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

6 months to
24 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 1,914 1,208 1,346
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.26% 4.41% 3.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.99% 4.87% 4.48%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,219 831 895
10th Percentile £324 £313 £363
25th Percentile £406 £380 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -9.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £663 £706 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £475 £520
% change year-on-year - -8.65% -0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 30 35
10th Percentile £40.00 £40.26 £47.70
25th Percentile £60.42 £44.63 £51.88
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -26.67%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.88 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.80 £75.25 £76.30
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +35.00% -11.11% -19.50%

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 38,365 24,818 30,014
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.35% 90.70% 85.85%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,059 15,915 19,627
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £633 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.46%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,375 1,336 1,933
10th Percentile £15.38 £14.23 £13.60
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.98 £17.25
Median hourly rate £47.00 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +86.88% -37.13% -8.32%
75th Percentile £69.63 £52.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.35 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -6.98%

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 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 24 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 24 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 +5 867 £500 - 319
North of England +17 387 £465 +3.68% 146
Midlands +6 252 £449 +9.06% 71
West Midlands +29 234 £450 -2.70% 40
South East -32 199 £459 -8.20% 160
Yorkshire +5 154 £500 +5.26% 39
North West -5 148 £489 +21.58% 80
South West +1 112 £463 +7.25% 89
North East +12 95 £425 +6.25% 30
East of England +18 81 £450 - 62
East Midlands -38 18 £425 +30.37% 31
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
1 174 (9.09%) Confluence
2 43 (2.25%) Apache Airflow
2 43 (2.25%) Apache Spark
3 39 (2.04%) SAS
4 25 (1.31%) SharePoint
5 20 (1.04%) Apache
6 13 (0.68%) CMS
7 11 (0.57%) WebLogic
8 5 (0.26%) Camunda
8 5 (0.26%) Microsoft Exchange
8 5 (0.26%) nginx
8 5 (0.26%) Tomcat
9 4 (0.21%) Appian
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%) Mule
12 1 (0.052%) Mendix
Applications
1 21 (1.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.84%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 8 (0.42%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.21%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.21%) Simulink
5 4 (0.21%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.10%) Trello
7 1 (0.052%) Mingle
7 1 (0.052%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 24 (1.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.89%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.63%) Payment Gateway
4 11 (0.57%) SAP S/4HANA
5 9 (0.47%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.42%) Findur
7 6 (0.31%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.31%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.31%) Shopify
8 5 (0.26%) BambooHR
9 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
9 3 (0.16%) Loan IQ
10 2 (0.10%) Infor CloudSuite
10 2 (0.10%) Infor LN
10 2 (0.10%) Infor M3
10 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS R12
10 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
10 2 (0.10%) Summit
11 1 (0.052%) Cloudability
Cloud Services
1 549 (28.68%) AWS
2 543 (28.37%) Azure
3 330 (17.24%) GitHub
4 247 (12.90%) Azure DevOps
5 209 (10.92%) GitHub Actions
6 143 (7.47%) Serverless
7 133 (6.95%) GCP
8 100 (5.22%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (4.44%) Amazon S3
10 81 (4.23%) Power Platform
11 63 (3.29%) OpenShift
12 62 (3.24%) Amazon ECS
13 57 (2.98%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 45 (2.35%) dbt
15 43 (2.25%) Amazon EC2
16 42 (2.19%) Azure Data Factory
17 40 (2.09%) Amazon EKS
18 39 (2.04%) Snowflake
19 37 (1.93%) GitHub Copilot
20 36 (1.88%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.15%) Firewall
2 16 (0.84%) HTTP
3 15 (0.78%) Network Security
3 15 (0.78%) SAN
4 12 (0.63%) 2G
4 12 (0.63%) 3G
4 12 (0.63%) 4G
4 12 (0.63%) Diameter Protocol
4 12 (0.63%) SIGTRAN
4 12 (0.63%) SS7
4 12 (0.63%) WAN
5 11 (0.57%) 5G
6 9 (0.47%) LAN
6 9 (0.47%) TCP/IP
7 8 (0.42%) VPN
7 8 (0.42%) Wi-Fi
8 7 (0.37%) BGP
8 7 (0.37%) DNS
8 7 (0.37%) MPLS
9 6 (0.31%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 110 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
2 107 (5.59%) Data Warehouse
3 93 (4.86%) NoSQL
4 91 (4.75%) MongoDB
5 78 (4.08%) SQL Server
6 66 (3.45%) Power BI
7 59 (3.08%) Relational Database
8 48 (2.51%) DynamoDB
9 37 (1.93%) Oracle Reports
10 33 (1.72%) Pentaho
11 29 (1.52%) Amazon Athena
12 28 (1.46%) Big Data
12 28 (1.46%) Data Lake
13 27 (1.41%) Amazon RDS
13 27 (1.41%) Metadata
14 23 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
14 23 (1.20%) Redis
15 22 (1.15%) MySQL
16 21 (1.10%) Oracle Database
17 18 (0.94%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 358 (18.70%) JIRA
2 351 (18.34%) Git
3 306 (15.99%) Jenkins
4 248 (12.96%) GitLab
5 236 (12.33%) Selenium
6 133 (6.95%) Cucumber
7 129 (6.74%) Postman
8 95 (4.96%) JUnit
8 95 (4.96%) REST Assured
9 93 (4.86%) Cypress.io
10 77 (4.02%) JMeter
11 64 (3.34%) Zephyr
12 54 (2.82%) SonarQube
13 51 (2.66%) WebDriver
14 46 (2.40%) Gatling
15 43 (2.25%) Gradle
16 40 (2.09%) Bitbucket
17 34 (1.78%) Maven
17 34 (1.78%) Mockito
18 27 (1.41%) SpecFlow
General
1 525 (27.43%) Social Skills
2 368 (19.23%) Finance
3 251 (13.11%) Analytical Skills
4 240 (12.54%) Public Sector
5 164 (8.57%) Banking
6 54 (2.82%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 39 (2.04%) Documentation Skills
8 31 (1.62%) Influencing Skills
9 30 (1.57%) Telecoms
10 29 (1.52%) Retail
11 28 (1.46%) Front Office
11 28 (1.46%) Investment Banking
12 23 (1.20%) Military
13 21 (1.10%) Financial Institution
14 18 (0.94%) Aerospace
15 16 (0.84%) Organisational Skills
16 15 (0.78%) Legal
17 14 (0.73%) Back Office
18 13 (0.68%) Automotive
19 12 (0.63%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 391 (20.43%) Developer
2 312 (16.30%) Senior
3 210 (10.97%) Lead
4 190 (9.93%) Test Engineer
5 184 (9.61%) Tester
6 133 (6.95%) Data Engineer
7 125 (6.53%) Java Developer
8 108 (5.64%) Software Engineer
9 103 (5.38%) Analyst
10 89 (4.65%) Senior Developer
11 88 (4.60%) Architect
11 88 (4.60%) DevOps Engineer
12 81 (4.23%) QA Engineer
13 80 (4.18%) Test Automation Engineer
14 73 (3.81%) Test Leader
15 66 (3.45%) Automation Tester
16 65 (3.40%) Full-Stack Developer
16 65 (3.40%) Test Analyst
17 55 (2.87%) Automation Engineer
18 50 (2.61%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 235 (12.28%) REST
2 209 (10.92%) Playwright
3 172 (8.99%) React
4 161 (8.41%) RESTful
5 156 (8.15%) Spring
6 154 (8.05%) Kafka
7 133 (6.95%) .NET
8 126 (6.58%) Spring Boot
9 99 (5.17%) Node.js
10 82 (4.28%) AngularJS
11 76 (3.97%) HTML
12 74 (3.87%) CSS
13 55 (2.87%) OAuth
14 45 (2.35%) .NET Framework
15 43 (2.25%) pytest
16 42 (2.19%) Jest
16 42 (2.19%) Quarkus
17 41 (2.14%) HTML5
18 40 (2.09%) .NET Core
19 39 (2.04%) Gherkin
Miscellaneous
1 268 (14.00%) Cloud Native
2 136 (7.11%) Distributed Systems
3 135 (7.05%) Product Ownership
4 64 (3.34%) Enterprise Software
5 57 (2.98%) Legacy Systems
6 50 (2.61%) Data Protection Act
7 46 (2.40%) Self-Motivation
8 44 (2.30%) Onboarding
9 37 (1.93%) Mobile App
10 31 (1.62%) AI Agents
11 30 (1.57%) Distributed Architecture
11 30 (1.57%) Virtual Team
12 28 (1.46%) Security Posture
13 27 (1.41%) Embedded Systems
14 22 (1.15%) Management Information System
15 21 (1.10%) Fixed Income
16 20 (1.04%) Algorithms
17 19 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
18 18 (0.94%) Data Structures
19 17 (0.89%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 119 (6.22%) Linux
2 74 (3.87%) Windows
3 61 (3.19%) Unix
4 38 (1.99%) Android
4 38 (1.99%) Apple iOS
5 23 (1.20%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 17 (0.89%) Windows Server
7 14 (0.73%) Mac OS X
8 7 (0.37%) Mac OS
8 7 (0.37%) 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 1,096 (57.26%) CI/CD
2 903 (47.18%) Agile
3 702 (36.68%) DevOps
4 365 (19.07%) Problem-Solving
5 362 (18.91%) Microservices
6 350 (18.29%) Continuous Improvement
7 319 (16.67%) Software Engineering
8 312 (16.30%) Scrum
9 293 (15.31%) Test Strategy
9 293 (15.31%) Validation
10 289 (15.10%) Infrastructure as Code
11 273 (14.26%) AI
12 249 (13.01%) Containerisation
13 246 (12.85%) Observability
14 245 (12.80%) TDD
15 210 (10.97%) ETL
16 199 (10.40%) SDLC
17 197 (10.29%) Data Pipeline
18 196 (10.24%) Software Testing
19 193 (10.08%) End-to-End Testing
Programming Languages
1 480 (25.08%) Python
2 477 (24.92%) Java
3 458 (23.93%) SQL
4 230 (12.02%) JavaScript
5 206 (10.76%) TypeScript
6 174 (9.09%) C#
7 73 (3.81%) PowerShell
8 65 (3.40%) Bash
9 49 (2.56%) Kotlin
10 39 (2.04%) Bicep
11 38 (1.99%) C++
12 28 (1.46%) C
13 27 (1.41%) Go
13 27 (1.41%) PL/SQL
14 25 (1.31%) Scala
15 24 (1.25%) Apex Code
16 22 (1.15%) Swift
17 18 (0.94%) Ruby
18 15 (0.78%) Groovy
19 13 (0.68%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 600 (31.35%) Security Cleared
2 497 (25.97%) SC Cleared
3 89 (4.65%) Degree
4 85 (4.44%) ISTQB
5 62 (3.24%) BPSS Clearance
6 59 (3.08%) DV Cleared
7 43 (2.25%) Computer Science Degree
8 26 (1.36%) AWS Certification
9 22 (1.15%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 16 (0.84%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.78%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 13 (0.68%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.57%) CCNP
13 11 (0.57%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.57%) Master's Degree
13 11 (0.57%) SAFe Agilist
14 8 (0.42%) CISSP
15 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
15 7 (0.37%) Microsoft Certification
16 6 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 472 (24.66%) QA
2 144 (7.52%) Accessibility
3 130 (6.79%) Data Quality
4 70 (3.66%) WCAG
5 36 (1.88%) GDPR
6 13 (0.68%) NCSC
7 10 (0.52%) NIST
8 9 (0.47%) ISO 20022
8 9 (0.47%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 9 (0.47%) SLA
9 6 (0.31%) Def Stans
10 5 (0.26%) FATCA
10 5 (0.26%) GRC
10 5 (0.26%) PCI DSS
10 5 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
11 3 (0.16%) EU AI Act
11 3 (0.16%) HL7
11 3 (0.16%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 3 (0.16%) MiFID
11 3 (0.16%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 348 (18.18%) Docker
2 27 (1.41%) VMware Infrastructure
3 22 (1.15%) Active Directory
4 15 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.63%) 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
1 352 (18.39%) Kubernetes
2 256 (13.38%) Terraform
3 103 (5.38%) Ansible
4 101 (5.28%) Grafana
5 88 (4.60%) Prometheus
6 38 (1.99%) Argo
7 16 (0.84%) Puppet
8 13 (0.68%) HP ALM
9 12 (0.63%) Kibana
10 10 (0.52%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.52%) Progress Chef
10 10 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
11 7 (0.37%) HP Quality Center
11 7 (0.37%) Kustomize
12 6 (0.31%) NetBackup
13 5 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
13 5 (0.26%) Istio
13 5 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
14 4 (0.21%) Packer
14 4 (0.21%) Rancher
Vendors
1 183 (9.56%) Microsoft
2 153 (7.99%) Oracle
3 76 (3.97%) Salesforce
4 69 (3.61%) Databricks
5 57 (2.98%) Red Hat
6 53 (2.77%) Google
6 53 (2.77%) Talend
7 52 (2.72%) Splunk
8 37 (1.93%) ServiceNow
9 36 (1.88%) Denodo
10 32 (1.67%) Informatica
11 31 (1.62%) IBM
11 31 (1.62%) VMware
12 28 (1.46%) Dynatrace
12 28 (1.46%) SAP
13 27 (1.41%) UiPath
14 25 (1.31%) Cisco
15 19 (0.99%) HP
16 13 (0.68%) Fortinet
17 12 (0.63%) OpenAI