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

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 48 53 47
Rank change year-on-year +5 -6 +6
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,031 1,234 1,340
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.37% 4.44% 4.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.16% 4.89% 4.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,286 835 904
10th Percentile £320 £313 £350
25th Percentile £406 £385 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -2.44% -5.09%
75th Percentile £575 £598 £600
90th Percentile £670 £700 £721
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 103 36 16
10th Percentile £40.00 £41.67 £41.25
25th Percentile £57.63 £50.00 £49.38
Median hourly rate £68.22 £57.50 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +18.63% - -23.33%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £72.53
90th Percentile £75.00 £71.75 £85.00
UK median hourly rate £70.00 £56.25 £57.50
% change year-on-year +24.44% -2.17% -20.69%

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 39,349 25,238 28,145
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.76% 90.90% 86.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,108 16,041 17,545
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £405 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £638 £625 £645
90th Percentile £738 £738 £750
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,747 1,497 1,306
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.38 £14.92
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.87 £20.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -1.91%
75th Percentile £68.00 £49.75 £66.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +1.18%

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 17 September 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 17 September 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 17 September 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 +5 914 £500 - 1,757
North of England +5 410 £459 -0.27% 485
Midlands +8 254 £450 -2.70% 208
West Midlands +15 239 £459 -11.48% 134
South East -12 235 £450 -10.00% 446
Yorkshire -12 170 £475 -5.09% 141
North West -11 139 £492 +15.79% 281
South West -1 114 £456 -15.12% 276
North East +12 108 £425 -4.49% 64
East of England +13 85 £425 +24.09% 229
East Midlands -36 15 £418 +19.29% 73
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 (8.57%) Confluence
2 55 (2.71%) Apache Airflow
3 41 (2.02%) SharePoint
4 39 (1.92%) Apache Spark
5 31 (1.53%) SAS
6 23 (1.13%) Apache
7 15 (0.74%) CMS
8 12 (0.59%) Camunda
9 10 (0.49%) WebLogic
10 7 (0.34%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 6 (0.30%) Microsoft Exchange
12 5 (0.25%) OpenStack
13 4 (0.20%) Jupyter
13 4 (0.20%) nginx
13 4 (0.20%) Oracle Workflow
13 4 (0.20%) Palantir Foundry
13 4 (0.20%) Tomcat
14 3 (0.15%) Kentico
15 2 (0.098%) Anypoint
15 2 (0.098%) Mule
Applications
1 23 (1.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (0.30%) Chatbot
3 6 (0.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 4 (0.20%) MS Visio
5 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Project
5 3 (0.15%) Simulink
5 3 (0.15%) Trello
6 2 (0.098%) Mingle
6 2 (0.098%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 27 (1.33%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.89%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.64%) Payment Gateway
4 9 (0.44%) Aladdin
5 7 (0.34%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.30%) Findur
6 6 (0.30%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
7 5 (0.25%) SAP GRC
8 3 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
8 3 (0.15%) SAP MDG
9 2 (0.098%) BambooHR
9 2 (0.098%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.098%) Shopify
10 1 (0.049%) FLEXCUBE
10 1 (0.049%) Misys Equation
10 1 (0.049%) SAP LE
10 1 (0.049%) SAP QM
10 1 (0.049%) Summit
10 1 (0.049%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 619 (30.48%) AWS
2 597 (29.39%) Azure
3 341 (16.79%) GitHub
4 276 (13.59%) Azure DevOps
5 210 (10.34%) GitHub Actions
6 159 (7.83%) Serverless
7 151 (7.43%) GCP
8 118 (5.81%) AWS Lambda
9 97 (4.78%) Power Platform
10 88 (4.33%) Amazon S3
11 78 (3.84%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 69 (3.40%) OpenShift
13 64 (3.15%) Amazon ECS
14 59 (2.90%) GitHub Copilot
15 57 (2.81%) Amazon EKS
16 56 (2.76%) dbt
17 51 (2.51%) Snowflake
18 45 (2.22%) AWS CloudFormation
19 41 (2.02%) Amazon EC2
19 41 (2.02%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.18%) HTTP
2 22 (1.08%) 4G
3 21 (1.03%) DNS
3 21 (1.03%) Firewall
4 20 (0.98%) 5G
5 19 (0.94%) TCP/IP
6 16 (0.79%) 2G
6 16 (0.79%) 3G
6 16 (0.79%) Diameter Protocol
6 16 (0.79%) SIGTRAN
6 16 (0.79%) SS7
7 15 (0.74%) Network Security
7 15 (0.74%) Wi-Fi
8 13 (0.64%) WAN
9 12 (0.59%) BGP
9 12 (0.59%) LAN
10 11 (0.54%) Broadband
10 11 (0.54%) Ethernet VPN
10 11 (0.54%) VXLAN
11 10 (0.49%) DHCP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
2 110 (5.42%) Data Warehouse
3 99 (4.87%) NoSQL
4 92 (4.53%) MongoDB
5 91 (4.48%) Relational Database
6 88 (4.33%) SQL Server
7 79 (3.89%) Power BI
8 40 (1.97%) DynamoDB
9 37 (1.82%) Data Lake
10 36 (1.77%) Metadata
11 34 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
12 31 (1.53%) Big Data
13 30 (1.48%) Pentaho
14 28 (1.38%) Amazon Athena
15 27 (1.33%) Amazon Redshift
15 27 (1.33%) MySQL
15 27 (1.33%) Redis
16 25 (1.23%) Amazon RDS
17 24 (1.18%) Oracle Database
18 19 (0.94%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 446 (21.96%) Git
2 345 (16.99%) JIRA
3 323 (15.90%) Jenkins
4 279 (13.74%) GitLab
5 254 (12.51%) Selenium
6 135 (6.65%) Cucumber
7 134 (6.60%) Postman
8 114 (5.61%) JUnit
9 99 (4.87%) Cypress.io
10 90 (4.43%) REST Assured
11 83 (4.09%) SonarQube
12 75 (3.69%) JMeter
13 60 (2.95%) Zephyr
14 58 (2.86%) Gatling
15 52 (2.56%) Maven
16 51 (2.51%) Gradle
17 44 (2.17%) Mockito
18 43 (2.12%) WebDriver
19 36 (1.77%) Bitbucket
20 24 (1.18%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 567 (27.92%) Social Skills
2 388 (19.10%) Finance
3 301 (14.82%) Analytical Skills
4 255 (12.56%) Public Sector
5 186 (9.16%) Banking
6 70 (3.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (2.22%) Telecoms
8 33 (1.62%) Front Office
8 33 (1.62%) Retail
9 28 (1.38%) Documentation Skills
9 28 (1.38%) Influencing Skills
10 27 (1.33%) Investment Banking
11 26 (1.28%) Military
12 20 (0.98%) Financial Institution
13 19 (0.94%) Aerospace
14 18 (0.89%) Law
14 18 (0.89%) Marketing
15 17 (0.84%) Manufacturing
16 14 (0.69%) Automotive
16 14 (0.69%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 439 (21.61%) Developer
2 326 (16.05%) Senior
3 196 (9.65%) Lead
4 195 (9.60%) Test Engineer
5 150 (7.39%) Tester
6 136 (6.70%) Java Developer
7 128 (6.30%) Data Engineer
8 124 (6.11%) Software Engineer
9 111 (5.47%) Analyst
10 98 (4.83%) DevOps Engineer
11 95 (4.68%) Senior Developer
12 92 (4.53%) QA Engineer
13 88 (4.33%) Test Automation Engineer
14 87 (4.28%) Architect
15 74 (3.64%) Full-Stack Developer
16 68 (3.35%) Test Analyst
17 67 (3.30%) Automation Engineer
17 67 (3.30%) Java Engineer
18 65 (3.20%) Test Leader
19 61 (3.00%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 320 (15.76%) REST
2 294 (14.48%) Terraform
3 229 (11.28%) Playwright
4 212 (10.44%) RESTful
5 205 (10.09%) Kafka
6 194 (9.55%) Spring
7 192 (9.45%) React
8 165 (8.12%) Spring Boot
9 149 (7.34%) .NET
10 128 (6.30%) HTML
11 113 (5.56%) Node.js
12 110 (5.42%) CSS
13 99 (4.87%) AngularJS
14 66 (3.25%) OAuth
15 58 (2.86%) JSON
16 52 (2.56%) SOAP
17 50 (2.46%) PySpark
17 50 (2.46%) pytest
17 50 (2.46%) XML
18 49 (2.41%) Next.js
Miscellaneous
1 322 (15.85%) Cloud Native
2 168 (8.27%) Product Ownership
3 150 (7.39%) Distributed Systems
4 83 (4.09%) Enterprise Software
5 62 (3.05%) Onboarding
6 56 (2.76%) AI Agents
7 50 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
7 50 (2.46%) Self-Motivation
8 48 (2.36%) Data Protection Act
9 40 (1.97%) Mobile App
10 34 (1.67%) Virtual Team
11 27 (1.33%) Security Posture
12 26 (1.28%) Data Structures
13 21 (1.03%) Embedded Systems
13 21 (1.03%) Management Information System
14 20 (0.98%) Data Centre
15 16 (0.79%) Distributed Architecture
15 16 (0.79%) Fixed Income
16 15 (0.74%) Legacy Applications
16 15 (0.74%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 141 (6.94%) Linux
2 90 (4.43%) Windows
3 81 (3.99%) Unix
4 38 (1.87%) Apple iOS
5 36 (1.77%) Android
6 29 (1.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 21 (1.03%) Windows Server
8 6 (0.30%) VMS
9 5 (0.25%) Mac OS X
9 5 (0.25%) Solaris
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 10
9 5 (0.25%) Windows 7
9 5 (0.25%) Windows Server 2003
10 4 (0.20%) Embedded Linux
10 4 (0.20%) Ubuntu
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 (0.098%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,228 (60.46%) CI/CD
2 983 (48.40%) Agile
3 758 (37.32%) DevOps
4 410 (20.19%) Problem-Solving
5 407 (20.04%) Continuous Improvement
6 403 (19.84%) Software Engineering
7 398 (19.60%) Microservices
8 353 (17.38%) Scrum
9 352 (17.33%) Infrastructure as Code
10 349 (17.18%) Validation
11 337 (16.59%) AI
12 312 (15.36%) Test Strategy
13 301 (14.82%) Containerisation
14 272 (13.39%) Observability
15 268 (13.20%) SDLC
16 257 (12.65%) TDD
17 249 (12.26%) Software Testing
18 230 (11.32%) Stakeholder Management
19 220 (10.83%) End-to-End Testing
20 199 (9.80%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 560 (27.57%) Python
2 555 (27.33%) Java
3 504 (24.82%) SQL
4 298 (14.67%) JavaScript
5 233 (11.47%) TypeScript
6 169 (8.32%) C#
7 89 (4.38%) PowerShell
8 77 (3.79%) Bash
9 46 (2.26%) Bicep
10 45 (2.22%) Kotlin
11 34 (1.67%) C++
12 31 (1.53%) Scala
13 29 (1.43%) Go
14 25 (1.23%) PL/SQL
15 22 (1.08%) Apex Code
16 21 (1.03%) C
17 20 (0.98%) Shell Script
18 16 (0.79%) Groovy
19 15 (0.74%) Ruby
19 15 (0.74%) Swift
Qualifications
1 653 (32.15%) Security Cleared
2 547 (26.93%) SC Cleared
3 114 (5.61%) Degree
4 91 (4.48%) ISTQB
5 80 (3.94%) DV Cleared
6 70 (3.45%) BPSS Clearance
7 62 (3.05%) Computer Science Degree
8 36 (1.77%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 23 (1.13%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.74%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 14 (0.69%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 13 (0.64%) Master's Degree
14 12 (0.59%) ISEB
15 10 (0.49%) Microsoft Certification
16 9 (0.44%) Cisco Certification
16 9 (0.44%) CISSP
16 9 (0.44%) SAFe Agilist
17 8 (0.39%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 7 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 554 (27.28%) QA
2 166 (8.17%) Accessibility
3 137 (6.75%) Data Quality
4 93 (4.58%) WCAG
5 39 (1.92%) GDPR
6 18 (0.89%) ISO 20022
7 13 (0.64%) NCSC
8 12 (0.59%) SLA
9 11 (0.54%) GRC
9 11 (0.54%) NIST
10 10 (0.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 7 (0.34%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.34%) Software Quality Assurance
12 5 (0.25%) FATCA
12 5 (0.25%) PCI DSS
13 4 (0.20%) HL7
13 4 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 4 (0.20%) SEPA
14 3 (0.15%) Def Stans
14 3 (0.15%) SOC 2
System Software
1 407 (20.04%) Docker
2 34 (1.67%) Active Directory
3 30 (1.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 18 (0.89%) Virtual Machines
5 11 (0.54%) Firmware
6 7 (0.34%) VMware NSX
7 4 (0.20%) VMware ESXi
8 3 (0.15%) Hyper-V
8 3 (0.15%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.049%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.049%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 397 (19.55%) Kubernetes
2 114 (5.61%) Ansible
3 109 (5.37%) Grafana
4 83 (4.09%) Prometheus
5 39 (1.92%) Argo
6 21 (1.03%) Progress Chef
6 21 (1.03%) Puppet
7 16 (0.79%) Kibana
8 13 (0.64%) HP ALM
8 13 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
9 11 (0.54%) Control-M
10 7 (0.34%) Kustomize
10 7 (0.34%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.30%) Dell DRAC
12 5 (0.25%) HP Fortify
12 5 (0.25%) Istio
12 5 (0.25%) Packer
12 5 (0.25%) SCCM
13 4 (0.20%) Rancher
13 4 (0.20%) WMI
Vendors
1 206 (10.14%) Microsoft
2 153 (7.53%) Oracle
3 86 (4.23%) Databricks
4 67 (3.30%) Salesforce
5 66 (3.25%) Google
6 59 (2.90%) Red Hat
7 51 (2.51%) IBM
8 49 (2.41%) ServiceNow
9 48 (2.36%) Splunk
10 47 (2.31%) Talend
11 40 (1.97%) SAP
12 39 (1.92%) Dynatrace
13 37 (1.82%) Denodo
13 37 (1.82%) VMware
14 33 (1.62%) Cisco
14 33 (1.62%) Informatica
15 29 (1.43%) UiPath
16 17 (0.84%) HP
17 15 (0.74%) Foundry
18 14 (0.69%) OpenAI