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 13 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 51 50
Rank change year-on-year +4 -1 +3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,974 1,240 1,302
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.33% 4.49% 3.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.09% 4.94% 4.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,270 854 878
10th Percentile £331 £313 £357
25th Percentile £406 £380 £418
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £663 £725 £741
UK median daily rate £475 £494 £513
% change year-on-year -3.75% -3.71% -2.38%
Number of hourly rates quoted 106 32 24
10th Percentile £38.63 £41.01 £44.00
25th Percentile £60.08 £44.88 £50.94
Median hourly rate £67.86 £50.00 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +35.72% -11.11% -13.79%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.50 £71.88
90th Percentile £74.00 £74.35 £81.85
UK median hourly rate £67.86 £50.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +35.72% -11.11% -14.45%

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 38,759 25,103 28,648
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.06% 90.80% 85.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,089 16,021 18,628
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £756
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,530 1,424 1,656
10th Percentile £14.55 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.87 £18.50
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +3.24%
75th Percentile £68.75 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £41.50
% change year-on-year +68.99% -39.40% -1.55%

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 13 August 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 13 August 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 13 August 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 +5 884 £500 - 1,099
North of England +13 394 £466 +1.31% 244
Midlands +7 274 £450 +2.86% 142
West Midlands +30 258 £450 -11.11% 85
South East -29 213 £459 -8.20% 284
Yorkshire -5 161 £475 -5.00% 63
North West -6 141 £492 +16.20% 132
South West +1 114 £475 +10.14% 177
North East +15 100 £438 +0.57% 50
East of England +15 83 £463 +0.82% 121
East Midlands -45 16 £425 +25.00% 57
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
1 170 (8.61%) Confluence
2 49 (2.48%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (2.28%) Apache Spark
4 44 (2.23%) SAS
5 33 (1.67%) SharePoint
6 23 (1.17%) Apache
7 13 (0.66%) CMS
8 11 (0.56%) WebLogic
9 5 (0.25%) Camunda
9 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
9 5 (0.25%) nginx
9 5 (0.25%) Tomcat
10 4 (0.20%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
11 3 (0.15%) Kentico
11 3 (0.15%) OpenStack
12 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
12 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.10%) Mule
Applications
1 18 (0.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.35%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.30%) Chatbot
5 5 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.20%) Simulink
7 3 (0.15%) Trello
8 1 (0.051%) Mingle
8 1 (0.051%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 25 (1.27%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.81%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.61%) Payment Gateway
4 11 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
5 8 (0.41%) Findur
6 7 (0.35%) Oracle EBS
7 6 (0.30%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.30%) SAP ERP
8 5 (0.25%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.25%) Shopify
9 3 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
10 2 (0.10%) Infor CloudSuite
10 2 (0.10%) Infor LN
10 2 (0.10%) Infor M3
10 2 (0.10%) Loan IQ
10 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
11 1 (0.051%) Maximo
11 1 (0.051%) Summit
11 1 (0.051%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 588 (29.79%) Azure
2 581 (29.43%) AWS
3 356 (18.03%) GitHub
4 267 (13.53%) Azure DevOps
5 223 (11.30%) GitHub Actions
6 152 (7.70%) Serverless
7 148 (7.50%) GCP
8 108 (5.47%) AWS Lambda
9 91 (4.61%) Power Platform
10 86 (4.36%) Amazon S3
11 69 (3.50%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 67 (3.39%) Amazon ECS
13 61 (3.09%) OpenShift
14 52 (2.63%) dbt
15 49 (2.48%) Amazon EKS
16 48 (2.43%) GitHub Copilot
16 48 (2.43%) Snowflake
17 45 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
17 45 (2.28%) Azure Data Factory
18 38 (1.93%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.22%) Firewall
2 18 (0.91%) HTTP
3 17 (0.86%) 4G
4 16 (0.81%) 5G
4 16 (0.81%) Network Security
5 15 (0.76%) 2G
5 15 (0.76%) 3G
5 15 (0.76%) Diameter Protocol
5 15 (0.76%) DNS
5 15 (0.76%) SIGTRAN
5 15 (0.76%) SS7
6 13 (0.66%) TCP/IP
6 13 (0.66%) WAN
7 12 (0.61%) SAN
8 10 (0.51%) LAN
9 9 (0.46%) Wi-Fi
10 8 (0.41%) BGP
11 7 (0.35%) DHCP
11 7 (0.35%) Ethernet VPN
11 7 (0.35%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 121 (6.13%) PostgreSQL
2 120 (6.08%) Data Warehouse
3 101 (5.12%) NoSQL
4 89 (4.51%) MongoDB
5 78 (3.95%) SQL Server
6 77 (3.90%) Power BI
7 61 (3.09%) Relational Database
8 46 (2.33%) DynamoDB
9 41 (2.08%) Oracle Reports
10 39 (1.98%) Pentaho
11 36 (1.82%) Data Lake
12 32 (1.62%) Metadata
13 30 (1.52%) Big Data
14 29 (1.47%) Amazon Athena
15 25 (1.27%) Amazon RDS
15 25 (1.27%) MySQL
15 25 (1.27%) Redis
16 24 (1.22%) Amazon Redshift
16 24 (1.22%) Tableau
17 21 (1.06%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 399 (20.21%) Git
2 358 (18.14%) JIRA
3 330 (16.72%) Jenkins
4 261 (13.22%) GitLab
5 240 (12.16%) Selenium
6 144 (7.29%) Postman
7 138 (6.99%) Cucumber
8 104 (5.27%) JUnit
9 95 (4.81%) Cypress.io
10 84 (4.26%) REST Assured
11 83 (4.20%) JMeter
12 71 (3.60%) Zephyr
13 61 (3.09%) SonarQube
14 55 (2.79%) WebDriver
15 48 (2.43%) Gatling
16 43 (2.18%) Gradle
17 40 (2.03%) Bitbucket
18 35 (1.77%) Maven
19 32 (1.62%) Mockito
20 24 (1.22%) SpecFlow
General
1 548 (27.76%) Social Skills
2 372 (18.84%) Finance
3 275 (13.93%) Analytical Skills
4 245 (12.41%) Public Sector
5 168 (8.51%) Banking
6 59 (2.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 40 (2.03%) Documentation Skills
8 37 (1.87%) Telecoms
9 32 (1.62%) Retail
10 29 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
10 29 (1.47%) Investment Banking
11 26 (1.32%) Front Office
12 23 (1.17%) Financial Institution
13 21 (1.06%) Military
14 19 (0.96%) Aerospace
15 17 (0.86%) Back Office
16 16 (0.81%) Organisational Skills
17 15 (0.76%) Legal
18 14 (0.71%) Automotive
18 14 (0.71%) Law
Job Titles
1 387 (19.60%) Developer
2 315 (15.96%) Senior
3 212 (10.74%) Lead
4 195 (9.88%) Test Engineer
5 175 (8.87%) Tester
6 142 (7.19%) Data Engineer
7 121 (6.13%) Java Developer
8 109 (5.52%) Software Engineer
9 103 (5.22%) Analyst
10 89 (4.51%) Architect
11 88 (4.46%) DevOps Engineer
12 87 (4.41%) Test Automation Engineer
13 84 (4.26%) QA Engineer
13 84 (4.26%) Senior Developer
14 73 (3.70%) Test Leader
15 67 (3.39%) Full-Stack Developer
16 64 (3.24%) Automation Engineer
16 64 (3.24%) Automation Tester
16 64 (3.24%) Test Analyst
17 53 (2.68%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (13.68%) REST
2 213 (10.79%) Playwright
3 184 (9.32%) Kafka
4 182 (9.22%) RESTful
5 173 (8.76%) React
6 165 (8.36%) Spring
7 135 (6.84%) .NET
8 127 (6.43%) Spring Boot
9 101 (5.12%) Node.js
10 90 (4.56%) AngularJS
11 89 (4.51%) HTML
12 79 (4.00%) CSS
13 54 (2.74%) OAuth
14 51 (2.58%) JSON
15 46 (2.33%) Jest
15 46 (2.33%) pytest
16 44 (2.23%) XML
17 43 (2.18%) .NET Framework
17 43 (2.18%) Quarkus
18 41 (2.08%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 294 (14.89%) Cloud Native
2 146 (7.40%) Product Ownership
3 141 (7.14%) Distributed Systems
4 72 (3.65%) Enterprise Software
5 51 (2.58%) Legacy Systems
6 49 (2.48%) Data Protection Act
6 49 (2.48%) Onboarding
7 47 (2.38%) Self-Motivation
8 39 (1.98%) Mobile App
9 37 (1.87%) AI Agents
10 33 (1.67%) Virtual Team
11 28 (1.42%) Distributed Architecture
11 28 (1.42%) Embedded Systems
12 26 (1.32%) Security Posture
13 21 (1.06%) Management Information System
14 18 (0.91%) Fixed Income
15 17 (0.86%) Data Structures
16 16 (0.81%) Data Centre
16 16 (0.81%) NHS
17 15 (0.76%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 137 (6.94%) Linux
2 89 (4.51%) Windows
3 76 (3.85%) Unix
4 39 (1.98%) Apple iOS
5 36 (1.82%) Android
6 29 (1.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (0.96%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.35%) Mac OS X
8 7 (0.35%) Solaris
9 6 (0.30%) Embedded Linux
10 5 (0.25%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.25%) Windows 7
10 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
10 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2008
11 4 (0.20%) Mac OS
11 4 (0.20%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.20%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.15%) AIX
12 3 (0.15%) Windows Server 2016
13 2 (0.10%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,150 (58.26%) CI/CD
2 920 (46.61%) Agile
3 750 (37.99%) DevOps
4 391 (19.81%) Continuous Improvement
5 387 (19.60%) Problem-Solving
6 365 (18.49%) Microservices
7 341 (17.27%) Software Engineering
8 323 (16.36%) Scrum
9 316 (16.01%) Infrastructure as Code
9 316 (16.01%) Validation
10 303 (15.35%) Test Strategy
11 292 (14.79%) AI
12 260 (13.17%) Containerisation
13 255 (12.92%) Observability
14 243 (12.31%) TDD
15 233 (11.80%) ETL
16 219 (11.09%) SDLC
17 214 (10.84%) End-to-End Testing
18 213 (10.79%) Data Pipeline
19 209 (10.59%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 522 (26.44%) Python
2 489 (24.77%) Java
3 486 (24.62%) SQL
4 256 (12.97%) JavaScript
5 207 (10.49%) TypeScript
6 175 (8.87%) C#
7 92 (4.66%) PowerShell
8 72 (3.65%) Bash
9 48 (2.43%) Kotlin
10 45 (2.28%) Bicep
11 44 (2.23%) C++
12 33 (1.67%) C
13 27 (1.37%) PL/SQL
13 27 (1.37%) Scala
14 25 (1.27%) Go
15 23 (1.17%) Apex Code
16 20 (1.01%) Swift
17 17 (0.86%) Groovy
17 17 (0.86%) Ruby
18 15 (0.76%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 643 (32.57%) Security Cleared
2 539 (27.30%) SC Cleared
3 98 (4.96%) ISTQB
4 90 (4.56%) Degree
5 57 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 56 (2.84%) BPSS Clearance
7 46 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
8 31 (1.57%) AWS Certification
9 28 (1.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 18 (0.91%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.76%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 11 (0.56%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.56%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.56%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.51%) CISSP
13 10 (0.51%) Microsoft Certification
14 9 (0.46%) ISEB
15 8 (0.41%) CCNP
15 8 (0.41%) Master's Degree
16 7 (0.35%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 505 (25.58%) QA
2 146 (7.40%) Accessibility
3 142 (7.19%) Data Quality
4 77 (3.90%) WCAG
5 40 (2.03%) GDPR
6 14 (0.71%) NCSC
7 13 (0.66%) ISO 20022
8 12 (0.61%) SLA
9 10 (0.51%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 9 (0.46%) NIST
11 7 (0.35%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.35%) Def Stans
12 6 (0.30%) Software Quality Assurance
13 5 (0.25%) FATCA
13 5 (0.25%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.25%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.20%) GRC
15 3 (0.15%) EU AI Act
15 3 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
15 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 379 (19.20%) Docker
2 30 (1.52%) VMware Infrastructure
3 29 (1.47%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.71%) Firmware
6 5 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
7 4 (0.20%) Oracle RAC
7 4 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
7 4 (0.20%) VMware NSX
8 2 (0.10%) SRDF
9 1 (0.051%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.051%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.051%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 386 (19.55%) Kubernetes
2 278 (14.08%) Terraform
3 111 (5.62%) Ansible
4 106 (5.37%) Grafana
5 90 (4.56%) Prometheus
6 40 (2.03%) Argo
7 24 (1.22%) Puppet
8 20 (1.01%) Progress Chef
9 11 (0.56%) HP ALM
9 11 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
10 10 (0.51%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.51%) Kibana
11 9 (0.46%) Control-M
12 7 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
13 6 (0.30%) Packer
14 5 (0.25%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.25%) HP Quality Center
14 5 (0.25%) NetBackup
14 5 (0.25%) SCCM
Vendors
1 198 (10.03%) Microsoft
2 165 (8.36%) Oracle
3 80 (4.05%) Databricks
4 75 (3.80%) Salesforce
5 65 (3.29%) Red Hat
6 58 (2.94%) Google
6 58 (2.94%) Talend
7 53 (2.68%) Splunk
8 45 (2.28%) IBM
9 43 (2.18%) ServiceNow
10 42 (2.13%) Denodo
11 36 (1.82%) VMware
12 34 (1.72%) Dynatrace
13 33 (1.67%) Informatica
14 31 (1.57%) SAP
15 28 (1.42%) Cisco
16 25 (1.27%) UiPath
17 18 (0.91%) HP
18 11 (0.56%) Fortinet
19 10 (0.51%) Sage