Automation Engineer Contracts in the UK excluding London

Automation Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Automation Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £531, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025.

The table below provides contractor rate benchmarking and summary statistics, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 289 373 417
Rank change year-on-year +84 +44 +34
Contract jobs requiring an Automation Engineer 47 26 45
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.37% 0.13% 0.19%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.40% 0.14% 0.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 36 21 34
10th Percentile £375 £450 £383
25th Percentile £404 £485 £414
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £531 £525 £475
Median % change year-on-year +1.19% +10.53% -5.94%
75th Percentile £626 £625 £538
90th Percentile £684 £725 £568
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £535
% change year-on-year +5.00% -6.54% +1.90%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
Median hourly rate £40.84 - -
UK median hourly rate £37.92 £55.00 £70.00
% change year-on-year -31.05% -21.43% -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies in the UK excluding 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 the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 11,767 19,240 22,667
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.17% 92.63% 94.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,552 11,748 15,893
10th Percentile £213 £213 £225
25th Percentile £363 £363 £395
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £492 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.46% -1.60% +5.26%
75th Percentile £575 £598 £595
90th Percentile £650 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £515 £525 £540
% change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
Number of hourly rates quoted 829 2,243 1,165
10th Percentile £14.00 £12.50 £13.45
25th Percentile £17.61 £15.75 £18.09
Median hourly rate £28.00 £39.55 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year -29.20% -6.94% +117.95%
75th Percentile £64.50 £61.30 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £73.75 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £36.42 £45.00
% change year-on-year -20.37% -19.07% +91.49%

Automation Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings that featured Automation Engineer in the job title as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London

Automation Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London.

Daily rate trend for Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London

Automation Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London

Automation Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London.

Hourly rate trend for Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London

Automation Engineer
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Automation Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 1 May 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
North of England +26 20 £525 +5.00% 45
South West +55 12 £615 +23.00% 20
Yorkshire +14 12 £463 -25.82% 22
North West +16 6 £625 +25.00% 20
Midlands +24 5 £400 -11.11% 33
East Midlands - 5 £400 - 20
South East +45 4 £425 -32.00% 40
Wales +3 3 £405 -17.35% 9
East of England +31 2 £450 -5.26% 27
North East - 2 £395 - 7
Scotland +12 1 - - 19
Automation Engineer
UK

Automation Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 1 May 2025, Automation Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring Automation Engineer in the job title.

1 31 (65.96%) Ansible
2 28 (59.57%) Python
3 21 (44.68%) CI/CD
4 16 (34.04%) Infrastructure Automation
5 15 (31.91%) VMware
5 15 (31.91%) Agile
5 15 (31.91%) PowerShell
6 14 (29.79%) Linux
6 14 (29.79%) Jenkins
7 13 (27.66%) Java
7 13 (27.66%) Configuration Management
7 13 (27.66%) Test Automation
7 13 (27.66%) Bash
8 12 (25.53%) Terraform
9 11 (23.40%) Kubernetes
9 11 (23.40%) Docker
9 11 (23.40%) DevOps
9 11 (23.40%) Infrastructure Engineering
9 11 (23.40%) Puppet
9 11 (23.40%) Azure
9 11 (23.40%) AWS
9 11 (23.40%) Security Cleared
10 10 (21.28%) Windows
10 10 (21.28%) VMware Infrastructure
10 10 (21.28%) REST
10 10 (21.28%) Problem-Solving
10 10 (21.28%) Social Skills
10 10 (21.28%) Containerisation
11 9 (19.15%) OpenShift
11 9 (19.15%) Validation

Automation Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 3 (6.38%) WebLogic
2 2 (4.26%) Apache
2 2 (4.26%) Confluence
2 2 (4.26%) JBoss
2 2 (4.26%) nginx
2 2 (4.26%) WebLogic Portal
2 2 (4.26%) WebSphere
3 1 (2.13%) Apache Spark
3 1 (2.13%) Oracle Service Bus
3 1 (2.13%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 2 (4.26%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (2.13%) CATIA
2 1 (2.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (2.13%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 1 (2.13%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 11 (23.40%) AWS
1 11 (23.40%) Azure
2 9 (19.15%) OpenShift
3 4 (8.51%) Azure DevOps
4 3 (6.38%) Power Automate
5 2 (4.26%) GCP
5 2 (4.26%) Power Platform
5 2 (4.26%) PowerApps
6 1 (2.13%) Amazon Kinesis
6 1 (2.13%) Amazon OpenSearch
6 1 (2.13%) Amazon SageMaker
6 1 (2.13%) AWS CodeBuild
6 1 (2.13%) AWS CodePipeline
6 1 (2.13%) AWS Lambda
6 1 (2.13%) Azure Sentinel
6 1 (2.13%) Entra ID
6 1 (2.13%) GitHub
6 1 (2.13%) Microsoft 365
6 1 (2.13%) OCI
6 1 (2.13%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 5 (10.64%) DHCP
1 5 (10.64%) DNS
1 5 (10.64%) HTTP
1 5 (10.64%) TCP/IP
2 4 (8.51%) Firewall
3 2 (4.26%) Network Security
3 2 (4.26%) SAN
4 1 (2.13%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (4.26%) PostgreSQL
1 2 (4.26%) Power BI
2 1 (2.13%) Flink
2 1 (2.13%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 14 (29.79%) Jenkins
2 8 (17.02%) Git
2 8 (17.02%) Selenium
3 7 (14.89%) Cucumber
4 6 (12.77%) GitLab
5 5 (10.64%) Bitbucket
5 5 (10.64%) JIRA
6 4 (8.51%) Visual Studio
7 2 (4.26%) Postman
7 2 (4.26%) REST Assured
7 2 (4.26%) TestNG
8 1 (2.13%) Chocolatey
8 1 (2.13%) JUnit
8 1 (2.13%) SonarQube
8 1 (2.13%) Subversion
8 1 (2.13%) WebDriver
General
1 10 (21.28%) Social Skills
2 5 (10.64%) Finance
3 3 (6.38%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (6.38%) Banking
3 3 (6.38%) Manufacturing
4 2 (4.26%) Financial Institution
4 2 (4.26%) Retail
5 1 (2.13%) Aerospace
5 1 (2.13%) Aviation
5 1 (2.13%) Military
5 1 (2.13%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (21.28%) REST
2 4 (8.51%) Gherkin
2 4 (8.51%) SOAP
3 3 (6.38%) Kafka
4 2 (4.26%) Playwright
4 2 (4.26%) pytest
4 2 (4.26%) RESTful
5 1 (2.13%) .NET
5 1 (2.13%) Elastic Stack
5 1 (2.13%) Jinja
5 1 (2.13%) JSON
5 1 (2.13%) Middleware
5 1 (2.13%) NETCONF
5 1 (2.13%) Oracle Fusion
5 1 (2.13%) RESTCONF
5 1 (2.13%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 2 (4.26%) Cloud Native
1 2 (4.26%) Data Centre
1 2 (4.26%) Data Protection Act
1 2 (4.26%) EMC VMAX
1 2 (4.26%) Enterprise Storage
2 1 (2.13%) Cyber Defence
2 1 (2.13%) Cyber Threat
2 1 (2.13%) Onboarding
2 1 (2.13%) Private Cloud
2 1 (2.13%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 14 (29.79%) Linux
2 10 (21.28%) Windows
3 8 (17.02%) Windows Server
4 7 (14.89%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 21 (44.68%) CI/CD
2 16 (34.04%) Infrastructure Automation
3 15 (31.91%) Agile
4 13 (27.66%) Configuration Management
4 13 (27.66%) Test Automation
5 11 (23.40%) DevOps
5 11 (23.40%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 10 (21.28%) Containerisation
6 10 (21.28%) Problem-Solving
7 9 (19.15%) Validation
8 8 (17.02%) Deployment Automation
8 8 (17.02%) Service Management
9 5 (10.64%) Incident Management
9 5 (10.64%) Microservices
10 4 (8.51%) Continuous Improvement
10 4 (8.51%) NsoIT
10 4 (8.51%) Process Improvement
10 4 (8.51%) QA Automation
10 4 (8.51%) Reverse Engineering
10 4 (8.51%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 28 (59.57%) Python
2 15 (31.91%) PowerShell
3 13 (27.66%) Bash
3 13 (27.66%) Java
4 2 (4.26%) SQL
5 1 (2.13%) C#
5 1 (2.13%) Go
5 1 (2.13%) JavaScript
5 1 (2.13%) Shell Script
5 1 (2.13%) TypeScript
5 1 (2.13%) VBA
5 1 (2.13%) WebLogic Scripting Tool
Qualifications
1 11 (23.40%) Security Cleared
2 7 (14.89%) SC Cleared
3 5 (10.64%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
4 4 (8.51%) CCNP
4 4 (8.51%) Cisco Certification
4 4 (8.51%) DV Cleared
4 4 (8.51%) OCA
4 4 (8.51%) Oracle Certification
5 3 (6.38%) RHCA
5 3 (6.38%) RHCE
6 1 (2.13%) Degree
6 1 (2.13%) HNC
6 1 (2.13%) JNCIP
6 1 (2.13%) MCSA
6 1 (2.13%) MCSE
6 1 (2.13%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (12.77%) QA
2 2 (4.26%) SOC 2
3 1 (2.13%) GDPR
3 1 (2.13%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (2.13%) PCI DSS
3 1 (2.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 11 (23.40%) Docker
2 10 (21.28%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (10.64%) Hyper-V
4 2 (4.26%) Active Directory
4 2 (4.26%) LXC
5 1 (2.13%) VMware NSX
5 1 (2.13%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 31 (65.96%) Ansible
2 12 (25.53%) Terraform
3 11 (23.40%) Kubernetes
3 11 (23.40%) Puppet
4 8 (17.02%) Progress Chef
5 4 (8.51%) vCenter Server
6 3 (6.38%) vRealize
7 2 (4.26%) PowerCLI
Vendors
1 15 (31.91%) VMware
2 8 (17.02%) Oracle
2 8 (17.02%) Red Hat
3 7 (14.89%) Cisco
4 6 (12.77%) Microsoft
5 4 (8.51%) ServiceNow
6 3 (6.38%) Fortinet
7 2 (4.26%) 3PAR
7 2 (4.26%) Brocade
7 2 (4.26%) EMC
7 2 (4.26%) HP
7 2 (4.26%) Infoblox
7 2 (4.26%) Workday
8 1 (2.13%) Atlassian
8 1 (2.13%) Google
8 1 (2.13%) Palo Alto
8 1 (2.13%) Siemens
8 1 (2.13%) SolarWinds
8 1 (2.13%) Splunk
8 1 (2.13%) Veeam