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

6 months to
24 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 52 49
Rank change year-on-year +5 -3 +4
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,967 1,264 1,316
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.31% 4.56% 3.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.08% 5.02% 4.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,260 876 882
10th Percentile £330 £313 £351
25th Percentile £409 £399 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £613
90th Percentile £665 £706 £736
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £507
% change year-on-year -5.00% -1.38% -3.43%
Number of hourly rates quoted 101 34 22
10th Percentile £37.25 £41.34 £43.00
25th Percentile £59.25 £46.93 £50.31
Median hourly rate £69.50 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.36% - -21.15%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.50 £69.84
90th Percentile £74.00 £73.05 £83.95
UK median hourly rate £69.75 £52.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +32.86% -4.55% -19.85%

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 38,743 25,202 28,504
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.81% 90.84% 85.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,962 16,051 18,351
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £424
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £627 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £751
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,572 1,476 1,524
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.25 £14.05
25th Percentile £19.17 £17.87 £18.08
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 £81.05 £70.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £42.00 £25.15 £40.94
% change year-on-year +67.00% -38.57% -3.67%

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 24 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 24 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 24 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 +6 910 £500 -2.20% 190
North of England +4 390 £460 - 125
Midlands +8 249 £450 - 78
West Midlands +21 233 £450 -10.00% 53
South East -30 214 £459 -8.20% 148
Yorkshire -8 157 £463 -7.50% 35
North West -17 138 £492 +15.09% 63
South West -2 115 £475 +5.56% 103
North East +14 103 £450 - 28
East of England +10 77 £450 +9.09% 55
East Midlands -37 16 £418 +17.61% 25
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 (8.64%) Confluence
2 50 (2.54%) Apache Airflow
3 41 (2.08%) Apache Spark
4 38 (1.93%) SharePoint
5 33 (1.68%) SAS
6 21 (1.07%) Apache
7 13 (0.66%) CMS
8 10 (0.51%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.31%) Camunda
9 6 (0.31%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
11 4 (0.20%) Jupyter
11 4 (0.20%) nginx
11 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
11 4 (0.20%) Tomcat
12 3 (0.15%) Kentico
12 3 (0.15%) OpenStack
13 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
13 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
13 2 (0.10%) Mule
Applications
1 25 (1.27%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.81%) Microsoft Office
3 9 (0.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.36%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.25%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.20%) 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 27 (1.37%) Dynamics CRM
2 15 (0.76%) Aladdin
2 15 (0.76%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.66%) Payment Gateway
4 8 (0.41%) Findur
5 7 (0.36%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.31%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.31%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.25%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.20%) SAP GRC
8 4 (0.20%) 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%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
11 1 (0.051%) Maximo
11 1 (0.051%) SAP QM
11 1 (0.051%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 600 (30.50%) Azure
2 593 (30.15%) AWS
3 353 (17.95%) GitHub
4 280 (14.23%) Azure DevOps
5 220 (11.18%) GitHub Actions
6 158 (8.03%) Serverless
7 150 (7.63%) GCP
8 114 (5.80%) AWS Lambda
9 95 (4.83%) Power Platform
10 87 (4.42%) Amazon S3
11 72 (3.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 66 (3.36%) Amazon ECS
13 59 (3.00%) OpenShift
14 56 (2.85%) dbt
15 53 (2.69%) Amazon EKS
16 50 (2.54%) Snowflake
17 49 (2.49%) GitHub Copilot
18 46 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
19 43 (2.19%) Azure Data Factory
20 42 (2.14%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.07%) Firewall
2 20 (1.02%) HTTP
3 17 (0.86%) 4G
3 17 (0.86%) DNS
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%) SIGTRAN
5 15 (0.76%) SS7
5 15 (0.76%) WAN
6 13 (0.66%) TCP/IP
7 12 (0.61%) LAN
8 11 (0.56%) Wi-Fi
9 10 (0.51%) BGP
9 10 (0.51%) SAN
10 8 (0.41%) DHCP
10 8 (0.41%) Ethernet VPN
10 8 (0.41%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (5.90%) Data Warehouse
2 115 (5.85%) PostgreSQL
3 99 (5.03%) NoSQL
4 89 (4.52%) MongoDB
5 83 (4.22%) SQL Server
6 81 (4.12%) Power BI
7 68 (3.46%) Relational Database
8 45 (2.29%) DynamoDB
9 36 (1.83%) Oracle Reports
10 35 (1.78%) Data Lake
10 35 (1.78%) Metadata
11 32 (1.63%) Amazon Athena
12 31 (1.58%) Big Data
13 29 (1.47%) Amazon Redshift
13 29 (1.47%) Pentaho
14 28 (1.42%) Amazon RDS
15 26 (1.32%) MySQL
15 26 (1.32%) Redis
16 24 (1.22%) Tableau
17 22 (1.12%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 395 (20.08%) Git
2 342 (17.39%) JIRA
3 312 (15.86%) Jenkins
4 263 (13.37%) GitLab
5 242 (12.30%) Selenium
6 135 (6.86%) Postman
7 130 (6.61%) Cucumber
8 98 (4.98%) Cypress.io
9 97 (4.93%) JUnit
10 84 (4.27%) REST Assured
11 79 (4.02%) JMeter
12 65 (3.30%) SonarQube
13 63 (3.20%) Zephyr
14 51 (2.59%) Gatling
15 50 (2.54%) WebDriver
16 45 (2.29%) Gradle
17 41 (2.08%) Bitbucket
18 35 (1.78%) Maven
19 32 (1.63%) Mockito
20 23 (1.17%) Appium
General
1 553 (28.11%) Social Skills
2 389 (19.78%) Finance
3 281 (14.29%) Analytical Skills
4 249 (12.66%) Public Sector
5 174 (8.85%) Banking
6 64 (3.25%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 39 (1.98%) Telecoms
8 38 (1.93%) Documentation Skills
9 33 (1.68%) Retail
10 30 (1.53%) Front Office
11 29 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
12 28 (1.42%) Investment Banking
13 23 (1.17%) Financial Institution
14 21 (1.07%) Military
15 18 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 17 (0.86%) Back Office
17 15 (0.76%) Legal
17 15 (0.76%) Marketing
18 14 (0.71%) Law
19 13 (0.66%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 400 (20.34%) Developer
2 321 (16.32%) Senior
3 206 (10.47%) Lead
4 192 (9.76%) Test Engineer
5 165 (8.39%) Tester
6 126 (6.41%) Data Engineer
7 121 (6.15%) Java Developer
8 112 (5.69%) Software Engineer
9 105 (5.34%) Analyst
10 97 (4.93%) DevOps Engineer
11 88 (4.47%) Architect
11 88 (4.47%) Senior Developer
11 88 (4.47%) Test Automation Engineer
12 87 (4.42%) QA Engineer
13 70 (3.56%) Test Leader
14 67 (3.41%) Full-Stack Developer
15 66 (3.36%) Test Analyst
16 65 (3.30%) Automation Engineer
17 62 (3.15%) Automation Tester
18 58 (2.95%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 292 (14.84%) Terraform
2 278 (14.13%) REST
3 216 (10.98%) Playwright
4 190 (9.66%) Kafka
5 189 (9.61%) RESTful
6 177 (9.00%) React
7 168 (8.54%) Spring
8 141 (7.17%) .NET
9 135 (6.86%) Spring Boot
10 103 (5.24%) HTML
11 98 (4.98%) Node.js
12 90 (4.58%) AngularJS
13 88 (4.47%) CSS
14 57 (2.90%) OAuth
15 55 (2.80%) JSON
16 49 (2.49%) XML
17 45 (2.29%) Next.js
18 44 (2.24%) Gherkin
18 44 (2.24%) pytest
19 43 (2.19%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 298 (15.15%) Cloud Native
2 153 (7.78%) Product Ownership
3 141 (7.17%) Distributed Systems
4 77 (3.91%) Enterprise Software
5 56 (2.85%) Onboarding
6 50 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
7 47 (2.39%) Data Protection Act
8 46 (2.34%) Self-Motivation
9 41 (2.08%) Mobile App
10 38 (1.93%) AI Agents
11 32 (1.63%) Virtual Team
12 25 (1.27%) Embedded Systems
13 22 (1.12%) Security Posture
14 21 (1.07%) Distributed Architecture
15 20 (1.02%) Management Information System
16 19 (0.97%) Data Centre
17 18 (0.92%) Fixed Income
18 16 (0.81%) NHS
19 15 (0.76%) Data Structures
19 15 (0.76%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 139 (7.07%) Linux
2 88 (4.47%) Windows
3 80 (4.07%) Unix
4 36 (1.83%) Apple iOS
5 35 (1.78%) Android
6 25 (1.27%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 17 (0.86%) Windows Server
8 6 (0.31%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.31%) Mac OS X
8 6 (0.31%) Solaris
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 10
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 7
9 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
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 1,154 (58.67%) CI/CD
2 919 (46.72%) Agile
3 753 (38.28%) DevOps
4 392 (19.93%) Problem-Solving
5 385 (19.57%) Continuous Improvement
6 368 (18.71%) Microservices
7 350 (17.79%) Software Engineering
8 330 (16.78%) Infrastructure as Code
9 321 (16.32%) Validation
10 316 (16.07%) Scrum
11 302 (15.35%) Test Strategy
12 293 (14.90%) AI
13 268 (13.62%) Containerisation
14 257 (13.07%) Observability
15 235 (11.95%) TDD
16 227 (11.54%) SDLC
17 217 (11.03%) Software Testing
18 211 (10.73%) End-to-End Testing
18 211 (10.73%) Stakeholder Management
19 207 (10.52%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 528 (26.84%) Python
2 506 (25.72%) Java
3 491 (24.96%) SQL
4 267 (13.57%) JavaScript
5 210 (10.68%) TypeScript
6 171 (8.69%) C#
7 100 (5.08%) PowerShell
8 76 (3.86%) Bash
9 49 (2.49%) Bicep
10 47 (2.39%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.93%) C++
12 28 (1.42%) C
13 27 (1.37%) PL/SQL
13 27 (1.37%) Scala
14 25 (1.27%) Go
15 23 (1.17%) Apex Code
16 17 (0.86%) Ruby
16 17 (0.86%) Shell Script
17 16 (0.81%) Groovy
17 16 (0.81%) Swift
Qualifications
1 633 (32.18%) Security Cleared
2 532 (27.05%) SC Cleared
3 103 (5.24%) Degree
4 94 (4.78%) ISTQB
5 59 (3.00%) DV Cleared
6 58 (2.95%) BPSS Clearance
7 54 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
8 34 (1.73%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.37%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 21 (1.07%) Azure Certification
11 17 (0.86%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 12 (0.61%) Cisco Certification
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%) CISSP
16 8 (0.41%) CCNP
17 7 (0.36%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 522 (26.54%) QA
2 146 (7.42%) Accessibility
3 138 (7.02%) Data Quality
4 78 (3.97%) WCAG
5 38 (1.93%) GDPR
6 16 (0.81%) ISO 20022
7 14 (0.71%) NCSC
8 13 (0.66%) SLA
9 11 (0.56%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 10 (0.51%) NIST
11 9 (0.46%) GRC
12 7 (0.36%) Actionable Recommendations
13 6 (0.31%) Software Quality Assurance
14 5 (0.25%) Def Stans
14 5 (0.25%) FATCA
14 5 (0.25%) HL7
14 5 (0.25%) PCI DSS
15 4 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
16 3 (0.15%) HMG Security Policy Framework
16 3 (0.15%) MiFID
System Software
1 383 (19.47%) Docker
2 28 (1.42%) Active Directory
3 27 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
4 17 (0.86%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.71%) Firmware
6 5 (0.25%) VMware NSX
7 4 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
7 4 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
8 3 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.051%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.051%) Hyper-V
Systems Management
1 385 (19.57%) Kubernetes
2 114 (5.80%) Ansible
3 102 (5.19%) Grafana
4 83 (4.22%) Prometheus
5 40 (2.03%) Argo
6 20 (1.02%) Puppet
7 19 (0.97%) Progress Chef
8 11 (0.56%) HP ALM
8 11 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
9 10 (0.51%) Control-M
9 10 (0.51%) Dell DRAC
9 10 (0.51%) Kibana
10 7 (0.36%) Kustomize
11 6 (0.31%) Istio
11 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.31%) Packer
12 5 (0.25%) HP Fortify
12 5 (0.25%) HP Quality Center
12 5 (0.25%) SCCM
13 4 (0.20%) Forefront Identity Manager
Vendors
1 207 (10.52%) Microsoft
2 157 (7.98%) Oracle
3 83 (4.22%) Databricks
4 71 (3.61%) Salesforce
5 60 (3.05%) Red Hat
6 58 (2.95%) Google
7 51 (2.59%) Splunk
8 47 (2.39%) Talend
9 44 (2.24%) ServiceNow
10 41 (2.08%) IBM
11 37 (1.88%) SAP
12 36 (1.83%) Denodo
13 33 (1.68%) Dynatrace
13 33 (1.68%) Informatica
13 33 (1.68%) VMware
14 30 (1.53%) Cisco
15 26 (1.32%) UiPath
16 16 (0.81%) HP
17 11 (0.56%) Fortinet
17 11 (0.56%) MuleSoft