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

6 months to
29 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 16 19 32
Rank change year-on-year +3 +13 -19
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 60 19 5
As % of all contract jobs in the North East 9.54% 6.27% 1.61%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 11.81% 7.88% 2.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 30 16 5
10th Percentile £313 £335 £331
25th Percentile £356 £360 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £400 £405
Median % change year-on-year +6.25% -1.23% -28.32%
75th Percentile £453 £453 £475
90th Percentile £475 £499 £490
England median daily rate £475 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 22 0 0
10th Percentile £60.00 - -
25th Percentile £62.50 - -
Median hourly rate £70.00 - -
75th Percentile - - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £66.25 £55.00 £60.00
% change year-on-year +20.45% -8.33% -15.49%

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 508 241 249
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North East 80.76% 79.54% 80.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 322 164 112
10th Percentile £325 £216 £263
25th Percentile £400 £355 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £463 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.70% -7.50% -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £559 £590
90th Percentile £638 £625 £650
England median daily rate £514 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -2.10% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 54 15 48
10th Percentile £17.00 - £11.44
25th Percentile £47.19 £11.60 £11.97
Median hourly rate £66.25 £17.00 £18.50
Median % change year-on-year +289.71% -8.11% -52.97%
75th Percentile £70.00 £33.40 £48.75
90th Percentile £72.50 £50.70 £50.00
England median hourly rate £47.00 £28.18 £36.84
% change year-on-year +66.78% -23.51% -1.29%

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 29 May 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 29 May 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 29 May 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 60 £425 +6.25% 22
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 3 (5.00%) Confluence
2 2 (3.33%) Apache
2 2 (3.33%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (3.33%) Jupyter
3 1 (1.67%) Apache Spark
Business Applications
1 2 (3.33%) Dynamics CRM
Cloud Services
1 20 (33.33%) AWS
2 16 (26.67%) OpenShift
3 14 (23.33%) Azure
4 8 (13.33%) GitHub
5 7 (11.67%) Azure DevOps
6 5 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
6 5 (8.33%) Firebase
6 5 (8.33%) Serverless
7 4 (6.67%) GitHub Actions
8 3 (5.00%) Amazon EKS
8 3 (5.00%) Amazon ElastiCache
8 3 (5.00%) Amazon S3
9 2 (3.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 2 (3.33%) Amazon EC2
9 2 (3.33%) Amazon ECS
9 2 (3.33%) Amazon EMR
9 2 (3.33%) BrowserStack
9 2 (3.33%) Google Play
10 1 (1.67%) Bitrise
10 1 (1.67%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 2 (3.33%) HTTP
2 1 (1.67%) DNS
2 1 (1.67%) SSL
2 1 (1.67%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 6 (10.00%) MongoDB
2 4 (6.67%) Amazon RDS
2 4 (6.67%) Redis
3 3 (5.00%) Amazon Aurora
3 3 (5.00%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (3.33%) Amazon Athena
4 2 (3.33%) Big Data
4 2 (3.33%) Relational Database
5 1 (1.67%) DynamoDB
5 1 (1.67%) Electronic Patient Records
5 1 (1.67%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 18 (30.00%) Jenkins
2 16 (26.67%) SonarQube
3 14 (23.33%) Selenium
4 11 (18.33%) REST Assured
5 10 (16.67%) Cucumber
5 10 (16.67%) Git
5 10 (16.67%) GitLab
5 10 (16.67%) Postman
6 7 (11.67%) JIRA
7 4 (6.67%) fastlane
7 4 (6.67%) Serenity BDD
8 3 (5.00%) SoapUI
9 2 (3.33%) Android Studio
9 2 (3.33%) Crashlytics
9 2 (3.33%) Gatling
9 2 (3.33%) Gradle
9 2 (3.33%) WebDriver
9 2 (3.33%) Xcode
10 1 (1.67%) JUnit
10 1 (1.67%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 16 (26.67%) Public Sector
2 10 (16.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 6 (10.00%) Social Skills
4 2 (3.33%) Aerospace
5 1 (1.67%) Analytical Skills
5 1 (1.67%) Military
Job Titles
1 25 (41.67%) Test Engineer
2 12 (20.00%) Developer
3 10 (16.67%) Java Engineer
4 7 (11.67%) Java Developer
4 7 (11.67%) Senior
5 6 (10.00%) DevOps Engineer
5 6 (10.00%) Software Engineer
5 6 (10.00%) Software Test Engineer
5 6 (10.00%) Test Automation Engineer
6 5 (8.33%) AWS DevOps
6 5 (8.33%) AWS DevOps Engineer
6 5 (8.33%) AWS Engineer
6 5 (8.33%) Java Software Engineer
7 4 (6.67%) Lead
7 4 (6.67%) Lead Test Engineer
7 4 (6.67%) QA Engineer
7 4 (6.67%) SC Cleared Java Developer
8 3 (5.00%) Senior QA Engineer
9 2 (3.33%) Delivery Manager
9 2 (3.33%) Senior Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 17 (28.33%) AngularJS
2 16 (26.67%) Quarkus
3 10 (16.67%) RESTful
4 9 (15.00%) Playwright
4 9 (15.00%) REST
5 8 (13.33%) Kafka
6 4 (6.67%) Spring Boot
7 3 (5.00%) Elastic Stack
7 3 (5.00%) HTML
7 3 (5.00%) Keycloak
7 3 (5.00%) SOAP
7 3 (5.00%) SwiftUI
8 2 (3.33%) Android Jetpack
8 2 (3.33%) Core Data
8 2 (3.33%) iOS SDK
8 2 (3.33%) Jetpack Compose
8 2 (3.33%) OpenID
8 2 (3.33%) Spring
8 2 (3.33%) Spring Cloud
8 2 (3.33%) UIKit
Miscellaneous
1 12 (20.00%) Product Ownership
2 6 (10.00%) Self-Motivation
3 5 (8.33%) Mobile App
4 4 (6.67%) Cloud Native
5 3 (5.00%) Replication
6 1 (1.67%) Distributed Architecture
6 1 (1.67%) Distributed Systems
6 1 (1.67%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 3 (5.00%) Android
1 3 (5.00%) Apple iOS
2 2 (3.33%) Linux
2 2 (3.33%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 42 (70.00%) Agile
2 30 (50.00%) Scrum
3 29 (48.33%) CI/CD
4 25 (41.67%) Sprint Planning
5 22 (36.67%) DevOps
6 21 (35.00%) SDLC
7 19 (31.67%) Software Engineering
8 16 (26.67%) DevSecOps
8 16 (26.67%) Front End Development
8 16 (26.67%) Unit Testing
9 15 (25.00%) Sprint Review
10 13 (21.67%) Software Testing
11 12 (20.00%) TDD
12 11 (18.33%) BDD
12 11 (18.33%) Microservices
12 11 (18.33%) Non-Functional Testing
13 9 (15.00%) Infrastructure as Code
14 8 (13.33%) Observability
14 8 (13.33%) SDET
14 8 (13.33%) User-Centered Design (UCD)
Programming Languages
1 40 (66.67%) Java
2 8 (13.33%) Bash
2 8 (13.33%) Python
3 5 (8.33%) Groovy
3 5 (8.33%) JavaScript
3 5 (8.33%) SQL
4 3 (5.00%) Kotlin
4 3 (5.00%) Swift
5 2 (3.33%) TypeScript
6 1 (1.67%) Go
6 1 (1.67%) Scala
6 1 (1.67%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 38 (63.33%) Security Cleared
2 32 (53.33%) SC Cleared
3 4 (6.67%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (33.33%) QA
2 14 (23.33%) Accessibility
3 7 (11.67%) WCAG
System Software
1 13 (21.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 21 (35.00%) Kubernetes
2 16 (26.67%) Argo
3 9 (15.00%) Terraform
4 6 (10.00%) Grafana
4 6 (10.00%) Prometheus
5 3 (5.00%) Rancher
6 1 (1.67%) Ansible
6 1 (1.67%) Consul
6 1 (1.67%) Packer
6 1 (1.67%) Single Sign-On
6 1 (1.67%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 15 (25.00%) Red Hat
2 8 (13.33%) Dynatrace
3 5 (8.33%) ServiceNow
4 3 (5.00%) Splunk
5 2 (3.33%) Apple
5 2 (3.33%) Google