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

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 52 52
Rank change year-on-year +5 0 0
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,916 1,207 1,364
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.28% 4.44% 3.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.01% 4.90% 4.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,222 834 906
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £406 £384 £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 £700 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £483 £516
% change year-on-year -1.66% -6.40% -1.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 29 42
10th Percentile £36.19 £39.67 £50.13
25th Percentile £60.17 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -24.66%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.52 £70.47
90th Percentile £74.40 £75.50 £77.20
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -20.00%

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 38,234 24,648 31,320
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.43% 90.68% 85.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,071 15,798 20,362
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £645
90th Percentile £735 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,374 1,309 2,214
10th Percentile £15.57 £14.39 £13.00
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.98 £16.25
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -34.02% -8.14%
75th Percentile £68.75 £54.00 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.70 £73.60
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.29%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 +7 871 £500 - 198
North of England +17 386 £460 +2.91% 104
Midlands +7 245 £450 +9.09% 51
West Midlands +28 228 £450 -6.83% 27
South East -37 194 £459 -8.20% 150
North West 0 155 £475 +18.75% 51
Yorkshire +4 154 £491 -1.75% 36
South West +13 115 £450 +2.86% 54
East of England +20 87 £450 -1.91% 42
North East +9 87 £425 +6.25% 17
East Midlands -38 17 £425 +51.79% 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
1 166 (8.66%) Confluence
2 43 (2.24%) Apache Airflow
2 43 (2.24%) Apache Spark
3 38 (1.98%) SAS
4 19 (0.99%) Apache
5 17 (0.89%) SharePoint
6 13 (0.68%) CMS
7 7 (0.37%) Camunda
7 7 (0.37%) WebLogic
8 5 (0.26%) Appian
8 5 (0.26%) nginx
8 5 (0.26%) Tomcat
9 4 (0.21%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.16%) Kentico
11 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
11 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
11 2 (0.10%) Mule
12 1 (0.052%) Mendix
Applications
1 27 (1.41%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.78%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.52%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (0.42%) MS Visio
5 7 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 4 (0.21%) Simulink
6 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.052%) Mingle
7 1 (0.052%) SOLIDWORKS
7 1 (0.052%) Trello
Business Applications
1 23 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.89%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.63%) 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 4 (0.21%) Loan IQ
9 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
9 3 (0.16%) 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
11 1 (0.052%) IntelliMatch
Cloud Services
1 544 (28.39%) AWS
2 535 (27.92%) Azure
3 329 (17.17%) GitHub
4 242 (12.63%) Azure DevOps
5 204 (10.65%) GitHub Actions
6 138 (7.20%) Serverless
7 131 (6.84%) GCP
8 97 (5.06%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (4.44%) Amazon S3
10 76 (3.97%) Power Platform
11 62 (3.24%) OpenShift
12 56 (2.92%) Amazon ECS
13 53 (2.77%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 44 (2.30%) dbt
15 43 (2.24%) Amazon EC2
16 41 (2.14%) Azure Data Factory
17 37 (1.93%) Snowflake
18 33 (1.72%) Amazon EKS
19 32 (1.67%) AWS CloudFormation
20 31 (1.62%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 18 (0.94%) Firewall
2 16 (0.84%) HTTP
3 15 (0.78%) SAN
4 11 (0.57%) WAN
5 9 (0.47%) 4G
5 9 (0.47%) 5G
5 9 (0.47%) MPLS
5 9 (0.47%) Network Security
6 8 (0.42%) 2G
6 8 (0.42%) 3G
6 8 (0.42%) Diameter Protocol
6 8 (0.42%) SIGTRAN
6 8 (0.42%) SS7
7 7 (0.37%) VPN
8 6 (0.31%) BGP
8 6 (0.31%) Ethernet
8 6 (0.31%) LAN
8 6 (0.31%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
9 5 (0.26%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 105 (5.48%) PostgreSQL
2 102 (5.32%) Data Warehouse
3 89 (4.65%) MongoDB
4 83 (4.33%) NoSQL
5 77 (4.02%) SQL Server
6 61 (3.18%) Power BI
7 60 (3.13%) Relational Database
8 45 (2.35%) DynamoDB
9 35 (1.83%) Oracle Reports
10 32 (1.67%) Pentaho
11 30 (1.57%) Amazon Athena
12 29 (1.51%) Big Data
13 28 (1.46%) Amazon RDS
14 26 (1.36%) Metadata
15 25 (1.30%) Data Lake
16 23 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
16 23 (1.20%) Redis
17 21 (1.10%) Oracle Database
18 19 (0.99%) MySQL
18 19 (0.99%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 352 (18.37%) JIRA
2 346 (18.06%) Git
3 305 (15.92%) Jenkins
4 258 (13.47%) GitLab
5 243 (12.68%) Selenium
6 137 (7.15%) Postman
7 133 (6.94%) Cucumber
8 100 (5.22%) JUnit
9 99 (5.17%) REST Assured
10 96 (5.01%) Cypress.io
11 79 (4.12%) JMeter
12 59 (3.08%) Zephyr
13 54 (2.82%) WebDriver
14 52 (2.71%) SonarQube
15 45 (2.35%) Gradle
16 44 (2.30%) Gatling
17 38 (1.98%) Bitbucket
18 35 (1.83%) Mockito
19 33 (1.72%) Maven
20 28 (1.46%) SpecFlow
General
1 519 (27.09%) Social Skills
2 365 (19.05%) Finance
3 256 (13.36%) Analytical Skills
4 232 (12.11%) Public Sector
5 162 (8.46%) Banking
6 54 (2.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 42 (2.19%) Documentation Skills
8 29 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
8 29 (1.51%) Investment Banking
9 28 (1.46%) Retail
10 27 (1.41%) Front Office
11 26 (1.36%) Telecoms
12 22 (1.15%) Financial Institution
13 20 (1.04%) Military
14 18 (0.94%) Aerospace
15 16 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
16 15 (0.78%) Legal
17 14 (0.73%) Automotive
17 14 (0.73%) Back Office
18 13 (0.68%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 382 (19.94%) Developer
2 309 (16.13%) Senior
3 210 (10.96%) Lead
4 195 (10.18%) Test Engineer
5 190 (9.92%) Tester
6 133 (6.94%) Data Engineer
7 122 (6.37%) Java Developer
8 108 (5.64%) Software Engineer
9 102 (5.32%) Analyst
10 86 (4.49%) Architect
11 85 (4.44%) DevOps Engineer
11 85 (4.44%) Senior Developer
12 83 (4.33%) QA Engineer
13 82 (4.28%) Test Automation Engineer
14 74 (3.86%) Test Leader
15 67 (3.50%) Automation Tester
16 60 (3.13%) Test Analyst
17 59 (3.08%) Full-Stack Developer
18 54 (2.82%) Automation Engineer
19 48 (2.51%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 221 (11.53%) REST
2 210 (10.96%) Playwright
3 181 (9.45%) React
4 156 (8.14%) Spring
5 152 (7.93%) RESTful
6 148 (7.72%) Kafka
7 127 (6.63%) .NET
8 124 (6.47%) Spring Boot
9 98 (5.11%) Node.js
10 83 (4.33%) AngularJS
11 74 (3.86%) HTML
12 71 (3.71%) CSS
13 47 (2.45%) OAuth
14 45 (2.35%) pytest
15 42 (2.19%) Jest
16 40 (2.09%) Quarkus
17 38 (1.98%) .NET Framework
17 38 (1.98%) Gherkin
17 38 (1.98%) GraphQL
17 38 (1.98%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 256 (13.36%) Cloud Native
2 132 (6.89%) Product Ownership
3 130 (6.78%) Distributed Systems
4 60 (3.13%) Enterprise Software
5 54 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
6 50 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
7 43 (2.24%) Onboarding
7 43 (2.24%) Self-Motivation
8 41 (2.14%) Mobile App
9 38 (1.98%) Virtual Team
10 31 (1.62%) Distributed Architecture
11 28 (1.46%) AI Agents
12 27 (1.41%) Embedded Systems
12 27 (1.41%) Security Posture
13 23 (1.20%) Management Information System
14 20 (1.04%) Fixed Income
14 20 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
15 19 (0.99%) Algorithms
16 17 (0.89%) Data Structures
17 15 (0.78%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 115 (6.00%) Linux
2 70 (3.65%) Windows
3 58 (3.03%) Unix
4 40 (2.09%) Android
5 39 (2.04%) Apple iOS
6 22 (1.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 14 (0.73%) Mac OS X
8 13 (0.68%) Windows Server
9 7 (0.37%) Mac OS
9 7 (0.37%) 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 (0.16%) AIX
13 3 (0.16%) Windows Server 2016
14 2 (0.10%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,085 (56.63%) CI/CD
2 888 (46.35%) Agile
3 693 (36.17%) DevOps
4 360 (18.79%) Problem-Solving
5 349 (18.22%) Microservices
6 337 (17.59%) Continuous Improvement
7 313 (16.34%) Software Engineering
8 303 (15.81%) Scrum
9 294 (15.34%) Test Strategy
10 289 (15.08%) Validation
11 278 (14.51%) Infrastructure as Code
12 263 (13.73%) AI
13 243 (12.68%) TDD
14 239 (12.47%) Containerisation
15 235 (12.27%) Observability
16 205 (10.70%) ETL
17 203 (10.59%) Software Testing
18 197 (10.28%) End-to-End Testing
19 195 (10.18%) Data Pipeline
20 186 (9.71%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 478 (24.95%) Python
2 475 (24.79%) Java
3 450 (23.49%) SQL
4 238 (12.42%) JavaScript
5 216 (11.27%) TypeScript
6 173 (9.03%) C#
7 68 (3.55%) PowerShell
8 63 (3.29%) Bash
9 49 (2.56%) Kotlin
10 42 (2.19%) C++
11 33 (1.72%) Bicep
11 33 (1.72%) C
12 30 (1.57%) Go
13 29 (1.51%) Apex Code
14 27 (1.41%) PL/SQL
15 26 (1.36%) Scala
16 23 (1.20%) Swift
17 18 (0.94%) Ruby
18 15 (0.78%) Groovy
19 11 (0.57%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 587 (30.64%) Security Cleared
2 482 (25.16%) SC Cleared
3 89 (4.65%) Degree
4 87 (4.54%) ISTQB
5 64 (3.34%) BPSS Clearance
6 62 (3.24%) DV Cleared
7 44 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
8 24 (1.25%) AWS Certification
9 21 (1.10%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 15 (0.78%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 13 (0.68%) Master's Degree
12 12 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.57%) Azure Certification
13 11 (0.57%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.57%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.52%) CCNP
15 8 (0.42%) CISSP
16 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
17 6 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 5 (0.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 461 (24.06%) QA
2 147 (7.67%) Accessibility
3 129 (6.73%) Data Quality
4 71 (3.71%) WCAG
5 35 (1.83%) GDPR
6 12 (0.63%) NCSC
7 10 (0.52%) Def Stans
8 9 (0.47%) ISO 20022
8 9 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 9 (0.47%) NIST
9 6 (0.31%) SLA
10 5 (0.26%) FATCA
10 5 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
11 4 (0.21%) GRC
11 4 (0.21%) HL7
11 4 (0.21%) PCI DSS
12 3 (0.16%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 3 (0.16%) MiFID
12 3 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 3 (0.16%) SEPA
System Software
1 335 (17.48%) Docker
2 26 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (0.78%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.73%) Firmware
4 14 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.26%) VMware ESXi
6 4 (0.21%) Oracle RAC
6 4 (0.21%) Virtual Desktop
7 2 (0.10%) SRDF
8 1 (0.052%) Hyper-V
8 1 (0.052%) Virtual Servers
8 1 (0.052%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 346 (18.06%) Kubernetes
2 244 (12.73%) Terraform
3 103 (5.38%) Ansible
4 101 (5.27%) Grafana
5 86 (4.49%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.88%) Argo
7 15 (0.78%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.73%) Puppet
9 12 (0.63%) Kibana
10 10 (0.52%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.52%) HP Quality Center
10 10 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
11 8 (0.42%) Progress Chef
12 7 (0.37%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.31%) NetBackup
14 5 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 5 (0.26%) Istio
14 5 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
15 4 (0.21%) Control-M
15 4 (0.21%) Rancher
Vendors
1 179 (9.34%) Microsoft
2 146 (7.62%) Oracle
3 84 (4.38%) Salesforce
4 67 (3.50%) Databricks
5 55 (2.87%) Red Hat
6 54 (2.82%) Talend
7 53 (2.77%) Splunk
8 51 (2.66%) Google
9 40 (2.09%) ServiceNow
10 35 (1.83%) Denodo
11 33 (1.72%) Informatica
12 28 (1.46%) UiPath
13 27 (1.41%) IBM
13 27 (1.41%) VMware
14 26 (1.36%) Dynatrace
14 26 (1.36%) SAP
15 21 (1.10%) Cisco
16 18 (0.94%) HP
17 13 (0.68%) Fortinet
18 11 (0.57%) Blue Prism