Test Engineer Contract Job Trends in London

Test Engineer
England > London

The median Test Engineer daily rate in London is £470, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 5 October 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 363 315 318
Rank change year-on-year -48 +3 +43
Contract jobs requiring a Test Engineer 95 58 72
As % of all contract jobs in London 0.47% 0.43% 0.45%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.51% 0.47% 0.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 59 44 55
10th Percentile £290 £360 £322
25th Percentile £356 £400 £393
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £411 £475
Median % change year-on-year +14.29% -13.42% -5.00%
75th Percentile £560 £491 £553
90th Percentile £638 £638 £608
England median daily rate £438 £419 £475
% change year-on-year +4.48% -11.84% +2.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £52.50
Median hourly rate - £45.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year - -18.18% -
75th Percentile - - £57.50
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £40.00 £50.00 £55.33
% change year-on-year -20.00% -9.62% +2.93%

All Contract IT Job Roles
London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in London with a recognized job title 18,770 12,424 15,211
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 93.13% 92.67% 94.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 12,117 8,295 9,975
10th Percentile £363 £332 £340
25th Percentile £450 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £545 £550
Median % change year-on-year +0.95% -0.94% -4.35%
75th Percentile £663 £663 £675
90th Percentile £775 £775 £800
England median daily rate £525 £512 £525
% change year-on-year +2.64% -2.57% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 411 204 179
10th Percentile £17.00 £17.00 £17.45
25th Percentile £21.97 £22.69 £24.17
Median hourly rate £40.96 £27.81 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +47.27% -23.80% -3.31%
75th Percentile £64.63 £50.00 £58.13
90th Percentile £81.25 £66.92 £78.75
England median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.90
% change year-on-year +68.99% -42.71% -4.32%

Test Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Test Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in London.

Test Engineer job vacancy trend in London

Test Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in London

Test Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Engineer in London over the 6 months to 5 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Test Engineer in London

Test Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in London

Test Engineer
Contract Job Locations in London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Test Engineer within the London region over the 6 months to 5 October 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
Central London -19 12 £515 +37.79% 6
West London - 6 £560 - 3
South London -10 3 £350 -26.32% 1
Test Engineer
England

Test Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London

For the 6 months to 5 October 2026, Test Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the London region featuring Test Engineer in the job title.

1 63 (66.32%) Test Automation
2 50 (52.63%) CI/CD
3 43 (45.26%) QA
4 35 (36.84%) Agile
4 35 (36.84%) Security Cleared
5 32 (33.68%) Java
5 32 (33.68%) Python
6 31 (32.63%) DevOps
6 31 (32.63%) SC Cleared
7 30 (31.58%) Selenium
8 28 (29.47%) Performance Testing
9 27 (28.42%) Test Strategy
10 26 (27.37%) API Testing
10 26 (27.37%) Validation
11 25 (26.32%) GitHub
11 25 (26.32%) JMeter
11 25 (26.32%) Playwright
12 24 (25.26%) AWS
12 24 (25.26%) Test Scripting
13 23 (24.21%) Azure
13 23 (24.21%) End-to-End Testing
13 23 (24.21%) Jenkins
14 22 (23.16%) Cucumber
15 20 (21.05%) BDD
15 20 (21.05%) Microservices
15 20 (21.05%) Non-Functional Testing
16 19 (20.00%) Kubernetes
16 19 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
16 19 (20.00%) SQL
17 18 (18.95%) Docker

Test Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in London 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 8 (8.42%) Confluence
2 4 (4.21%) SharePoint
3 2 (2.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 2 (2.11%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (2.11%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (1.05%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 1 (1.05%) Aladdin
1 1 (1.05%) Maximo
1 1 (1.05%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 25 (26.32%) GitHub
2 24 (25.26%) AWS
3 23 (24.21%) Azure
4 14 (14.74%) Azure DevOps
5 11 (11.58%) GitHub Actions
6 9 (9.47%) GCP
6 9 (9.47%) OpenShift
7 5 (5.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 5 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
7 5 (5.26%) Serverless
8 4 (4.21%) Amazon EventBridge
8 4 (4.21%) Amazon SQS
8 4 (4.21%) Power Platform
9 3 (3.16%) GitHub Copilot
10 2 (2.11%) Amazon EC2
10 2 (2.11%) Amazon EKS
10 2 (2.11%) Amazon S3
10 2 (2.11%) BrowserStack
10 2 (2.11%) PowerApps
11 1 (1.05%) Power Automate
Communications & Networking
1 2 (2.11%) Firewall
1 2 (2.11%) LAN
1 2 (2.11%) SD-WAN
1 2 (2.11%) WAN
1 2 (2.11%) Wi-Fi
2 1 (1.05%) HTTP
2 1 (1.05%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (4.21%) Tableau
2 3 (3.16%) MongoDB
2 3 (3.16%) Power BI
3 2 (2.11%) Oracle Database
4 1 (1.05%) Big Data
4 1 (1.05%) Data Lake
4 1 (1.05%) Data Warehouse
4 1 (1.05%) DynamoDB
4 1 (1.05%) Flink
4 1 (1.05%) NoSQL
4 1 (1.05%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 30 (31.58%) Selenium
2 25 (26.32%) JMeter
3 23 (24.21%) Jenkins
4 22 (23.16%) Cucumber
5 18 (18.95%) Gatling
6 14 (14.74%) JIRA
7 13 (13.68%) Postman
8 12 (12.63%) Git
9 11 (11.58%) REST Assured
10 10 (10.53%) GitLab
11 9 (9.47%) LoadRunner
12 8 (8.42%) JUnit
13 7 (7.37%) Cypress.io
14 6 (6.32%) TestNG
15 5 (5.26%) TestRail
16 4 (4.21%) HP UFT
16 4 (4.21%) Robot Framework
16 4 (4.21%) SpecFlow
16 4 (4.21%) WebDriver
17 3 (3.16%) eggPlant
General
1 21 (22.11%) Social Skills
2 15 (15.79%) Analytical Skills
2 15 (15.79%) Finance
2 15 (15.79%) Public Sector
3 10 (10.53%) Banking
4 2 (2.11%) Police
4 2 (2.11%) Telecoms
5 1 (1.05%) Documentation Skills
5 1 (1.05%) Law
5 1 (1.05%) Legal
5 1 (1.05%) Legal Technology
5 1 (1.05%) Local Government
5 1 (1.05%) Military
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 25 (26.32%) Playwright
2 13 (13.68%) Kafka
2 13 (13.68%) REST
3 10 (10.53%) Terraform
4 8 (8.42%) .NET
5 7 (7.37%) pytest
6 6 (6.32%) Model Context Protocol
6 6 (6.32%) OpenTelemetry
7 5 (5.26%) RESTful
8 3 (3.16%) Middleware
8 3 (3.16%) SOAP
8 3 (3.16%) Web Services
9 2 (2.11%) Elastic Stack
9 2 (2.11%) JSON
9 2 (2.11%) Node.js
9 2 (2.11%) PySpark
9 2 (2.11%) RFC 2544
9 2 (2.11%) Swagger
9 2 (2.11%) XML
10 1 (1.05%) Vuetify.js
Miscellaneous
1 7 (7.37%) Cloud Native
1 7 (7.37%) Distributed Systems
2 6 (6.32%) AI Agents
2 6 (6.32%) Product Ownership
2 6 (6.32%) Virtual Team
3 4 (4.21%) Enterprise Software
3 4 (4.21%) Self-Motivation
4 2 (2.11%) Data Centre
4 2 (2.11%) Fibre Optics
4 2 (2.11%) IoT
4 2 (2.11%) Legacy Applications
4 2 (2.11%) NHS
4 2 (2.11%) Onboarding
4 2 (2.11%) Private Cloud
5 1 (1.05%) Distributed Architecture
5 1 (1.05%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (1.05%) Mainframe
5 1 (1.05%) Reference Data
5 1 (1.05%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 6 (6.32%) Unix
2 4 (4.21%) Linux
3 3 (3.16%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 63 (66.32%) Test Automation
2 50 (52.63%) CI/CD
3 35 (36.84%) Agile
4 31 (32.63%) DevOps
5 28 (29.47%) Performance Testing
6 27 (28.42%) Test Strategy
7 26 (27.37%) API Testing
7 26 (27.37%) Validation
8 24 (25.26%) Test Scripting
9 23 (24.21%) End-to-End Testing
10 20 (21.05%) BDD
10 20 (21.05%) Microservices
10 20 (21.05%) Non-Functional Testing
11 19 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
12 18 (18.95%) Manual Testing
12 18 (18.95%) Software Testing
13 17 (17.89%) Regression Testing
14 15 (15.79%) AI
14 15 (15.79%) Containerisation
14 15 (15.79%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 32 (33.68%) Java
1 32 (33.68%) Python
2 19 (20.00%) SQL
3 16 (16.84%) JavaScript
4 12 (12.63%) TypeScript
5 10 (10.53%) C#
6 4 (4.21%) Ruby
7 3 (3.16%) Kotlin
8 2 (2.11%) R
8 2 (2.11%) Scala
9 1 (1.05%) COBOL
9 1 (1.05%) Groovy
9 1 (1.05%) VB.NET
9 1 (1.05%) VBA
Qualifications
1 35 (36.84%) Security Cleared
2 31 (32.63%) SC Cleared
3 9 (9.47%) DV Cleared
4 7 (7.37%) ISTQB
5 4 (4.21%) ISEB
6 2 (2.11%) AWS Certification
6 2 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
6 2 (2.11%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 1 (1.05%) CCNA
7 1 (1.05%) Cisco Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 43 (45.26%) QA
2 13 (13.68%) Accessibility
3 6 (6.32%) Data Quality
4 3 (3.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 3 (3.16%) NIST
5 2 (2.11%) Actionable Recommendations
6 1 (1.05%) ISO 15022
6 1 (1.05%) ISO 20022
6 1 (1.05%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 18 (18.95%) Docker
Systems Management
1 19 (20.00%) Kubernetes
2 11 (11.58%) Grafana
3 6 (6.32%) Kibana
3 6 (6.32%) Prometheus
4 5 (5.26%) Ansible
5 3 (3.16%) Argo
6 2 (2.11%) Control-M
6 2 (2.11%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 14 (14.74%) Splunk
2 9 (9.47%) Microsoft
3 6 (6.32%) IBM
4 5 (5.26%) Dynatrace
4 5 (5.26%) Google
5 4 (4.21%) Databricks
5 4 (4.21%) Oracle
6 3 (3.16%) New Relic
7 2 (2.11%) AppDynamics
7 2 (2.11%) Cisco
7 2 (2.11%) HP
7 2 (2.11%) SAP
8 1 (1.05%) Adobe
8 1 (1.05%) Brio
8 1 (1.05%) Informatica
8 1 (1.05%) Pega
8 1 (1.05%) Salesforce
8 1 (1.05%) ServiceNow
8 1 (1.05%) SimCorp
8 1 (1.05%) Snow