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

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 50 56
Rank change year-on-year +5 +6 -7
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,837 1,104 1,337
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.24% 4.42% 3.57%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.97% 4.84% 4.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,176 771 885
10th Percentile £345 £313 £363
25th Percentile £405 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £525
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -6.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £669 £725 £725
UK median daily rate £475 £490 £513
% change year-on-year -3.06% -4.39% -6.82%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 26 48
10th Percentile £36.26 £41.67 £50.88
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.95 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +28.57% -8.70% -19.01%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.50 £71.88
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.35 £85.00
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +35.00% -13.04% -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 36,943 22,820 31,966
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.26% 91.36% 85.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,357 14,745 20,676
10th Percentile £325 £300 £303
25th Percentile £415 £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 £513 £502 £525
% change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,312 1,098 2,392
10th Percentile £15.25 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £21.00 £18.13 £16.06
Median hourly rate £47.00 £27.06 £37.63
Median % change year-on-year +73.67% -28.07% +7.07%
75th Percentile £68.55 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £74.13 £72.50
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%

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 23 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 23 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 23 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 +3 835 £500 - 185
North of England +13 367 £458 +1.67% 106
Midlands +10 232 £450 +6.51% 50
West Midlands +27 213 £450 -10.00% 25
South East -29 194 £475 -5.00% 129
North West +1 148 £475 +6.26% 53
Yorkshire +3 147 £500 +2.56% 29
South West +14 106 £450 - 43
East of England +19 84 £495 +5.88% 52
North East +7 80 £425 +6.25% 25
East Midlands -41 19 £418 +51.82% 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
1 156 (8.49%) Confluence
2 43 (2.34%) Apache Airflow
3 42 (2.29%) SAS
4 36 (1.96%) Apache Spark
5 16 (0.87%) Apache
6 14 (0.76%) SharePoint
7 12 (0.65%) CMS
8 8 (0.44%) Appian
8 8 (0.44%) Camunda
9 5 (0.27%) nginx
9 5 (0.27%) Tomcat
9 5 (0.27%) WebLogic
10 4 (0.22%) 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%) Solana
Applications
1 29 (1.58%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.87%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.60%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.44%) Microsoft Project
4 8 (0.44%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.27%) Spreadsheet
6 3 (0.16%) Simulink
7 2 (0.11%) Chatbot
8 1 (0.054%) Mingle
8 1 (0.054%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 19 (1.03%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.93%) Aladdin
3 11 (0.60%) Payment Gateway
4 8 (0.44%) Findur
4 8 (0.44%) SAP S/4HANA
5 6 (0.33%) Oracle EBS
5 6 (0.33%) SAP ERP
5 6 (0.33%) Shopify
6 5 (0.27%) BambooHR
6 5 (0.27%) Loan IQ
7 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
7 3 (0.16%) Maximo
7 3 (0.16%) Salesforce CRM
8 2 (0.11%) Infor CloudSuite
8 2 (0.11%) Infor LN
8 2 (0.11%) Infor M3
8 2 (0.11%) IntelliMatch
8 2 (0.11%) Oracle ERP
8 2 (0.11%) Summit
8 2 (0.11%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 511 (27.82%) AWS
2 498 (27.11%) Azure
3 288 (15.68%) GitHub
4 219 (11.92%) Azure DevOps
5 178 (9.69%) GitHub Actions
6 134 (7.29%) Serverless
7 124 (6.75%) GCP
8 92 (5.01%) AWS Lambda
9 79 (4.30%) Amazon S3
10 68 (3.70%) Power Platform
11 63 (3.43%) OpenShift
12 54 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 53 (2.89%) Amazon ECS
14 44 (2.40%) Azure Data Factory
15 41 (2.23%) dbt
16 40 (2.18%) Amazon EC2
17 36 (1.96%) Snowflake
18 32 (1.74%) Amazon EKS
19 30 (1.63%) Azure AKS
20 28 (1.52%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (1.14%) Firewall
2 15 (0.82%) HTTP
2 15 (0.82%) SAN
3 11 (0.60%) WAN
4 9 (0.49%) MPLS
4 9 (0.49%) Network Security
5 8 (0.44%) VPN
6 7 (0.38%) TCP/IP
7 6 (0.33%) 4G
7 6 (0.33%) 5G
7 6 (0.33%) BGP
7 6 (0.33%) Ethernet
7 6 (0.33%) LAN
7 6 (0.33%) SD-WAN
7 6 (0.33%) Wi-Fi
7 6 (0.33%) Wireshark
8 5 (0.27%) 2G
8 5 (0.27%) Diameter Protocol
8 5 (0.27%) Multicast
8 5 (0.27%) SIGTRAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (5.61%) PostgreSQL
2 94 (5.12%) Data Warehouse
3 83 (4.52%) MongoDB
4 80 (4.35%) NoSQL
5 68 (3.70%) SQL Server
6 61 (3.32%) Relational Database
7 52 (2.83%) Power BI
8 46 (2.50%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.91%) Oracle Reports
10 34 (1.85%) Pentaho
11 30 (1.63%) Amazon Athena
12 26 (1.42%) Amazon RDS
12 26 (1.42%) Data Lake
12 26 (1.42%) Redis
13 25 (1.36%) Big Data
14 24 (1.31%) Amazon Redshift
15 22 (1.20%) Metadata
15 22 (1.20%) Tableau
16 20 (1.09%) Oracle Database
17 18 (0.98%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 347 (18.89%) JIRA
2 322 (17.53%) Git
3 295 (16.06%) Jenkins
4 262 (14.26%) GitLab
5 229 (12.47%) Selenium
6 141 (7.68%) Postman
7 130 (7.08%) Cucumber
8 94 (5.12%) JUnit
8 94 (5.12%) REST Assured
9 82 (4.46%) Cypress.io
9 82 (4.46%) JMeter
10 54 (2.94%) SonarQube
11 53 (2.89%) Zephyr
12 50 (2.72%) WebDriver
13 42 (2.29%) Gradle
14 39 (2.12%) Gatling
15 35 (1.91%) Bitbucket
16 33 (1.80%) Mockito
17 30 (1.63%) Maven
18 26 (1.42%) SpecFlow
General
1 501 (27.27%) Social Skills
2 349 (19.00%) Finance
3 238 (12.96%) Analytical Skills
4 234 (12.74%) Public Sector
5 160 (8.71%) Banking
6 49 (2.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 37 (2.01%) Documentation Skills
8 31 (1.69%) Investment Banking
9 26 (1.42%) Front Office
10 25 (1.36%) Influencing Skills
11 24 (1.31%) Telecoms
12 21 (1.14%) Financial Institution
13 20 (1.09%) Retail
14 19 (1.03%) Military
15 17 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
16 16 (0.87%) Aerospace
17 15 (0.82%) Legal
18 14 (0.76%) Presentation Skills
19 12 (0.65%) Law
19 12 (0.65%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 357 (19.43%) Developer
2 288 (15.68%) Senior
3 197 (10.72%) Lead
4 196 (10.67%) Tester
5 193 (10.51%) Test Engineer
6 123 (6.70%) Data Engineer
7 106 (5.77%) Java Developer
8 102 (5.55%) Software Engineer
9 94 (5.12%) Analyst
10 87 (4.74%) Architect
11 80 (4.35%) DevOps Engineer
11 80 (4.35%) Test Automation Engineer
12 74 (4.03%) QA Engineer
13 73 (3.97%) Senior Developer
14 69 (3.76%) Automation Tester
15 67 (3.65%) Test Leader
16 53 (2.89%) Automation Engineer
17 52 (2.83%) Test Analyst
18 50 (2.72%) Full-Stack Developer
19 45 (2.45%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 201 (10.94%) REST
2 190 (10.34%) Playwright
3 170 (9.25%) React
4 141 (7.68%) Spring
5 139 (7.57%) Kafka
6 136 (7.40%) RESTful
7 115 (6.26%) Spring Boot
8 104 (5.66%) .NET
9 92 (5.01%) Node.js
10 78 (4.25%) AngularJS
11 63 (3.43%) HTML
12 58 (3.16%) CSS
13 48 (2.61%) OAuth
13 48 (2.61%) pytest
14 40 (2.18%) Jest
15 39 (2.12%) Quarkus
16 36 (1.96%) Swagger
17 34 (1.85%) Gherkin
18 33 (1.80%) WireMock
19 32 (1.74%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 224 (12.19%) Cloud Native
2 129 (7.02%) Product Ownership
3 115 (6.26%) Distributed Systems
4 53 (2.89%) Legacy Systems
5 49 (2.67%) Data Protection Act
6 47 (2.56%) Enterprise Software
7 41 (2.23%) Mobile App
8 39 (2.12%) Self-Motivation
9 36 (1.96%) Virtual Team
10 32 (1.74%) Onboarding
11 31 (1.69%) Distributed Architecture
12 26 (1.42%) Management Information System
12 26 (1.42%) Security Posture
13 23 (1.25%) Embedded Systems
14 22 (1.20%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (1.14%) AI Agents
16 20 (1.09%) Algorithms
17 19 (1.03%) Fixed Income
18 16 (0.87%) Data Structures
19 15 (0.82%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 114 (6.21%) Linux
2 73 (3.97%) Windows
3 52 (2.83%) Unix
4 40 (2.18%) Android
5 39 (2.12%) Apple iOS
6 21 (1.14%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 15 (0.82%) Windows Server
8 12 (0.65%) Mac OS X
9 7 (0.38%) Mac OS
9 7 (0.38%) Solaris
10 5 (0.27%) Windows Server 2008
11 4 (0.22%) Embedded Linux
11 4 (0.22%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.22%) 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
1 991 (53.95%) CI/CD
2 849 (46.22%) Agile
3 639 (34.78%) DevOps
4 343 (18.67%) Problem-Solving
5 309 (16.82%) Microservices
6 302 (16.44%) Continuous Improvement
7 284 (15.46%) Software Engineering
8 283 (15.41%) Scrum
9 274 (14.92%) Test Strategy
10 273 (14.86%) Validation
11 250 (13.61%) Infrastructure as Code
12 234 (12.74%) AI
13 230 (12.52%) Observability
14 219 (11.92%) Containerisation
15 209 (11.38%) TDD
16 192 (10.45%) ETL
17 183 (9.96%) Software Testing
18 178 (9.69%) End-to-End Testing
19 177 (9.64%) User Acceptance Testing
20 176 (9.58%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 460 (25.04%) Python
2 452 (24.61%) Java
3 438 (23.84%) SQL
4 227 (12.36%) JavaScript
5 203 (11.05%) TypeScript
6 166 (9.04%) C#
7 62 (3.38%) PowerShell
8 56 (3.05%) Bash
9 45 (2.45%) Kotlin
10 41 (2.23%) C++
11 31 (1.69%) Go
12 30 (1.63%) C
12 30 (1.63%) Scala
13 29 (1.58%) Apex Code
14 28 (1.52%) Bicep
14 28 (1.52%) PL/SQL
15 22 (1.20%) Swift
16 16 (0.87%) Groovy
17 15 (0.82%) Ruby
18 13 (0.71%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 574 (31.25%) Security Cleared
2 464 (25.26%) SC Cleared
3 86 (4.68%) ISTQB
4 81 (4.41%) Degree
5 64 (3.48%) BPSS Clearance
5 64 (3.48%) DV Cleared
6 40 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
7 19 (1.03%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 18 (0.98%) AWS Certification
9 15 (0.82%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 14 (0.76%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
10 14 (0.76%) Master's Degree
11 12 (0.65%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.60%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.54%) CCNP
14 8 (0.44%) CISSP
15 7 (0.38%) Azure Certification
15 7 (0.38%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 5 (0.27%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 408 (22.21%) QA
2 128 (6.97%) Accessibility
3 122 (6.64%) Data Quality
4 58 (3.16%) WCAG
5 31 (1.69%) GDPR
6 12 (0.65%) ISO 20022
6 12 (0.65%) NCSC
7 11 (0.60%) NIST
8 10 (0.54%) Def Stans
8 10 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 9 (0.49%) SLA
10 5 (0.27%) FATCA
11 4 (0.22%) HL7
11 4 (0.22%) PCI DSS
11 4 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 4 (0.22%) SEPA
11 4 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
12 3 (0.16%) GRC
12 3 (0.16%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 3 (0.16%) SOC 2
System Software
1 300 (16.33%) Docker
2 26 (1.42%) VMware Infrastructure
3 14 (0.76%) Active Directory
3 14 (0.76%) Firmware
4 12 (0.65%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.27%) VMware ESXi
6 4 (0.22%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
6 4 (0.22%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.22%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.11%) SRDF
8 1 (0.054%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.054%) Virtual Servers
8 1 (0.054%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 314 (17.09%) Kubernetes
2 224 (12.19%) Terraform
3 93 (5.06%) Ansible
4 92 (5.01%) Grafana
5 84 (4.57%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.96%) Argo
7 13 (0.71%) HP ALM
8 12 (0.65%) Puppet
9 11 (0.60%) Kibana
10 10 (0.54%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.54%) HP Quality Center
11 8 (0.44%) Kustomize
11 8 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
12 6 (0.33%) Forefront Identity Manager
12 6 (0.33%) NetBackup
12 6 (0.33%) NetIQ Identity Manager
13 5 (0.27%) Istio
13 5 (0.27%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.22%) Oracle RMAN
14 4 (0.22%) Rancher
Vendors
1 154 (8.38%) Microsoft
2 142 (7.73%) Oracle
3 78 (4.25%) Salesforce
4 60 (3.27%) Databricks
5 56 (3.05%) Red Hat
6 55 (2.99%) Talend
7 51 (2.78%) ServiceNow
8 50 (2.72%) Google
8 50 (2.72%) Splunk
9 38 (2.07%) Denodo
10 32 (1.74%) Informatica
11 28 (1.52%) VMware
12 27 (1.47%) Dynatrace
12 27 (1.47%) UiPath
13 26 (1.42%) IBM
13 26 (1.42%) SAP
14 21 (1.14%) Cisco
15 16 (0.87%) HP
16 15 (0.82%) OpenAI
17 14 (0.76%) Blue Prism