QA Test Engineer Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Quality Assurance Test Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Quality Assurance Test Engineer daily rate in the UK excluding London is £450, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 16 May 2026.

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

6 months to
16 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 443 340 388
Rank change year-on-year -103 +48 +45
Contract jobs requiring a QA Test Engineer 4 2 2
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.016% 0.016% 0.010%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.018% 0.017% 0.011%
Number of daily rates quoted 3 2 2
10th Percentile £430 £428 £500
25th Percentile £438 £441 £501
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £476 £504
Median % change year-on-year -5.51% -5.55% +0.85%
75th Percentile £463 £506 £510
90th Percentile £470 £516 £511
UK median daily rate £450 £715 £438
% change year-on-year -37.06% +63.43% -30.28%

All Contract IT Job Roles
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 22,479 11,791 18,742
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 91.95% 91.99% 92.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 13,034 7,536 11,429
10th Percentile £300 £213 £213
25th Percentile £400 £363 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £498 £475 £490
Median % change year-on-year +4.74% -3.06% -2.00%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £595
90th Percentile £686 £650 £688
UK median daily rate £510 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -2.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,533 841 2,251
10th Percentile £14.64 £13.85 £12.50
25th Percentile £19.72 £17.30 £15.75
Median hourly rate £45.00 £27.35 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +64.53% -31.63% -5.88%
75th Percentile £67.25 £63.75 £61.60
90th Percentile £78.75 £75.00 £74.00
UK median hourly rate £42.69 £28.18 £36.50
% change year-on-year +51.47% -22.79% -18.89%

QA Test Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

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

QA Test Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

QA Test Engineer
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for QA Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for QA Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

QA Test Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for QA Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for QA Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

QA Test 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 QA Test Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 16 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
North of England - 2 £475 -
Yorkshire - 1 - -
North East - 1 £475 -
South West - 1 £450 -
Wales - 1 £425 -
QA Test Engineer
UK

QA Test Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 16 May 2026, QA 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 UK excluding London region featuring QA Test Engineer in the job title.

1 4 (100.00%) CI/CD
1 4 (100.00%) GitHub
1 4 (100.00%) QA
2 3 (75.00%) AWS
2 3 (75.00%) GitHub Actions
2 3 (75.00%) GitLab
2 3 (75.00%) Jenkins
2 3 (75.00%) Test Automation
3 2 (50.00%) Agile
3 2 (50.00%) Azure
3 2 (50.00%) Containerisation
3 2 (50.00%) DevOps
3 2 (50.00%) Docker
3 2 (50.00%) Gatling
3 2 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (50.00%) Kubernetes
3 2 (50.00%) Observability
3 2 (50.00%) Playwright
3 2 (50.00%) Regression Testing
3 2 (50.00%) Terraform
3 2 (50.00%) Validation
4 1 (25.00%) Accessibility
4 1 (25.00%) Ansible
4 1 (25.00%) API Testing
4 1 (25.00%) BDD
4 1 (25.00%) Bicep
4 1 (25.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (25.00%) Checkmarx
4 1 (25.00%) Continuous Delivery
4 1 (25.00%) Continuous Improvement

QA Test Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding 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:

Cloud Services
1 4 (100.00%) GitHub
2 3 (75.00%) AWS
2 3 (75.00%) GitHub Actions
3 2 (50.00%) Azure
4 1 (25.00%) GCP
Communications & Networking
1 1 (25.00%) DHCP
1 1 (25.00%) DNS
1 1 (25.00%) Firewall
1 1 (25.00%) TCP/IP
1 1 (25.00%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (25.00%) MongoDB
Development Applications
1 3 (75.00%) GitLab
1 3 (75.00%) Jenkins
2 2 (50.00%) Gatling
3 1 (25.00%) Cucumber
3 1 (25.00%) JMeter
3 1 (25.00%) Postman
3 1 (25.00%) REST Assured
3 1 (25.00%) Selenium
3 1 (25.00%) Serenity BDD
General
1 2 (50.00%) Public Sector
1 2 (50.00%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (50.00%) Playwright
2 1 (25.00%) Kafka
2 1 (25.00%) REST
2 1 (25.00%) Spring
2 1 (25.00%) Spring Boot
2 1 (25.00%) Spring Cloud
Miscellaneous
1 1 (25.00%) Data Protection Act
1 1 (25.00%) Distributed Systems
1 1 (25.00%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 1 (25.00%) Linux
1 1 (25.00%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 4 (100.00%) CI/CD
2 3 (75.00%) Test Automation
3 2 (50.00%) Agile
3 2 (50.00%) Containerisation
3 2 (50.00%) DevOps
3 2 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
3 2 (50.00%) Observability
3 2 (50.00%) Regression Testing
3 2 (50.00%) Validation
4 1 (25.00%) Data Protection
4 1 (25.00%) Event-Driven
4 1 (25.00%) Integration Testing
4 1 (25.00%) Manual Testing
4 1 (25.00%) Migration
4 1 (25.00%) OWASP
4 1 (25.00%) Performance Testing
4 1 (25.00%) Security Testing
4 1 (25.00%) Stakeholder Management
4 1 (25.00%) System Testing
4 1 (25.00%) Test Scripting
Programming Languages
1 1 (25.00%) Bicep
1 1 (25.00%) Java
1 1 (25.00%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1 (25.00%) BPSS Clearance
1 1 (25.00%) DV Cleared
1 1 (25.00%) Security Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (100.00%) QA
2 1 (25.00%) Accessibility
System Software
1 2 (50.00%) Docker
2 1 (25.00%) VirtualBox
2 1 (25.00%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 2 (50.00%) Kubernetes
1 2 (50.00%) Terraform
2 1 (25.00%) Ansible
2 1 (25.00%) Grafana
2 1 (25.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 1 (25.00%) Checkmarx
1 1 (25.00%) Splunk
1 1 (25.00%) VMware