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 10 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 51 53
Rank change year-on-year +4 +2 -3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,944 1,199 1,375
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.34% 4.44% 3.71%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.07% 4.89% 4.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,247 832 913
10th Percentile £331 £313 £363
25th Percentile £406 £390 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £484 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.86% -7.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £663 £706 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £483 £513
% change year-on-year -1.66% -5.76% -4.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 30 46
10th Percentile £36.22 £40.26 £50.63
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.95 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +28.57% -6.67% -25.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.50 £71.87
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.22 £83.75
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +35.00% -11.11% -19.50%

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 38,339 24,527 31,778
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.54% 90.74% 85.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,173 15,771 20,632
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -1.90% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £645
90th Percentile £733 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £518 £505 £525
% change year-on-year +2.48% -3.81% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,381 1,262 2,268
10th Percentile £15.38 £14.21 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.98 £16.25
Median hourly rate £47.00 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +86.88% -34.02% -6.09%
75th Percentile £68.75 £54.00 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.50 £70.16 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%

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 10 July 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 10 July 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 10 July 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 +4 876 £500 - 274
North of England +16 394 £460 +2.91% 128
Midlands +4 249 £450 +9.09% 58
West Midlands +24 232 £450 -6.83% 27
South East -32 203 £459 -8.20% 152
Yorkshire +12 162 £493 -1.50% 41
North West +7 155 £475 +18.16% 63
South West +11 115 £450 +2.86% 109
East of England +14 87 £475 +3.54% 44
North East +8 87 £425 +6.25% 24
East Midlands -41 17 £425 +54.55% 31
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
1 169 (8.69%) Confluence
2 43 (2.21%) Apache Airflow
3 42 (2.16%) Apache Spark
4 41 (2.11%) SAS
5 17 (0.87%) Apache
6 16 (0.82%) SharePoint
7 12 (0.62%) CMS
8 7 (0.36%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.31%) Camunda
10 5 (0.26%) Appian
10 5 (0.26%) nginx
10 5 (0.26%) Tomcat
11 4 (0.21%) Jupyter
12 3 (0.15%) Kentico
12 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
12 3 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
13 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
13 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
13 2 (0.10%) Mule
14 1 (0.051%) Mendix
Applications
1 28 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.82%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.57%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.41%) Microsoft Project
5 7 (0.36%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.21%) Simulink
6 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.051%) Mingle
7 1 (0.051%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 22 (1.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.93%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.62%) Payment Gateway
4 11 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 8 (0.41%) Findur
5 8 (0.41%) Oracle EBS
6 7 (0.36%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.31%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.31%) Shopify
8 5 (0.26%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.26%) Loan IQ
9 3 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
9 3 (0.15%) Maximo
10 2 (0.10%) Infor CloudSuite
10 2 (0.10%) Infor LN
10 2 (0.10%) Infor M3
10 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 2 (0.10%) Summit
10 2 (0.10%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 549 (28.24%) AWS
2 540 (27.78%) Azure
3 316 (16.26%) GitHub
4 237 (12.19%) Azure DevOps
5 193 (9.93%) GitHub Actions
6 138 (7.10%) Serverless
7 134 (6.89%) GCP
8 96 (4.94%) AWS Lambda
9 84 (4.32%) Amazon S3
10 76 (3.91%) Power Platform
11 62 (3.19%) OpenShift
12 56 (2.88%) Amazon ECS
13 52 (2.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 44 (2.26%) dbt
15 41 (2.11%) Amazon EC2
15 41 (2.11%) Azure Data Factory
16 38 (1.95%) Snowflake
17 33 (1.70%) Amazon EKS
18 30 (1.54%) AWS CloudFormation
18 30 (1.54%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 18 (0.93%) Firewall
2 16 (0.82%) HTTP
3 15 (0.77%) SAN
4 11 (0.57%) WAN
5 10 (0.51%) Network Security
6 9 (0.46%) MPLS
7 8 (0.41%) 4G
7 8 (0.41%) 5G
8 7 (0.36%) 2G
8 7 (0.36%) 3G
8 7 (0.36%) Diameter Protocol
8 7 (0.36%) SIGTRAN
8 7 (0.36%) SS7
8 7 (0.36%) VPN
9 6 (0.31%) BGP
9 6 (0.31%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.31%) LAN
9 6 (0.31%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
9 6 (0.31%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (5.40%) PostgreSQL
2 101 (5.20%) Data Warehouse
3 90 (4.63%) MongoDB
4 84 (4.32%) NoSQL
5 76 (3.91%) SQL Server
6 63 (3.24%) Relational Database
7 60 (3.09%) Power BI
8 45 (2.31%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.80%) Oracle Reports
10 34 (1.75%) Pentaho
11 31 (1.59%) Amazon Athena
12 29 (1.49%) Big Data
13 28 (1.44%) Amazon RDS
14 27 (1.39%) Metadata
15 25 (1.29%) Data Lake
16 24 (1.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 22 (1.13%) Redis
18 21 (1.08%) Oracle Database
18 21 (1.08%) Tableau
19 18 (0.93%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 369 (18.98%) JIRA
2 346 (17.80%) Git
3 311 (16.00%) Jenkins
4 263 (13.53%) GitLab
5 247 (12.71%) Selenium
6 147 (7.56%) Postman
7 138 (7.10%) Cucumber
8 102 (5.25%) REST Assured
9 100 (5.14%) JUnit
10 93 (4.78%) Cypress.io
11 84 (4.32%) JMeter
12 59 (3.03%) Zephyr
13 55 (2.83%) WebDriver
14 52 (2.67%) SonarQube
15 47 (2.42%) Gatling
16 43 (2.21%) Gradle
17 37 (1.90%) Bitbucket
18 35 (1.80%) Mockito
19 32 (1.65%) Maven
20 29 (1.49%) SpecFlow
General
1 533 (27.42%) Social Skills
2 371 (19.08%) Finance
3 258 (13.27%) Analytical Skills
4 235 (12.09%) Public Sector
5 165 (8.49%) Banking
6 53 (2.73%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 42 (2.16%) Documentation Skills
8 31 (1.59%) Investment Banking
9 27 (1.39%) Front Office
9 27 (1.39%) Influencing Skills
10 26 (1.34%) Telecoms
11 24 (1.23%) Retail
12 22 (1.13%) Financial Institution
13 20 (1.03%) Military
14 18 (0.93%) Aerospace
15 17 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
16 15 (0.77%) Legal
17 13 (0.67%) Automotive
17 13 (0.67%) Back Office
17 13 (0.67%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 387 (19.91%) Developer
2 307 (15.79%) Senior
3 212 (10.91%) Lead
4 199 (10.24%) Test Engineer
5 198 (10.19%) Tester
6 136 (7.00%) Data Engineer
7 124 (6.38%) Java Developer
8 108 (5.56%) Software Engineer
9 100 (5.14%) Analyst
10 89 (4.58%) Architect
11 85 (4.37%) DevOps Engineer
11 85 (4.37%) Test Automation Engineer
12 82 (4.22%) QA Engineer
12 82 (4.22%) Senior Developer
13 75 (3.86%) Test Leader
14 66 (3.40%) Automation Tester
15 59 (3.03%) Test Analyst
16 58 (2.98%) Automation Engineer
17 55 (2.83%) Full-Stack Developer
18 47 (2.42%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 218 (11.21%) Playwright
1 218 (11.21%) REST
2 180 (9.26%) React
3 155 (7.97%) Spring
4 150 (7.72%) RESTful
5 145 (7.46%) Kafka
6 125 (6.43%) .NET
7 124 (6.38%) Spring Boot
8 99 (5.09%) Node.js
9 82 (4.22%) AngularJS
10 75 (3.86%) HTML
11 70 (3.60%) CSS
12 50 (2.57%) OAuth
13 46 (2.37%) pytest
14 44 (2.26%) Jest
15 40 (2.06%) Quarkus
16 38 (1.95%) .NET Framework
17 37 (1.90%) Gherkin
17 37 (1.90%) GraphQL
18 36 (1.85%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 256 (13.17%) Cloud Native
2 133 (6.84%) Product Ownership
3 123 (6.33%) Distributed Systems
4 59 (3.03%) Enterprise Software
5 56 (2.88%) Legacy Systems
6 48 (2.47%) Data Protection Act
7 42 (2.16%) Mobile App
7 42 (2.16%) Onboarding
7 42 (2.16%) Self-Motivation
8 38 (1.95%) Virtual Team
9 31 (1.59%) Distributed Architecture
10 28 (1.44%) Security Posture
11 26 (1.34%) Embedded Systems
11 26 (1.34%) Management Information System
12 24 (1.23%) AI Agents
13 21 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
14 20 (1.03%) Fixed Income
15 18 (0.93%) Algorithms
16 16 (0.82%) Data Structures
17 15 (0.77%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 117 (6.02%) Linux
2 71 (3.65%) Windows
3 57 (2.93%) Unix
4 38 (1.95%) Android
5 37 (1.90%) Apple iOS
6 22 (1.13%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.72%) Mac OS X
8 13 (0.67%) Windows Server
9 7 (0.36%) Mac OS
9 7 (0.36%) Solaris
10 6 (0.31%) Embedded Linux
11 5 (0.26%) Windows Server 2008
12 4 (0.21%) Ubuntu
12 4 (0.21%) Windows Server 2019
13 3 (0.15%) AIX
13 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
14 2 (0.10%) CentOS
14 2 (0.10%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,081 (55.61%) CI/CD
2 896 (46.09%) Agile
3 697 (35.85%) DevOps
4 364 (18.72%) Problem-Solving
5 340 (17.49%) Microservices
6 338 (17.39%) Continuous Improvement
7 307 (15.79%) Scrum
8 305 (15.69%) Software Engineering
9 300 (15.43%) Test Strategy
10 298 (15.33%) Validation
11 276 (14.20%) Infrastructure as Code
12 257 (13.22%) AI
13 246 (12.65%) Containerisation
14 241 (12.40%) TDD
15 236 (12.14%) Observability
16 209 (10.75%) ETL
17 202 (10.39%) Software Testing
18 200 (10.29%) End-to-End Testing
19 194 (9.98%) Data Pipeline
20 188 (9.67%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 491 (25.26%) Python
2 484 (24.90%) Java
3 459 (23.61%) SQL
4 247 (12.71%) JavaScript
5 224 (11.52%) TypeScript
6 178 (9.16%) C#
7 67 (3.45%) PowerShell
8 61 (3.14%) Bash
9 46 (2.37%) Kotlin
10 43 (2.21%) C++
11 33 (1.70%) C
11 33 (1.70%) Scala
12 32 (1.65%) Bicep
13 31 (1.59%) Go
14 29 (1.49%) Apex Code
15 28 (1.44%) PL/SQL
16 23 (1.18%) Swift
17 18 (0.93%) Ruby
18 16 (0.82%) Groovy
19 13 (0.67%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 596 (30.66%) Security Cleared
2 488 (25.10%) SC Cleared
3 91 (4.68%) Degree
4 87 (4.48%) ISTQB
5 69 (3.55%) BPSS Clearance
6 63 (3.24%) DV Cleared
7 47 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
8 20 (1.03%) AWS Certification
8 20 (1.03%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 16 (0.82%) Master's Degree
10 15 (0.77%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 12 (0.62%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.57%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.57%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.51%) CCNP
14 8 (0.41%) Azure Certification
14 8 (0.41%) CISSP
15 7 (0.36%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 455 (23.41%) QA
2 141 (7.25%) Accessibility
3 133 (6.84%) Data Quality
4 66 (3.40%) WCAG
5 35 (1.80%) GDPR
6 12 (0.62%) ISO 20022
6 12 (0.62%) NCSC
7 11 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 10 (0.51%) Def Stans
9 9 (0.46%) NIST
9 9 (0.46%) SLA
10 5 (0.26%) FATCA
10 5 (0.26%) SEPA
10 5 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
11 4 (0.21%) GRC
11 4 (0.21%) HL7
11 4 (0.21%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.21%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 3 (0.15%) HIPAA
12 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 334 (17.18%) Docker
2 26 (1.34%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (0.77%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.72%) Firmware
5 13 (0.67%) Virtual Machines
6 5 (0.26%) 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 (0.10%) SRDF
9 1 (0.051%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.051%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.051%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 348 (17.90%) Kubernetes
2 243 (12.50%) Terraform
3 102 (5.25%) Ansible
4 99 (5.09%) Grafana
5 84 (4.32%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.85%) Argo
7 15 (0.77%) HP ALM
8 13 (0.67%) Puppet
9 12 (0.62%) HP Quality Center
10 11 (0.57%) Kibana
11 10 (0.51%) Dell DRAC
11 10 (0.51%) Single Sign-On
12 8 (0.41%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.31%) NetBackup
13 6 (0.31%) Progress Chef
14 5 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 5 (0.26%) Istio
14 5 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
15 4 (0.21%) Packer
15 4 (0.21%) Rancher
Vendors
1 172 (8.85%) Microsoft
2 147 (7.56%) Oracle
3 85 (4.37%) Salesforce
4 67 (3.45%) Databricks
5 55 (2.83%) Red Hat
5 55 (2.83%) Talend
6 51 (2.62%) Splunk
7 49 (2.52%) Google
8 47 (2.42%) ServiceNow
9 37 (1.90%) Denodo
10 34 (1.75%) Informatica
11 29 (1.49%) SAP
12 28 (1.44%) UiPath
13 27 (1.39%) VMware
14 26 (1.34%) Dynatrace
14 26 (1.34%) IBM
15 21 (1.08%) Cisco
16 18 (0.93%) HP
17 14 (0.72%) Blue Prism
18 13 (0.67%) Fortinet