QA Contracts in the North West

Quality Assurance (QA)
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the North West requiring QA skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited QA over the 6 months leading up to 14 August 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Aug 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 68 72 74
Rank change year-on-year +4 +2 +2
Contract jobs citing QA 68 54 84
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the North West 3.09% 2.24% 2.80%
As % of the Quality Assurance & Compliance category 20.80% 15.56% 18.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 55 33 63
10th Percentile £327 - £300
25th Percentile £400 £400 £394
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £425 £500
Median % change year-on-year - -15.00% +8.11%
75th Percentile £495 £506 £550
90th Percentile £600 £555 £629
England median daily rate £475 £499 £525
% change year-on-year -4.81% -4.95% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 2 6
10th Percentile £17.64 £23.05 £43.02
25th Percentile £24.95 £30.46 £64.79
Median hourly rate £37.14 £44.06 £73.79
Median % change year-on-year -15.70% -40.30% +48.99%
75th Percentile £61.20 £58.90 £78.00
90th Percentile £75.63 £67.06 £78.59
England median hourly rate £15.96 £14.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year +14.00% -72.00% +83.49%

All Quality Assurance and Compliance Skills
North West

QA falls under the Quality Assurance and Compliance category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring quality assurance or compliance skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for quality assurance or compliance skills 327 347 444
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 14.87% 14.40% 14.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 228 197 257
10th Percentile £313 £363 £316
25th Percentile £392 £413 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £464 £500 £486
Median % change year-on-year -7.15% +2.88% +2.32%
75th Percentile £590 £585 £588
90th Percentile £688 £672 £647
England median daily rate £500 £525 £536
% change year-on-year -4.76% -2.05% +2.10%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 37 36
10th Percentile £13.50 - £17.20
25th Percentile £25.50 - £29.83
Median hourly rate £49.82 £10.95 £37.55
Median % change year-on-year +354.98% -70.84% -46.36%
75th Percentile £74.44 £18.11 £49.52
90th Percentile £85.07 £43.10 £76.19
England median hourly rate £31.64 £27.50 £38.46
% change year-on-year +15.05% -28.50% +56.98%

QA
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Job postings citing QA as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Job vacancy trend for QA in the North West

QA
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the North West

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing QA in the North West.

Daily rate trend for QA in the North West

QA
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing QA in the North West over the 6 months to 14 August 2025.

Daily rate histogram for QA in the North West

QA
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing QA in the North West.

Hourly rate trend for QA in the North West

QA
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing QA in the North West over the 6 months to 14 August 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for QA in the North West

QA
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing QA within the North West region over the 6 months to 14 August 2025. 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
Manchester -6 34 £419 -1.47% 112
Cheshire -11 18 £430 -4.44% 29
Lancashire +2 7 £530 -11.67% 82
Cumbria - 5 - - 2
Merseyside 0 3 £288 - 18
QA
England

QA
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the North West by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 4 (5.88%) CICS
1 4 (5.88%) WebSphere
2 2 (2.94%) Apache
2 2 (2.94%) IIS
3 1 (1.47%) CMS
3 1 (1.47%) Confluence
3 1 (1.47%) EPiServer
3 1 (1.47%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (2.94%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (1.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (1.47%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (2.94%) Maximo
2 1 (1.47%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 15 (22.06%) AWS
2 9 (13.24%) Azure
3 7 (10.29%) GitHub
4 6 (8.82%) GCP
5 2 (2.94%) SaaS
6 1 (1.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 1 (1.47%) Amazon EC2
6 1 (1.47%) Amazon S3
6 1 (1.47%) AWS CloudFormation
6 1 (1.47%) AWS Lambda
6 1 (1.47%) GitHub Actions
6 1 (1.47%) Power Automate
6 1 (1.47%) Power Platform
6 1 (1.47%) Serverless
6 1 (1.47%) SuccessFactors
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (5.88%) Amazon RDS
1 4 (5.88%) DB2
2 2 (2.94%) Data Warehouse
2 2 (2.94%) Easytrieve
2 2 (2.94%) Hadoop
2 2 (2.94%) SQL Server
3 1 (1.47%) Amazon Aurora
3 1 (1.47%) DynamoDB
3 1 (1.47%) Metadata
3 1 (1.47%) MySQL
3 1 (1.47%) Oracle Reports
3 1 (1.47%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (1.47%) Redis
3 1 (1.47%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 13 (19.12%) Jenkins
1 13 (19.12%) JIRA
2 10 (14.71%) GitLab
3 8 (11.76%) Cucumber
3 8 (11.76%) Git
4 6 (8.82%) JUnit
4 6 (8.82%) Selenium
5 2 (2.94%) REST Assured
5 2 (2.94%) SOAtest
5 2 (2.94%) Zephyr
6 1 (1.47%) Appium
6 1 (1.47%) Cypress.io
6 1 (1.47%) HP UFT
6 1 (1.47%) JIRA Agile
General
1 17 (25.00%) Finance
2 16 (23.53%) Analytical Skills
3 13 (19.12%) Social Skills
4 8 (11.76%) Banking
5 4 (5.88%) Legal
6 3 (4.41%) Back Office
6 3 (4.41%) Manufacturing
7 2 (2.94%) General Ledger
7 2 (2.94%) Influencing Skills
7 2 (2.94%) Pharmaceutical
7 2 (2.94%) Public Sector
7 2 (2.94%) Retail Banking
7 2 (2.94%) Telecoms
8 1 (1.47%) Aerospace
8 1 (1.47%) Avionics
8 1 (1.47%) Games
8 1 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 1 (1.47%) Military
Job Titles
1 10 (14.71%) Developer
1 10 (14.71%) Test Manager
2 8 (11.76%) Java Developer
3 6 (8.82%) Lead
4 5 (7.35%) Architect
5 3 (4.41%) AWS Developer
5 3 (4.41%) Consultant
5 3 (4.41%) Designer
5 3 (4.41%) QA Engineer
5 3 (4.41%) Solutions Architect
5 3 (4.41%) Test Engineer
6 2 (2.94%) Desktop Engineer
6 2 (2.94%) Desktop Migration Engineer
6 2 (2.94%) Mainframe Designer
6 2 (2.94%) Migration Engineer
6 2 (2.94%) Migration Manager
6 2 (2.94%) Software Tester
6 2 (2.94%) Test Architect
6 2 (2.94%) Test Programme Manager
6 2 (2.94%) Windows Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (13.24%) REST
2 8 (11.76%) Spring
2 8 (11.76%) Spring Boot
3 6 (8.82%) Kafka
3 6 (8.82%) React
3 6 (8.82%) RESTful
3 6 (8.82%) Web Services
4 4 (5.88%) Node.js
4 4 (5.88%) Playwright
4 4 (5.88%) XML
5 2 (2.94%) .NET
5 2 (2.94%) J2EE
5 2 (2.94%) JMS
5 2 (2.94%) JSON
5 2 (2.94%) SOAP
6 1 (1.47%) Bootstrap
6 1 (1.47%) HTML
6 1 (1.47%) Laravel
6 1 (1.47%) Middleware
6 1 (1.47%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 4 (5.88%) Data Centre
1 4 (5.88%) Mainframe
1 4 (5.88%) VSAM
2 3 (4.41%) Cloud Native
2 3 (4.41%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 2 (2.94%) CMDB
3 2 (2.94%) Mobile Payment
3 2 (2.94%) SWIFT Messaging Network
4 1 (1.47%) Legacy Systems
4 1 (1.47%) Operational Technology
4 1 (1.47%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.47%) Public Cloud
4 1 (1.47%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 4 (5.88%) Windows
2 2 (2.94%) Unix
2 2 (2.94%) Windows Server
2 2 (2.94%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 31 (45.59%) Agile
2 21 (30.88%) Problem-Solving
3 19 (27.94%) Risk Management
4 17 (25.00%) CI/CD
4 17 (25.00%) Continuous Improvement
5 16 (23.53%) Migration
5 16 (23.53%) User Acceptance Testing
6 15 (22.06%) Test Automation
6 15 (22.06%) Test Strategy
7 14 (20.59%) DevOps
8 13 (19.12%) Scrum
9 12 (17.65%) Sprint Planning
10 11 (16.18%) SDLC
10 11 (16.18%) Sprint Retrospective
11 10 (14.71%) Project Management
11 10 (14.71%) Test Planning
12 8 (11.76%) Microservices
12 8 (11.76%) Release Management
12 8 (11.76%) Stakeholder Management
12 8 (11.76%) Waterfall
Programming Languages
1 16 (23.53%) Java
2 11 (16.18%) SQL
3 6 (8.82%) JavaScript
3 6 (8.82%) Python
4 4 (5.88%) COBOL
4 4 (5.88%) JCL
5 2 (2.94%) C#
5 2 (2.94%) REXX
6 1 (1.47%) PHP
6 1 (1.47%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 10 (14.71%) SC Cleared
1 10 (14.71%) Security Cleared
2 9 (13.24%) Degree
3 5 (7.35%) Azure Certification
3 5 (7.35%) Computer Science Degree
4 4 (5.88%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (4.41%) AWS Certification
6 2 (2.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 2 (2.94%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (1.47%) ISTQB
7 1 (1.47%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
7 1 (1.47%) Master's Degree
7 1 (1.47%) PMI Certification
7 1 (1.47%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (4.41%) Accessibility
2 2 (2.94%) ISO 20022
2 2 (2.94%) PSD2
2 2 (2.94%) SEPA
3 1 (1.47%) Data Quality
3 1 (1.47%) Software Quality Assurance
3 1 (1.47%) WCAG
System Software
1 3 (4.41%) Docker
Systems Management
1 4 (5.88%) SCCM
2 3 (4.41%) Ansible
2 3 (4.41%) Kubernetes
2 3 (4.41%) Terraform
3 1 (1.47%) Grafana
3 1 (1.47%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 8 (11.76%) Microsoft
2 6 (8.82%) Oracle
3 3 (4.41%) Google
3 3 (4.41%) SAP
4 2 (2.94%) Ab Initio
4 2 (2.94%) IBM
4 2 (2.94%) Informatica
4 2 (2.94%) Parasoft
5 1 (1.47%) Atlassian
5 1 (1.47%) Concur
5 1 (1.47%) HP
5 1 (1.47%) MuleSoft
5 1 (1.47%) Optimizely
5 1 (1.47%) Salesforce
5 1 (1.47%) ServiceNow