (0.96%) Distributed Architecture
15 19 (0.96%) Management Information System
16 17 (0.86%) Data Centre
16 17 (0.86%) Fixed Income
17 16 (0.81%) Greenfield Project
18 15 (0.76%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 136 (6.90%) Linux
2 83 (4.21%) Windows
3 80 (4.06%) Unix
4 36 (1.83%) Apple iOS
5 34 (1.73%) Android
6 26 (1.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 18 (0.91%) Windows Server
8 6 (0.30%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.30%) Solaris
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 10
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 7
9 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
10 4 (0.20%) Mac OS X
10 4 (0.20%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.20%) VMS
10 4 (0.20%) Windows Server 2008
11 3 (0.15%) AIX
11 3 (0.15%) Mac OS
11 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2019
12 2 (0.10%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,164 (59.06%) CI/CD
2 929 (47.13%) Agile
3 743 (37.70%) DevOps
4 384 (19.48%) Continuous Improvement
5 383 (19.43%) Problem-Solving
6 379 (19.23%) Microservices
7 373 (18.92%) Software Engineering
8 334 (16.95%) Infrastructure as Code
9 331 (16.79%) Validation
10 328 (16.64%) Scrum
11 305 (15.47%) Test Strategy
12 301 (15.27%) AI
13 271 (13.75%) Containerisation
14 260 (13.19%) Observability
15 242 (12.28%) TDD
16 240 (12.18%) SDLC
17 228 (11.57%) Software Testing
18 216 (10.96%) Stakeholder Management
19 213 (10.81%) End-to-End Testing
20 196 (9.94%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 538 (27.30%) Python
2 523 (26.53%) Java
3 487 (24.71%) SQL
4 278 (14.10%) JavaScript
5 213 (10.81%) TypeScript
6 165 (8.37%) C#
7 95 (4.82%) PowerShell
8 75 (3.81%) Bash
9 46 (2.33%) Bicep
9 46 (2.33%) Kotlin
10 38 (1.93%) C++
11 28 (1.42%) C
12 27 (1.37%) Scala
13 25 (1.27%) Go
13 25 (1.27%) PL/SQL
14 22 (1.12%) Apex Code
15 19 (0.96%) Shell Script
16 18 (0.91%) Ruby
17 17 (0.86%) Swift
18 16 (0.81%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 632 (32.06%) Security Cleared
2 531 (26.94%) SC Cleared
3 108 (5.48%) Degree
4 91 (4.62%) ISTQB
5 67 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
6 65 (3.30%) DV Cleared
7 59 (2.99%) Computer Science Degree
8 36 (1.83%) AWS Certification
9 26 (1.32%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 20 (1.01%) Azure Certification
11 17 (0.86%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 12 (0.61%) ISEB
12 12 (0.61%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 12 (0.61%) Master's Degree
13 11 (0.56%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
15 9 (0.46%) Cisco Certification
15 9 (0.46%) CISSP
16 8 (0.41%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 6 (0.30%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 521 (26.43%) QA
2 152 (7.71%) Accessibility
3 134 (6.80%) Data Quality
4 85 (4.31%) WCAG
5 39 (1.98%) GDPR
6 16 (0.81%) ISO 20022
7 14 (0.71%) NCSC
8 13 (0.66%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 13 (0.66%) SLA
9 11 (0.56%) NIST
10 10 (0.51%) GRC
11 7 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
12 6 (0.30%) Software Quality Assurance
13 5 (0.25%) Def Stans
13 5 (0.25%) FATCA
13 5 (0.25%) HL7
13 5 (0.25%) PCI DSS
14 4 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.15%) EU AI Act
15 3 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
System Software
1 381 (19.33%) Docker
2 30 (1.52%) Active Directory
3 27 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 17 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
5 11 (0.56%) Firmware
6 5 (0.25%) VMware NSX
7 4 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
8 3 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.10%) Hyper-V
10 1 (0.051%) Embedded Firmware
Systems Management
1 383 (19.43%) Kubernetes
2 110 (5.58%) Ansible
3 100 (5.07%) Grafana
4 80 (4.06%) Prometheus
5 40 (2.03%) Argo
6 21 (1.07%) Puppet
7 20 (1.01%) Progress Chef
8 11 (0.56%) HP ALM
8 11 (0.56%) Kibana
9 10 (0.51%) Control-M
9 10 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.36%) Dell DRAC
10 7 (0.36%) Kustomize
10 7 (0.36%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.30%) Istio
11 6 (0.30%) Packer
12 5 (0.25%) HP Fortify
12 5 (0.25%) SCCM
13 4 (0.20%) HP Quality Center
13 4 (0.20%) WMI
Vendors
1 199 (10.10%) Microsoft
2 154 (7.81%) Oracle
3 80 (4.06%) Databricks
4 68 (3.45%) Salesforce
5 63 (3.20%) Google
6 61 (3.09%) Red Hat
7 47 (2.38%) IBM
7 47 (2.38%) Talend
8 45 (2.28%) Splunk
9 42 (2.13%) ServiceNow
10 40 (2.03%) SAP
11 35 (1.78%) Dynatrace
12 34 (1.73%) Denodo
13 33 (1.67%) Informatica
13 33 (1.67%) VMware
14 30 (1.52%) Cisco
15 27 (1.37%) UiPath
16 16 (0.81%) HP
17 11 (0.56%) MuleSoft
17 11 (0.56%) OpenAI