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 27 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 51 55
Rank change year-on-year +5 +4 -6
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,869 1,124 1,343
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.30% 4.45% 3.60%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.04% 4.87% 4.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,197 782 891
10th Percentile £334 £313 £363
25th Percentile £405 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £489 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.81% -6.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £664 £715 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £489 £513
% change year-on-year -2.81% -4.63% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 28 48
10th Percentile £36.19 £42.00 £50.88
25th Percentile £60.00 £45.82 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +22.73% -4.35% -19.01%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.38 £71.88
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.28 £85.00
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +22.73% -4.35% -12.88%

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 37,112 23,092 31,896
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.37% 91.39% 85.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,409 14,893 20,664
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £418 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.97% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £730 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £515 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +1.98% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,320 1,127 2,324
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.87 £16.06
Median hourly rate £47.00 £25.50 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +84.31% -33.11% +1.87%
75th Percentile £68.55 £55.00 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.25 £72.50 £73.60
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%

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 27 June 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 27 June 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 27 June 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 +6 849 £500 - 181
North of England +15 377 £453 +0.67% 105
Midlands +5 238 £450 +5.88% 56
West Midlands +27 220 £450 -10.00% 27
South East -33 193 £475 -5.00% 139
Yorkshire +11 154 £500 +2.56% 28
North West -2 150 £475 +6.26% 51
South West +7 107 £450 - 51
East of England +14 85 £495 +5.88% 46
North East +9 82 £425 +6.25% 27
East Midlands -40 18 £425 +51.79% 29
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
1 162 (8.67%) Confluence
2 43 (2.30%) Apache Airflow
3 42 (2.25%) SAS
4 37 (1.98%) Apache Spark
5 17 (0.91%) Apache
6 15 (0.80%) SharePoint
7 12 (0.64%) CMS
8 7 (0.37%) Appian
8 7 (0.37%) Camunda
9 5 (0.27%) nginx
9 5 (0.27%) Tomcat
9 5 (0.27%) WebLogic
10 4 (0.21%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.16%) Kentico
11 3 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.16%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.11%) Anypoint
12 2 (0.11%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.11%) Mule
13 1 (0.054%) Mendix
Applications
1 29 (1.55%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.86%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.59%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.43%) Microsoft Project
4 8 (0.43%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.16%) Simulink
8 1 (0.054%) Mingle
8 1 (0.054%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 21 (1.12%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.91%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.59%) Payment Gateway
4 8 (0.43%) Findur
4 8 (0.43%) SAP S/4HANA
5 7 (0.37%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.32%) SAP ERP
6 6 (0.32%) Shopify
7 5 (0.27%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.27%) Loan IQ
8 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
8 3 (0.16%) Maximo
8 3 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
9 2 (0.11%) Infor M3
9 2 (0.11%) IntelliMatch
9 2 (0.11%) iTrent
9 2 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.11%) SAP MDG
9 2 (0.11%) Summit
9 2 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 523 (27.98%) AWS
2 508 (27.18%) Azure
3 300 (16.05%) GitHub
4 222 (11.88%) Azure DevOps
5 182 (9.74%) GitHub Actions
6 134 (7.17%) Serverless
7 126 (6.74%) GCP
8 91 (4.87%) AWS Lambda
9 79 (4.23%) Amazon S3
10 70 (3.75%) Power Platform
11 62 (3.32%) OpenShift
12 52 (2.78%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 52 (2.78%) Amazon ECS
13 43 (2.30%) dbt
14 41 (2.19%) Azure Data Factory
15 39 (2.09%) Amazon EC2
16 36 (1.93%) Snowflake
17 32 (1.71%) Amazon EKS
18 31 (1.66%) Azure AKS
19 28 (1.50%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 20 (1.07%) Firewall
2 15 (0.80%) HTTP
2 15 (0.80%) SAN
3 11 (0.59%) WAN
4 10 (0.54%) Network Security
5 9 (0.48%) MPLS
6 8 (0.43%) VPN
7 7 (0.37%) 4G
7 7 (0.37%) 5G
8 6 (0.32%) 3G
8 6 (0.32%) BGP
8 6 (0.32%) Diameter Protocol
8 6 (0.32%) Ethernet
8 6 (0.32%) LAN
8 6 (0.32%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.32%) SIGTRAN
8 6 (0.32%) SS7
8 6 (0.32%) TCP/IP
8 6 (0.32%) Wi-Fi
8 6 (0.32%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 104 (5.56%) PostgreSQL
2 95 (5.08%) Data Warehouse
3 86 (4.60%) MongoDB
4 82 (4.39%) NoSQL
5 74 (3.96%) SQL Server
6 61 (3.26%) Relational Database
7 54 (2.89%) Power BI
8 45 (2.41%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.87%) Oracle Reports
10 34 (1.82%) Pentaho
11 31 (1.66%) Amazon Athena
12 26 (1.39%) Amazon RDS
13 25 (1.34%) Amazon Redshift
13 25 (1.34%) Big Data
13 25 (1.34%) Redis
14 24 (1.28%) Data Lake
15 22 (1.18%) Metadata
15 22 (1.18%) Tableau
16 20 (1.07%) Oracle Database
17 18 (0.96%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 358 (19.15%) JIRA
2 330 (17.66%) Git
3 306 (16.37%) Jenkins
4 263 (14.07%) GitLab
5 238 (12.73%) Selenium
6 144 (7.70%) Postman
7 132 (7.06%) Cucumber
8 100 (5.35%) REST Assured
9 96 (5.14%) JUnit
10 87 (4.65%) Cypress.io
11 82 (4.39%) JMeter
12 57 (3.05%) Zephyr
13 52 (2.78%) SonarQube
13 52 (2.78%) WebDriver
14 43 (2.30%) Gatling
15 42 (2.25%) Gradle
16 36 (1.93%) Bitbucket
17 34 (1.82%) Mockito
18 30 (1.61%) Maven
19 26 (1.39%) SpecFlow
General
1 517 (27.66%) Social Skills
2 357 (19.10%) Finance
3 242 (12.95%) Analytical Skills
4 231 (12.36%) Public Sector
5 165 (8.83%) Banking
6 52 (2.78%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 39 (2.09%) Documentation Skills
8 33 (1.77%) Investment Banking
9 27 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
10 26 (1.39%) Front Office
11 25 (1.34%) Telecoms
12 22 (1.18%) Financial Institution
13 21 (1.12%) Retail
14 18 (0.96%) Military
15 17 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
16 16 (0.86%) Aerospace
17 15 (0.80%) Legal
18 13 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
19 12 (0.64%) Law
19 12 (0.64%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 369 (19.74%) Developer
2 290 (15.52%) Senior
3 199 (10.65%) Lead
4 196 (10.49%) Tester
5 191 (10.22%) Test Engineer
6 124 (6.63%) Data Engineer
7 113 (6.05%) Java Developer
8 103 (5.51%) Software Engineer
9 99 (5.30%) Analyst
10 87 (4.65%) Architect
11 80 (4.28%) DevOps Engineer
12 79 (4.23%) Test Automation Engineer
13 78 (4.17%) QA Engineer
14 75 (4.01%) Senior Developer
15 71 (3.80%) Test Leader
16 68 (3.64%) Automation Tester
17 58 (3.10%) Test Analyst
18 56 (3.00%) Automation Engineer
19 51 (2.73%) Full-Stack Developer
20 46 (2.46%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (11.13%) REST
2 203 (10.86%) Playwright
3 172 (9.20%) React
4 147 (7.87%) Spring
5 140 (7.49%) Kafka
6 136 (7.28%) RESTful
7 117 (6.26%) Spring Boot
8 113 (6.05%) .NET
9 94 (5.03%) Node.js
10 79 (4.23%) AngularJS
11 65 (3.48%) HTML
12 61 (3.26%) CSS
13 49 (2.62%) pytest
14 47 (2.51%) OAuth
15 39 (2.09%) Jest
16 38 (2.03%) Quarkus
17 36 (1.93%) Gherkin
18 35 (1.87%) Swagger
19 34 (1.82%) GraphQL
19 34 (1.82%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 230 (12.31%) Cloud Native
2 134 (7.17%) Product Ownership
3 116 (6.21%) Distributed Systems
4 54 (2.89%) Enterprise Software
4 54 (2.89%) Legacy Systems
5 47 (2.51%) Data Protection Act
6 42 (2.25%) Self-Motivation
7 40 (2.14%) Mobile App
8 38 (2.03%) Virtual Team
9 34 (1.82%) Onboarding
10 31 (1.66%) Distributed Architecture
11 28 (1.50%) Management Information System
12 26 (1.39%) Security Posture
13 23 (1.23%) Embedded Systems
14 21 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
15 20 (1.07%) AI Agents
16 19 (1.02%) Algorithms
16 19 (1.02%) Fixed Income
17 16 (0.86%) Data Structures
18 15 (0.80%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 114 (6.10%) Linux
2 72 (3.85%) Windows
3 54 (2.89%) Unix
4 39 (2.09%) Android
5 38 (2.03%) Apple iOS
6 21 (1.12%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.75%) Windows Server
8 12 (0.64%) Mac OS X
9 7 (0.37%) Mac OS
9 7 (0.37%) Solaris
10 5 (0.27%) Windows Server 2008
11 4 (0.21%) Embedded Linux
11 4 (0.21%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.21%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.16%) AIX
12 3 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
13 2 (0.11%) CentOS
13 2 (0.11%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,020 (54.57%) CI/CD
2 866 (46.33%) Agile
3 656 (35.10%) DevOps
4 350 (18.73%) Problem-Solving
5 315 (16.85%) Microservices
6 314 (16.80%) Continuous Improvement
7 290 (15.52%) Scrum
8 288 (15.41%) Software Engineering
9 285 (15.25%) Test Strategy
10 278 (14.87%) Validation
11 253 (13.54%) Infrastructure as Code
12 240 (12.84%) AI
13 230 (12.31%) Observability
14 223 (11.93%) TDD
15 222 (11.88%) Containerisation
16 194 (10.38%) ETL
17 189 (10.11%) Software Testing
18 184 (9.84%) End-to-End Testing
19 182 (9.74%) SDLC
19 182 (9.74%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 466 (24.93%) Python
2 465 (24.88%) Java
3 449 (24.02%) SQL
4 230 (12.31%) JavaScript
5 209 (11.18%) TypeScript
6 173 (9.26%) C#
7 65 (3.48%) PowerShell
8 57 (3.05%) Bash
9 46 (2.46%) Kotlin
10 41 (2.19%) C++
11 31 (1.66%) C
11 31 (1.66%) Scala
12 30 (1.61%) Go
13 28 (1.50%) Apex Code
13 28 (1.50%) Bicep
13 28 (1.50%) PL/SQL
14 22 (1.18%) Swift
15 16 (0.86%) Groovy
16 15 (0.80%) Ruby
17 13 (0.70%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 582 (31.14%) Security Cleared
2 473 (25.31%) SC Cleared
3 86 (4.60%) ISTQB
4 84 (4.49%) Degree
5 64 (3.42%) BPSS Clearance
5 64 (3.42%) DV Cleared
6 41 (2.19%) Computer Science Degree
7 20 (1.07%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 18 (0.96%) AWS Certification
9 15 (0.80%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 14 (0.75%) Master's Degree
11 12 (0.64%) Cisco Certification
11 12 (0.64%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.59%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.54%) CCNP
14 7 (0.37%) Azure Certification
14 7 (0.37%) CISSP
14 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.27%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 421 (22.53%) QA
2 134 (7.17%) Accessibility
3 123 (6.58%) Data Quality
4 61 (3.26%) WCAG
5 34 (1.82%) GDPR
6 13 (0.70%) ISO 20022
7 11 (0.59%) NCSC
8 10 (0.54%) Def Stans
8 10 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 9 (0.48%) NIST
9 9 (0.48%) SLA
10 5 (0.27%) FATCA
10 5 (0.27%) SEPA
11 4 (0.21%) HL7
11 4 (0.21%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 4 (0.21%) Software Quality Assurance
12 3 (0.16%) HIPAA
12 3 (0.16%) MiFID
12 3 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 311 (16.64%) Docker
2 26 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
3 16 (0.86%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.75%) Firmware
5 13 (0.70%) Virtual Machines
6 5 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
7 4 (0.21%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
7 4 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
7 4 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.11%) SRDF
9 1 (0.054%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.054%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.054%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 325 (17.39%) Kubernetes
2 228 (12.20%) Terraform
3 97 (5.19%) Ansible
4 95 (5.08%) Grafana
5 82 (4.39%) Prometheus
6 35 (1.87%) Argo
7 15 (0.80%) HP ALM
8 12 (0.64%) Puppet
9 11 (0.59%) HP Quality Center
9 11 (0.59%) Kibana
10 10 (0.54%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.54%) Single Sign-On
11 8 (0.43%) Kustomize
12 6 (0.32%) Forefront Identity Manager
12 6 (0.32%) NetBackup
12 6 (0.32%) NetIQ Identity Manager
13 5 (0.27%) Istio
13 5 (0.27%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.21%) Nmap
14 4 (0.21%) Rancher
Vendors
1 161 (8.61%) Microsoft
2 143 (7.65%) Oracle
3 78 (4.17%) Salesforce
4 61 (3.26%) Databricks
5 55 (2.94%) Talend
6 54 (2.89%) Red Hat
7 52 (2.78%) ServiceNow
8 50 (2.68%) Splunk
9 49 (2.62%) Google
10 38 (2.03%) Denodo
11 32 (1.71%) Informatica
12 28 (1.50%) VMware
13 27 (1.44%) UiPath
14 26 (1.39%) Dynatrace
14 26 (1.39%) IBM
14 26 (1.39%) SAP
15 21 (1.12%) Cisco
16 18 (0.96%) HP
17 14 (0.75%) Blue Prism
18 13 (0.70%) OpenAI