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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 51 51
Rank change year-on-year +4 0 +3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,917 1,211 1,364
As % of all contract jobs in England 4.27% 4.42% 3.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.01% 4.87% 4.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,220 834 905
10th Percentile £319 £313 £363
25th Percentile £406 £381 £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 £704 £738
UK median daily rate £475 £480 £520
% change year-on-year -1.04% -7.69% -0.95%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 30 40
10th Percentile £37.00 £40.26 £49.80
25th Percentile £60.33 £44.63 £52.50
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 £67.66
90th Percentile £74.20 £75.25 £74.80
UK median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -21.29%

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 38,301 24,864 30,650
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 85.33% 90.66% 85.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,041 15,953 19,995
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £421 £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 £745 £750
UK median daily rate £520 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.02%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,379 1,324 2,046
10th Percentile £15.33 £14.23 £13.22
25th Percentile £21.00 £17.88 £16.90
Median hourly rate £47.50 £25.15 £39.50
Median % change year-on-year +88.87% -36.33% -7.06%
75th Percentile £69.10 £53.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £83.00 £71.39 £73.75
UK median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 +4 873 £500 - 271
North of England +16 388 £463 +3.12% 119
Midlands +11 243 £450 +9.09% 51
West Midlands +24 226 £450 -6.83% 26
South East -37 197 £459 -8.20% 143
Yorkshire +2 154 £496 +1.79% 36
North West -1 152 £478 +18.91% 68
South West +3 116 £463 +5.71% 57
North East +11 92 £425 +7.59% 15
East of England +23 84 £450 -1.91% 50
East Midlands -41 17 £425 +40.26% 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
1 166 (8.66%) Confluence
2 43 (2.24%) Apache Airflow
2 43 (2.24%) Apache Spark
3 37 (1.93%) SAS
4 20 (1.04%) SharePoint
5 19 (0.99%) Apache
6 13 (0.68%) CMS
7 8 (0.42%) WebLogic
8 7 (0.37%) Camunda
9 5 (0.26%) nginx
9 5 (0.26%) Tomcat
10 4 (0.21%) Appian
10 4 (0.21%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.21%) Oracle Workflow
11 3 (0.16%) Kentico
12 2 (0.10%) Anypoint
12 2 (0.10%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.10%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.10%) Mule
13 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 2 (0.10%) Trello
8 1 (0.052%) Mingle
8 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 4 (0.21%) Loan IQ
10 3 (0.16%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.10%) Infor CloudSuite
11 2 (0.10%) Infor LN
11 2 (0.10%) Infor M3
11 2 (0.10%) Oracle EBS R12
11 2 (0.10%) Oracle ERP
11 2 (0.10%) SAP MDG
11 2 (0.10%) Summit
12 1 (0.052%) IntelliMatch
Cloud Services
1 544 (28.38%) AWS
2 536 (27.96%) Azure
3 331 (17.27%) GitHub
4 241 (12.57%) Azure DevOps
5 208 (10.85%) GitHub Actions
6 138 (7.20%) Serverless
7 132 (6.89%) GCP
8 96 (5.01%) AWS Lambda
9 84 (4.38%) Amazon S3
10 77 (4.02%) Power Platform
11 64 (3.34%) OpenShift
12 56 (2.92%) Amazon ECS
13 53 (2.76%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 45 (2.35%) dbt
15 43 (2.24%) Amazon EC2
16 41 (2.14%) Azure Data Factory
17 39 (2.03%) Snowflake
18 34 (1.77%) Amazon EKS
18 34 (1.77%) GitHub Copilot
19 32 (1.67%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 18 (0.94%) Firewall
2 16 (0.83%) HTTP
3 15 (0.78%) SAN
4 11 (0.57%) Network Security
5 10 (0.52%) 2G
5 10 (0.52%) 3G
5 10 (0.52%) 4G
5 10 (0.52%) 5G
5 10 (0.52%) Diameter Protocol
5 10 (0.52%) SIGTRAN
5 10 (0.52%) SS7
6 9 (0.47%) WAN
7 7 (0.37%) MPLS
7 7 (0.37%) VPN
8 6 (0.31%) BGP
8 6 (0.31%) LAN
8 6 (0.31%) Wi-Fi
8 6 (0.31%) Wireshark
9 5 (0.26%) Multicast
9 5 (0.26%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 106 (5.53%) PostgreSQL
2 104 (5.43%) Data Warehouse
3 91 (4.75%) MongoDB
4 85 (4.43%) NoSQL
5 76 (3.96%) SQL Server
6 62 (3.23%) Power BI
7 60 (3.13%) Relational Database
8 46 (2.40%) DynamoDB
9 36 (1.88%) Oracle Reports
10 31 (1.62%) Pentaho
11 30 (1.56%) Amazon Athena
12 28 (1.46%) Amazon RDS
12 28 (1.46%) Big Data
13 26 (1.36%) Data Lake
13 26 (1.36%) Metadata
14 23 (1.20%) Amazon Redshift
14 23 (1.20%) Redis
15 21 (1.10%) Oracle Database
16 20 (1.04%) MySQL
17 18 (0.94%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 350 (18.26%) JIRA
2 344 (17.94%) Git
3 302 (15.75%) Jenkins
4 253 (13.20%) GitLab
5 241 (12.57%) Selenium
6 135 (7.04%) Postman
7 134 (6.99%) Cucumber
8 98 (5.11%) REST Assured
9 96 (5.01%) JUnit
10 95 (4.96%) Cypress.io
11 79 (4.12%) JMeter
12 61 (3.18%) Zephyr
13 54 (2.82%) SonarQube
13 54 (2.82%) WebDriver
14 44 (2.30%) Gatling
15 42 (2.19%) Gradle
16 39 (2.03%) Bitbucket
17 35 (1.83%) Mockito
18 30 (1.56%) Maven
19 27 (1.41%) SpecFlow
General
1 523 (27.28%) Social Skills
2 364 (18.99%) Finance
3 256 (13.35%) Analytical Skills
4 231 (12.05%) Public Sector
5 164 (8.56%) Banking
6 55 (2.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 41 (2.14%) Documentation Skills
8 29 (1.51%) Front Office
8 29 (1.51%) Influencing Skills
8 29 (1.51%) Investment Banking
8 29 (1.51%) Retail
9 27 (1.41%) Telecoms
10 22 (1.15%) Financial Institution
11 20 (1.04%) Military
12 19 (0.99%) Aerospace
13 16 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
14 15 (0.78%) Legal
15 14 (0.73%) Automotive
15 14 (0.73%) Back Office
16 13 (0.68%) Electronics
Job Titles
1 386 (20.14%) Developer
2 310 (16.17%) Senior
3 211 (11.01%) Lead
4 191 (9.96%) Test Engineer
5 189 (9.86%) Tester
6 133 (6.94%) Data Engineer
7 125 (6.52%) Java Developer
8 112 (5.84%) Software Engineer
9 102 (5.32%) Analyst
10 87 (4.54%) Architect
11 86 (4.49%) DevOps Engineer
11 86 (4.49%) Senior Developer
12 82 (4.28%) QA Engineer
12 82 (4.28%) Test Automation Engineer
13 75 (3.91%) Test Leader
14 68 (3.55%) Automation Tester
15 61 (3.18%) Test Analyst
16 60 (3.13%) Full-Stack Developer
17 53 (2.76%) Automation Engineer
18 47 (2.45%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (11.42%) REST
2 210 (10.95%) Playwright
3 176 (9.18%) React
4 157 (8.19%) RESTful
4 157 (8.19%) Spring
5 150 (7.82%) Kafka
6 129 (6.73%) .NET
7 127 (6.62%) Spring Boot
8 97 (5.06%) Node.js
9 83 (4.33%) AngularJS
10 75 (3.91%) HTML
11 72 (3.76%) CSS
12 47 (2.45%) OAuth
13 42 (2.19%) pytest
13 42 (2.19%) Quarkus
14 41 (2.14%) Jest
15 40 (2.09%) HTML5
16 39 (2.03%) .NET Framework
16 39 (2.03%) Gherkin
17 37 (1.93%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 258 (13.46%) Cloud Native
2 132 (6.89%) Product Ownership
3 131 (6.83%) Distributed Systems
4 63 (3.29%) Enterprise Software
5 55 (2.87%) Legacy Systems
6 49 (2.56%) Data Protection Act
7 44 (2.30%) Self-Motivation
8 41 (2.14%) Onboarding
9 38 (1.98%) Mobile App
10 35 (1.83%) Virtual Team
11 30 (1.56%) Distributed Architecture
12 28 (1.46%) AI Agents
12 28 (1.46%) Security Posture
13 27 (1.41%) Embedded Systems
14 23 (1.20%) Management Information System
15 22 (1.15%) Fixed Income
16 21 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
17 19 (0.99%) Algorithms
18 18 (0.94%) Data Structures
19 15 (0.78%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 115 (6.00%) Linux
2 68 (3.55%) Windows
3 59 (3.08%) Unix
4 38 (1.98%) Android
4 38 (1.98%) Apple iOS
5 22 (1.15%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 14 (0.73%) Mac OS X
7 13 (0.68%) Windows Server
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 1,086 (56.65%) CI/CD
2 901 (47.00%) Agile
3 690 (35.99%) DevOps
4 367 (19.14%) Problem-Solving
5 352 (18.36%) Microservices
6 340 (17.74%) Continuous Improvement
7 322 (16.80%) Software Engineering
8 312 (16.28%) Scrum
9 292 (15.23%) Test Strategy
10 289 (15.08%) Validation
11 279 (14.55%) Infrastructure as Code
12 266 (13.88%) AI
13 246 (12.83%) TDD
14 242 (12.62%) Containerisation
15 238 (12.42%) Observability
16 206 (10.75%) ETL
17 196 (10.22%) Software Testing
18 195 (10.17%) End-to-End Testing
19 194 (10.12%) Data Pipeline
19 194 (10.12%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 476 (24.83%) Java
2 473 (24.67%) Python
3 450 (23.47%) SQL
4 235 (12.26%) JavaScript
5 214 (11.16%) TypeScript
6 172 (8.97%) C#
7 69 (3.60%) PowerShell
8 64 (3.34%) Bash
9 50 (2.61%) Kotlin
10 43 (2.24%) C++
11 34 (1.77%) Bicep
12 33 (1.72%) C
13 31 (1.62%) Go
14 29 (1.51%) Apex Code
15 27 (1.41%) PL/SQL
16 25 (1.30%) Scala
17 23 (1.20%) Swift
18 18 (0.94%) Ruby
19 15 (0.78%) Groovy
20 12 (0.63%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 588 (30.67%) Security Cleared
2 486 (25.35%) SC Cleared
3 89 (4.64%) Degree
4 84 (4.38%) ISTQB
5 63 (3.29%) BPSS Clearance
6 60 (3.13%) DV Cleared
7 44 (2.30%) Computer Science Degree
8 25 (1.30%) AWS Certification
9 20 (1.04%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 15 (0.78%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 12 (0.63%) Azure Certification
11 12 (0.63%) Cisco Certification
11 12 (0.63%) Master's Degree
12 11 (0.57%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.57%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.52%) CCNP
14 8 (0.42%) CISSP
15 7 (0.37%) DBS Check
16 6 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 6 (0.31%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 465 (24.26%) QA
2 146 (7.62%) Accessibility
3 128 (6.68%) Data Quality
4 71 (3.70%) WCAG
5 37 (1.93%) GDPR
6 12 (0.63%) NCSC
7 10 (0.52%) Def Stans
7 10 (0.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 10 (0.52%) NIST
8 9 (0.47%) ISO 20022
9 7 (0.37%) SLA
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%) SEPA
System Software
1 337 (17.58%) Docker
2 26 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 15 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
4 14 (0.73%) Active Directory
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
9 1 (0.052%) Hyper-V
9 1 (0.052%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.052%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 349 (18.21%) Kubernetes
2 243 (12.68%) Terraform
3 103 (5.37%) Ansible
4 101 (5.27%) Grafana
5 88 (4.59%) Prometheus
6 38 (1.98%) Argo
7 14 (0.73%) HP ALM
7 14 (0.73%) Puppet
8 12 (0.63%) Kibana
9 10 (0.52%) Dell DRAC
9 10 (0.52%) Single Sign-On
10 8 (0.42%) HP Quality Center
10 8 (0.42%) Progress Chef
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
1 176 (9.18%) Microsoft
2 149 (7.77%) Oracle
3 83 (4.33%) Salesforce
4 68 (3.55%) Databricks
5 57 (2.97%) Red Hat
6 53 (2.76%) Talend
7 51 (2.66%) Splunk
8 50 (2.61%) Google
9 40 (2.09%) ServiceNow
10 34 (1.77%) Denodo
11 31 (1.62%) Informatica
12 29 (1.51%) IBM
13 27 (1.41%) UiPath
13 27 (1.41%) VMware
14 26 (1.36%) Dynatrace
14 26 (1.36%) SAP
15 21 (1.10%) Cisco
16 17 (0.89%) HP
17 13 (0.68%) Fortinet
18 11 (0.57%) MuleSoft