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

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 52 52
Rank change year-on-year +5 0 +1
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,924 1,214 1,315
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.24% 4.41% 3.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.98% 4.86% 4.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,230 833 891
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £406 £375 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -9.52% -2.78%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £628
90th Percentile £663 £713 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £475 £515
% change year-on-year - -7.77% -1.90%
Number of hourly rates quoted 104 31 26
10th Percentile £40.00 £40.84 £45.00
25th Percentile £60.25 £44.76 £51.25
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -13.04% -11.88%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.00 £71.88
90th Percentile £74.00 £75.00 £81.25
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +35.00% -13.04% -12.21%

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 38,641 24,977 29,189
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.26% 90.76% 85.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,154 16,016 19,101
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £419
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% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,462 1,371 1,780
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.25 £13.87
25th Percentile £20.92 £17.98 £17.72
Median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +78.93% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £68.75 £52.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £70.16 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%

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 31 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 31 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 31 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 +7 867 £500 - 373
North of England +16 383 £463 +2.78% 136
Midlands +12 264 £450 +9.76% 69
West Midlands +32 246 £450 -2.17% 45
South East -34 205 £459 -8.20% 164
Yorkshire +1 155 £493 +3.68% 37
North West -10 139 £488 +15.52% 77
South West +2 111 £463 +8.82% 80
North East +12 97 £425 +6.25% 23
East of England +12 79 £450 - 55
East Midlands -40 18 £425 +30.37% 24
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
1 173 (8.99%) Confluence
2 47 (2.44%) Apache Airflow
3 43 (2.23%) Apache Spark
4 41 (2.13%) SAS
5 27 (1.40%) SharePoint
6 21 (1.09%) Apache
7 13 (0.68%) CMS
8 11 (0.57%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Exchange
10 5 (0.26%) Camunda
10 5 (0.26%) nginx
10 5 (0.26%) Tomcat
11 4 (0.21%) Jupyter
11 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
12 3 (0.16%) Appian
12 3 (0.16%) Kentico
13 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
13 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
13 2 (0.10%) Mule
13 2 (0.10%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 21 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.42%) MS Visio
4 7 (0.36%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.21%) Simulink
6 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 3 (0.16%) Trello
8 1 (0.052%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 25 (1.30%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.78%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.62%) Payment Gateway
4 11 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 8 (0.42%) Findur
5 8 (0.42%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.31%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.31%) SAP ERP
6 6 (0.31%) Shopify
7 5 (0.26%) BambooHR
8 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
9 2 (0.10%) Infor CloudSuite
9 2 (0.10%) Infor LN
9 2 (0.10%) Infor M3
9 2 (0.10%) Loan IQ
9 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 1 (0.052%) Maximo
10 1 (0.052%) Summit
10 1 (0.052%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 566 (29.42%) AWS
2 565 (29.37%) Azure
3 341 (17.72%) GitHub
4 255 (13.25%) Azure DevOps
5 216 (11.23%) GitHub Actions
6 145 (7.54%) Serverless
7 143 (7.43%) GCP
8 100 (5.20%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (4.42%) Power Platform
10 84 (4.37%) Amazon S3
11 65 (3.38%) OpenShift
12 63 (3.27%) Amazon ECS
13 60 (3.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 49 (2.55%) dbt
15 44 (2.29%) Amazon EKS
16 43 (2.23%) Amazon EC2
16 43 (2.23%) GitHub Copilot
17 42 (2.18%) Azure Data Factory
17 42 (2.18%) Snowflake
18 36 (1.87%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.14%) Firewall
2 16 (0.83%) Network Security
3 15 (0.78%) HTTP
4 13 (0.68%) 2G
4 13 (0.68%) 3G
4 13 (0.68%) 4G
4 13 (0.68%) Diameter Protocol
4 13 (0.68%) SAN
4 13 (0.68%) SIGTRAN
4 13 (0.68%) SS7
4 13 (0.68%) WAN
5 12 (0.62%) 5G
6 10 (0.52%) LAN
7 8 (0.42%) DNS
7 8 (0.42%) TCP/IP
7 8 (0.42%) Wi-Fi
8 7 (0.36%) VPN
9 6 (0.31%) BGP
9 6 (0.31%) HTTPS
9 6 (0.31%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (6.03%) PostgreSQL
2 111 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
3 96 (4.99%) NoSQL
4 91 (4.73%) MongoDB
5 81 (4.21%) SQL Server
6 70 (3.64%) Power BI
7 57 (2.96%) Relational Database
8 49 (2.55%) DynamoDB
9 37 (1.92%) Oracle Reports
10 35 (1.82%) Pentaho
11 29 (1.51%) Amazon Athena
11 29 (1.51%) Data Lake
12 28 (1.46%) Big Data
12 28 (1.46%) Metadata
13 25 (1.30%) Amazon RDS
13 25 (1.30%) MySQL
14 24 (1.25%) Redis
15 23 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
16 19 (0.99%) Oracle Database
17 17 (0.88%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 367 (19.07%) Git
2 357 (18.56%) JIRA
3 315 (16.37%) Jenkins
4 258 (13.41%) GitLab
5 236 (12.27%) Selenium
6 136 (7.07%) Cucumber
7 131 (6.81%) Postman
8 103 (5.35%) JUnit
9 95 (4.94%) Cypress.io
10 91 (4.73%) REST Assured
11 78 (4.05%) JMeter
12 64 (3.33%) Zephyr
13 60 (3.12%) SonarQube
14 51 (2.65%) WebDriver
15 48 (2.49%) Gatling
16 42 (2.18%) Bitbucket
17 41 (2.13%) Gradle
18 35 (1.82%) Mockito
19 32 (1.66%) Maven
20 26 (1.35%) SpecFlow
General
1 522 (27.13%) Social Skills
2 371 (19.28%) Finance
3 259 (13.46%) Analytical Skills
4 245 (12.73%) Public Sector
5 164 (8.52%) Banking
6 56 (2.91%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 38 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
8 32 (1.66%) Telecoms
9 31 (1.61%) Influencing Skills
10 30 (1.56%) Retail
11 29 (1.51%) Investment Banking
12 27 (1.40%) Front Office
13 22 (1.14%) Financial Institution
13 22 (1.14%) Military
14 17 (0.88%) Aerospace
15 15 (0.78%) Legal
15 15 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
16 14 (0.73%) Back Office
17 12 (0.62%) Automotive
17 12 (0.62%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 393 (20.43%) Developer
2 311 (16.16%) Senior
3 201 (10.45%) Lead
4 190 (9.88%) Test Engineer
5 175 (9.10%) Tester
6 135 (7.02%) Data Engineer
7 126 (6.55%) Java Developer
8 111 (5.77%) Software Engineer
9 100 (5.20%) Analyst
10 90 (4.68%) DevOps Engineer
11 89 (4.63%) Senior Developer
12 86 (4.47%) Architect
13 84 (4.37%) QA Engineer
14 83 (4.31%) Test Automation Engineer
15 67 (3.48%) Full-Stack Developer
16 66 (3.43%) Test Leader
17 63 (3.27%) Test Analyst
18 62 (3.22%) Automation Tester
19 58 (3.01%) Automation Engineer
20 51 (2.65%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 246 (12.79%) REST
2 214 (11.12%) Playwright
3 176 (9.15%) React
4 168 (8.73%) RESTful
5 158 (8.21%) Kafka
6 156 (8.11%) Spring
7 138 (7.17%) .NET
8 121 (6.29%) Spring Boot
9 106 (5.51%) Node.js
10 89 (4.63%) AngularJS
11 77 (4.00%) HTML
12 74 (3.85%) CSS
13 55 (2.86%) OAuth
14 47 (2.44%) pytest
15 45 (2.34%) .NET Framework
15 45 (2.34%) Jest
15 45 (2.34%) Quarkus
16 44 (2.29%) JSON
17 43 (2.23%) Gherkin
18 41 (2.13%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 279 (14.50%) Cloud Native
2 144 (7.48%) Distributed Systems
3 138 (7.17%) Product Ownership
4 64 (3.33%) Enterprise Software
5 54 (2.81%) Legacy Systems
6 50 (2.60%) Data Protection Act
7 46 (2.39%) Onboarding
7 46 (2.39%) Self-Motivation
8 38 (1.98%) Mobile App
9 32 (1.66%) Virtual Team
10 31 (1.61%) AI Agents
10 31 (1.61%) Distributed Architecture
11 27 (1.40%) Embedded Systems
12 26 (1.35%) Security Posture
13 21 (1.09%) Management Information System
14 20 (1.04%) Fixed Income
15 18 (0.94%) Algorithms
15 18 (0.94%) Data Structures
15 18 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
16 16 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 119 (6.19%) Linux
2 78 (4.05%) Windows
3 63 (3.27%) Unix
4 39 (2.03%) Android
4 39 (2.03%) Apple iOS
5 25 (1.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 18 (0.94%) Windows Server
7 13 (0.68%) Mac OS X
8 7 (0.36%) Mac OS
8 7 (0.36%) Solaris
9 6 (0.31%) Embedded Linux
10 5 (0.26%) Windows Server 2008
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 (0.10%) CentOS
14 1 (0.052%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,119 (58.16%) CI/CD
2 915 (47.56%) Agile
3 721 (37.47%) DevOps
4 370 (19.23%) Microservices
5 369 (19.18%) Problem-Solving
6 364 (18.92%) Continuous Improvement
7 328 (17.05%) Software Engineering
8 321 (16.68%) Scrum
9 304 (15.80%) Infrastructure as Code
10 295 (15.33%) Validation
11 290 (15.07%) Test Strategy
12 279 (14.50%) AI
13 256 (13.31%) Containerisation
14 254 (13.20%) TDD
15 251 (13.05%) Observability
16 217 (11.28%) ETL
17 213 (11.07%) SDLC
18 206 (10.71%) Data Pipeline
19 205 (10.65%) Software Testing
20 194 (10.08%) End-to-End Testing
Programming Languages
1 491 (25.52%) Python
2 484 (25.16%) Java
3 462 (24.01%) SQL
4 235 (12.21%) JavaScript
5 206 (10.71%) TypeScript
6 176 (9.15%) C#
7 74 (3.85%) PowerShell
8 65 (3.38%) Bash
9 51 (2.65%) Kotlin
10 41 (2.13%) Bicep
11 39 (2.03%) C++
12 28 (1.46%) C
13 27 (1.40%) PL/SQL
14 26 (1.35%) Go
14 26 (1.35%) Scala
15 23 (1.20%) Apex Code
16 22 (1.14%) Swift
17 18 (0.94%) Ruby
18 15 (0.78%) Groovy
19 12 (0.62%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 599 (31.13%) Security Cleared
2 495 (25.73%) SC Cleared
3 88 (4.57%) Degree
4 84 (4.37%) ISTQB
5 58 (3.01%) BPSS Clearance
6 57 (2.96%) DV Cleared
7 41 (2.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 28 (1.46%) AWS Certification
9 22 (1.14%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 16 (0.83%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.78%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 13 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.57%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.57%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.52%) CCNP
14 10 (0.52%) Master's Degree
15 9 (0.47%) CISSP
16 8 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
17 7 (0.36%) DBS Check
18 6 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 485 (25.21%) QA
2 147 (7.64%) Accessibility
3 135 (7.02%) Data Quality
4 76 (3.95%) WCAG
5 36 (1.87%) GDPR
6 13 (0.68%) NCSC
7 11 (0.57%) NIST
8 10 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 10 (0.52%) SLA
9 8 (0.42%) ISO 20022
10 6 (0.31%) Software Quality Assurance
11 5 (0.26%) Def Stans
11 5 (0.26%) FATCA
11 5 (0.26%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.21%) GRC
13 3 (0.16%) EU AI Act
13 3 (0.16%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 3 (0.16%) MiFID
13 3 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 2 (0.10%) HL7
System Software
1 358 (18.61%) Docker
2 27 (1.40%) VMware Infrastructure
3 23 (1.20%) Active Directory
4 15 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.62%) Firmware
6 5 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
7 4 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
7 4 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.10%) SRDF
8 2 (0.10%) VMware NSX
9 1 (0.052%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.052%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 374 (19.44%) Kubernetes
2 264 (13.72%) Terraform
3 103 (5.35%) Ansible
4 97 (5.04%) Grafana
5 85 (4.42%) Prometheus
6 42 (2.18%) Argo
7 20 (1.04%) Puppet
8 14 (0.73%) Progress Chef
9 13 (0.68%) HP ALM
10 12 (0.62%) Kibana
11 10 (0.52%) Dell DRAC
11 10 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
12 7 (0.36%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.31%) Istio
13 6 (0.31%) NetBackup
14 5 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 5 (0.26%) HP Quality Center
14 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Intune
14 5 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
15 4 (0.21%) Packer
Vendors
1 186 (9.67%) Microsoft
2 153 (7.95%) Oracle
3 76 (3.95%) Salesforce
4 73 (3.79%) Databricks
5 61 (3.17%) Red Hat
6 56 (2.91%) Talend
7 55 (2.86%) Google
8 49 (2.55%) Splunk
9 38 (1.98%) Denodo
9 38 (1.98%) ServiceNow
10 33 (1.72%) Informatica
10 33 (1.72%) VMware
11 31 (1.61%) IBM
12 30 (1.56%) Dynatrace
13 28 (1.46%) SAP
14 26 (1.35%) UiPath
15 25 (1.30%) Cisco
16 20 (1.04%) HP
17 13 (0.68%) Fortinet
18 11 (0.57%) OpenAI