Test Automation Contract Job Trends in the North East

Automated Testing
England > North East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North East requiring Test Automation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 17 22 35
Rank change year-on-year +5 +13 -23
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 48 17 3
As % of all contract jobs in the North East 8.92% 5.61% 0.89%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 10.74% 6.77% 1.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 24 15 2
10th Percentile £350 £305 £369
25th Percentile £400 £353 £378
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £419 £390 £413
Median % change year-on-year +7.37% -5.45% -26.99%
75th Percentile £534 £443 £453
90th Percentile £573 £583 £466
England median daily rate £480 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -4.00% -4.76% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 19 0 0
10th Percentile £55.00 - -
25th Percentile £60.00 - -
Median hourly rate £70.00 - -
75th Percentile - - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £65.50 £56.75 £60.00
% change year-on-year +15.42% -5.42% -4.00%

All Process & Methodology Skills
North East

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 the North East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 447 251 271
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North East 83.09% 82.84% 80.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 302 178 136
10th Percentile £280 £263 £190
25th Percentile £380 £358 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £464 £489
Median % change year-on-year -2.96% -5.07% -11.18%
75th Percentile £538 £568 £590
90th Percentile £593 £629 £675
England median daily rate £505 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 47 12 47
10th Percentile £17.00 - £11.50
25th Percentile £47.25 £11.60 £12.13
Median hourly rate £65.00 £14.07 £17.50
Median % change year-on-year +361.98% -19.60% -57.06%
75th Percentile £70.00 £25.70 £47.47
90th Percentile £72.50 £48.49 £50.00
England median hourly rate £41.00 £31.88 £34.00
% change year-on-year +28.61% -6.24% -9.33%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend in the North East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Test Automation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North East.

Test Automation job vacancy trend in the North East

Test Automation
Daily Rate Trend in the North East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing Test Automation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram in the North East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation in the North East over the 6 months to 14 April 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in the North East

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Trend in the North East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing Test Automation.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North East citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation in the North East over the 6 months to 14 April 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in the North East

Test Automation
Contract Job Locations in the North East

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 North East region over the 6 months to 14 April 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
Tyne and Wear +1 47 £413 +5.77% 35
Durham - 1 £500 - 3
Test Automation
England

Test Automation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North East 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 2 (4.17%) Confluence
Applications
1 1 (2.08%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (4.17%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 15 (31.25%) OpenShift
2 14 (29.17%) AWS
3 9 (18.75%) Azure
4 7 (14.58%) GitHub
5 5 (10.42%) GitHub Actions
6 4 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
6 4 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
6 4 (8.33%) Serverless
7 2 (4.17%) Amazon EC2
7 2 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
7 2 (4.17%) Amazon ElastiCache
7 2 (4.17%) Amazon S3
7 2 (4.17%) BrowserStack
8 1 (2.08%) Amazon ECS
8 1 (2.08%) AWS CloudFormation
8 1 (2.08%) Bitrise
8 1 (2.08%) CloudFront
8 1 (2.08%) Pulumi
8 1 (2.08%) Route 53
8 1 (2.08%) Virtual Private Cloud
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (6.25%) Amazon RDS
1 3 (6.25%) Redis
2 2 (4.17%) Amazon Aurora
2 2 (4.17%) MongoDB
2 2 (4.17%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (2.08%) Delta Lake
3 1 (2.08%) NoSQL
3 1 (2.08%) Relational Database
3 1 (2.08%) Spark SQL
Development Applications
1 14 (29.17%) SonarQube
2 10 (20.83%) Postman
3 9 (18.75%) Cucumber
3 9 (18.75%) Git
3 9 (18.75%) REST Assured
4 8 (16.67%) Jenkins
5 6 (12.50%) GitLab
5 6 (12.50%) JIRA
5 6 (12.50%) Selenium
6 3 (6.25%) Gatling
6 3 (6.25%) JMeter
7 2 (4.17%) SoapUI
8 1 (2.08%) Artifactory
8 1 (2.08%) Cypress.io
8 1 (2.08%) JUnit
8 1 (2.08%) Serenity BDD
8 1 (2.08%) Sonatype Nexus
8 1 (2.08%) TestRail
General
1 14 (29.17%) Public Sector
2 3 (6.25%) Aerospace
3 2 (4.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 2 (4.17%) Social Skills
4 1 (2.08%) Finance
4 1 (2.08%) Military
Job Titles
1 21 (43.75%) Test Engineer
2 9 (18.75%) Developer
3 8 (16.67%) Java Developer
3 8 (16.67%) Test Automation Engineer
4 6 (12.50%) DevOps Engineer
4 6 (12.50%) Java Engineer
4 6 (12.50%) Software Engineer
5 5 (10.42%) Senior
5 5 (10.42%) Software Test Engineer
6 4 (8.33%) AWS DevOps
6 4 (8.33%) AWS DevOps Engineer
6 4 (8.33%) AWS Engineer
6 4 (8.33%) Java Software Engineer
7 3 (6.25%) SC Cleared Java Developer
8 2 (4.17%) Agile Delivery Manager
8 2 (4.17%) DevOps Automation Engineer
8 2 (4.17%) Lead
8 2 (4.17%) QA Test Engineer
8 2 (4.17%) Senior Agile Delivery Manager
8 2 (4.17%) Senior Delivery Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (31.25%) AngularJS
2 14 (29.17%) Quarkus
3 10 (20.83%) REST
4 6 (12.50%) Playwright
5 5 (10.42%) RESTful
6 4 (8.33%) Elastic Stack
6 4 (8.33%) WireMock
7 3 (6.25%) Kafka
8 2 (4.17%) HTML
8 2 (4.17%) Keycloak
8 2 (4.17%) SOAP
8 2 (4.17%) Spring Boot
9 1 (2.08%) Express.js
9 1 (2.08%) Jest
9 1 (2.08%) JWT
9 1 (2.08%) Play Framework
9 1 (2.08%) PySpark
9 1 (2.08%) Spring
9 1 (2.08%) Spring Cloud
9 1 (2.08%) SwiftUI
Miscellaneous
1 8 (16.67%) Product Ownership
2 5 (10.42%) Self-Motivation
3 4 (8.33%) Cloud Native
4 2 (4.17%) Replication
5 1 (2.08%) Enterprise Software
5 1 (2.08%) Legacy Systems
5 1 (2.08%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 2 (4.17%) Linux
2 1 (2.08%) Android
2 1 (2.08%) Apple iOS
2 1 (2.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 1 (2.08%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 34 (70.83%) Agile
2 24 (50.00%) Scrum
3 23 (47.92%) CI/CD
4 22 (45.83%) Sprint Planning
5 18 (37.50%) SDLC
5 18 (37.50%) Software Engineering
6 16 (33.33%) DevOps
6 16 (33.33%) DevSecOps
7 14 (29.17%) Front End Development
7 14 (29.17%) Unit Testing
8 13 (27.08%) Sprint Review
9 11 (22.92%) Infrastructure as Code
10 9 (18.75%) Containerisation
10 9 (18.75%) Software Testing
11 8 (16.67%) BDD
11 8 (16.67%) Non-Functional Testing
11 8 (16.67%) Test Management
12 7 (14.58%) Acceptance Criteria
12 7 (14.58%) Code Quality
12 7 (14.58%) Functional Testing
Programming Languages
1 27 (56.25%) Java
2 9 (18.75%) JavaScript
3 5 (10.42%) Python
4 4 (8.33%) Bash
5 3 (6.25%) Groovy
5 3 (6.25%) TypeScript
6 2 (4.17%) Bicep
6 2 (4.17%) Ruby
6 2 (4.17%) SQL
7 1 (2.08%) Kotlin
7 1 (2.08%) PowerShell
7 1 (2.08%) Scala
7 1 (2.08%) Swift
Qualifications
1 29 (60.42%) Security Cleared
2 26 (54.17%) SC Cleared
3 2 (4.17%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (2.08%) AWS Certification
4 1 (2.08%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
4 1 (2.08%) ISTQB
4 1 (2.08%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 18 (37.50%) QA
2 5 (10.42%) Accessibility
3 1 (2.08%) Data Quality
3 1 (2.08%) WCAG
System Software
1 11 (22.92%) Docker
Systems Management
1 20 (41.67%) Kubernetes
2 15 (31.25%) Argo
3 12 (25.00%) Terraform
4 5 (10.42%) Grafana
4 5 (10.42%) Prometheus
5 2 (4.17%) Rancher
6 1 (2.08%) Ansible
6 1 (2.08%) Istio
Vendors
1 14 (29.17%) Red Hat
2 4 (8.33%) ServiceNow
3 3 (6.25%) Microsoft
4 2 (4.17%) Dynatrace
5 1 (2.08%) Checkmarx
5 1 (2.08%) Databricks
5 1 (2.08%) Splunk