Test Automation Contracts in the UK excluding London

Automated Testing
UK > UK excluding London

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London with a requirement for Test Automation skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited Test Automation over the 6 months to 17 May 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
17 May 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 65 47 48
Rank change year-on-year -18 +1 -8
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 575 1,026 1,391
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 2.83% 4.47% 4.57%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.35% 4.99% 5.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 370 767 1,003
10th Percentile £363 £363 £360
25th Percentile £425 £425 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £520 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% +4.00% +16.28%
75th Percentile £584 £600 £575
90th Percentile £651 £700 £638
UK median daily rate £513 £550 £545
% change year-on-year -6.82% +0.92% +14.74%
Number of hourly rates quoted 41 31 36
10th Percentile £51.25 £47.50 £17.00
25th Percentile £52.50 £53.75 £31.25
Median hourly rate £62.50 £68.75 £48.75
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% +41.03% +16.07%
75th Percentile £85.00 £79.00 £60.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £90.00 £65.00
UK median hourly rate £60.00 £70.50 £54.25
% change year-on-year -14.89% +29.95% +20.56%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Test Automation is in the Processes and Methodologies category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 17,140 20,557 27,119
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 84.34% 89.47% 89.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,220 14,177 18,943
10th Percentile £250 £256 £238
25th Percentile £381 £400 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £480
Median % change year-on-year - +4.17% +9.43%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £575
90th Percentile £688 £688 £655
UK median daily rate £525 £550 £530
% change year-on-year -4.55% +3.77% +8.16%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,064 1,258 1,350
10th Percentile £12.35 £10.63 £12.25
25th Percentile £15.25 £15.25 £14.25
Median hourly rate £37.50 £35.00 £20.00
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +75.00% -6.54%
75th Percentile £61.30 £65.00 £47.25
90th Percentile £72.50 £73.72 £61.52
UK median hourly rate £36.05 £35.65 £25.68
% change year-on-year +1.11% +38.82% +5.90%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings citing Test Automation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Test Automation in the UK excluding London

Test Automation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Daily rate trend for Test Automation in the UK excluding London

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 17 May 2024.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK excluding London

Test Automation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Hourly rate trend for Test Automation in the UK excluding London

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 17 May 2024.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK excluding London

Test Automation
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 Test Automation within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 17 May 2024. 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
South East +1 191 £550 -4.35% 148
North of England -11 155 £475 -13.64% 112
North West +14 83 £500 +1.55% 72
Scotland -25 72 £475 - 45
Yorkshire -13 67 £475 -13.64% 36
South West -46 58 £550 +4.76% 72
Midlands -28 41 £425 -10.53% 76
East of England -32 33 £498 +2.05% 78
West Midlands -18 24 £430 -16.10% 52
Wales +35 21 £509 -11.18% 17
East Midlands -5 17 £400 +5.26% 24
North East -18 5 £405 -28.32% 4
Northern Ireland +2 2 - - 12
Isle of Man - 2 - -
Test Automation
UK

Test Automation
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 22 (3.83%) Confluence
2 19 (3.30%) Apache
3 15 (2.61%) Apache Airflow
4 14 (2.43%) Apache Spark
5 7 (1.22%) Alfresco
6 6 (1.04%) Appian
6 6 (1.04%) Camunda
7 3 (0.52%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.35%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 1 (0.17%) GeoServer
9 1 (0.17%) IIS
9 1 (0.17%) JBoss
9 1 (0.17%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Exchange
9 1 (0.17%) OpenStack
Applications
1 15 (2.61%) Simulink
2 14 (2.43%) Stateflow
3 7 (1.22%) Microsoft Office
4 5 (0.87%) Microsoft Excel
5 3 (0.52%) CANalyzer
6 2 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.52%) Oracle EBS
1 3 (0.52%) SAP EWM
2 2 (0.35%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.17%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.17%) Oracle Assets
3 1 (0.17%) Oracle Cash Management
3 1 (0.17%) Oracle General Ledger
3 1 (0.17%) Oracle Payables
3 1 (0.17%) Oracle Receivables
3 1 (0.17%) Remedy ITSM
3 1 (0.17%) SAP Retail
3 1 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 123 (21.39%) Azure
2 109 (18.96%) AWS
3 62 (10.78%) Azure DevOps
4 41 (7.13%) GitHub
5 32 (5.57%) Serverless
6 25 (4.35%) Amazon S3
7 24 (4.17%) GCP
8 19 (3.30%) AWS Lambda
9 18 (3.13%) Amazon EC2
10 14 (2.43%) Amazon SQS
11 13 (2.26%) GitHub Actions
12 12 (2.09%) AWS CloudFormation
12 12 (2.09%) Azure Monitor
13 11 (1.91%) Azure Data Factory
13 11 (1.91%) Azure Functions
13 11 (1.91%) OpenShift
13 11 (1.91%) PaaS
14 10 (1.74%) Amazon EKS
14 10 (1.74%) Azure Service Bus
15 9 (1.57%) Dynamics 365
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.74%) Radio Access Network
1 10 (1.74%) VPN
2 9 (1.57%) BGP
2 9 (1.57%) Ethernet VPN
2 9 (1.57%) HTTP
2 9 (1.57%) MPLS
2 9 (1.57%) TCP/IP
3 6 (1.04%) Firewall
3 6 (1.04%) Kerberos
4 5 (0.87%) FTP
5 4 (0.70%) DNS
6 2 (0.35%) 5G
6 2 (0.35%) DHCP
6 2 (0.35%) Internet
6 2 (0.35%) Network Security
6 2 (0.35%) SSL
6 2 (0.35%) Wi-Fi
6 2 (0.35%) Wireless
7 1 (0.17%) FlexRay
7 1 (0.17%) VSAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (6.96%) PostgreSQL
2 26 (4.52%) Relational Database
3 25 (4.35%) NoSQL
4 23 (4.00%) MongoDB
5 16 (2.78%) MySQL
6 14 (2.43%) Elasticsearch
6 14 (2.43%) SQL Server
7 8 (1.39%) Big Data
8 7 (1.22%) Amazon Aurora
9 5 (0.87%) SQLite
10 4 (0.70%) Apache Cassandra
10 4 (0.70%) Couchbase
10 4 (0.70%) GIS
10 4 (0.70%) InfluxDB
10 4 (0.70%) MariaDB
10 4 (0.70%) Oracle Database
11 3 (0.52%) Amazon Redshift
11 3 (0.52%) Azure SQL Database
11 3 (0.52%) Data Lake
11 3 (0.52%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 110 (19.13%) Selenium
2 95 (16.52%) Jenkins
3 94 (16.35%) Git
4 84 (14.61%) JIRA
5 62 (10.78%) GitLab
6 59 (10.26%) Cucumber
7 42 (7.30%) Cypress.io
8 38 (6.61%) Postman
9 34 (5.91%) TestRail
10 31 (5.39%) SonarQube
11 30 (5.22%) Robot Framework
12 29 (5.04%) REST Assured
13 26 (4.52%) JMeter
14 19 (3.30%) Visual Studio
15 17 (2.96%) Bitbucket
15 17 (2.96%) JUnit
15 17 (2.96%) WebDriver
16 15 (2.61%) Sonatype Nexus
17 11 (1.91%) NUnit
18 10 (1.74%) SpecFlow
General
1 111 (19.30%) Social Skills
2 64 (11.13%) Analytical Skills
3 48 (8.35%) Finance
4 41 (7.13%) Public Sector
5 28 (4.87%) Automotive
6 22 (3.83%) Banking
6 22 (3.83%) Law
7 16 (2.78%) Manufacturing
8 14 (2.43%) Legal
9 13 (2.26%) Police
10 8 (1.39%) Electronics
10 8 (1.39%) Telecoms
11 6 (1.04%) Aerospace
11 6 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
12 5 (0.87%) Documentation Skills
12 5 (0.87%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 5 (0.87%) Marketing
12 5 (0.87%) Pharmaceutical
13 4 (0.70%) Multimedia
14 3 (0.52%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 114 (19.83%) Developer
2 70 (12.17%) Test Engineer
3 59 (10.26%) Tester
4 57 (9.91%) Analyst
5 52 (9.04%) Software Engineer
6 49 (8.52%) Senior
7 40 (6.96%) Test Analyst
8 35 (6.09%) Automation Tester
9 31 (5.39%) Java Developer
10 30 (5.22%) Architect
10 30 (5.22%) Lead
11 29 (5.04%) Test Manager
12 27 (4.70%) DevOps Engineer
13 25 (4.35%) Test Automation Engineer
14 24 (4.17%) Java Engineer
15 20 (3.48%) DV Cleared Test Analyst
15 20 (3.48%) Senior Test Engineer
16 18 (3.13%) Full Stack Developer
17 15 (2.61%) QA Engineer
18 14 (2.43%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (10.78%) REST
2 61 (10.61%) React
3 40 (6.96%) .NET
4 33 (5.74%) Node.js
5 29 (5.04%) JSON
6 28 (4.87%) AngularJS
6 28 (4.87%) Web Services
6 28 (4.87%) XML
7 27 (4.70%) HTML
7 27 (4.70%) RESTful
8 26 (4.52%) Playwright
8 26 (4.52%) Spring
9 25 (4.35%) CSS
9 25 (4.35%) Java EE
10 24 (4.17%) Kafka
10 24 (4.17%) Spring Boot
11 23 (4.00%) SOAP
12 18 (3.13%) AWS CDK
13 17 (2.96%) Gherkin
14 14 (2.43%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 47 (8.17%) Product Ownership
2 23 (4.00%) Algorithms
3 18 (3.13%) PKI
4 12 (2.09%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (1.91%) Data Protection Act
5 11 (1.91%) Legacy Systems
6 8 (1.39%) Client/Server
6 8 (1.39%) Data Structures
6 8 (1.39%) Enterprise Software
6 8 (1.39%) NHS
6 8 (1.39%) Public Cloud
7 7 (1.22%) Data Centre
7 7 (1.22%) Mobile App
8 6 (1.04%) Enterprise Cloud
8 6 (1.04%) Life Science
8 6 (1.04%) Management Information System
8 6 (1.04%) Private Cloud
9 5 (0.87%) Low-Code
10 4 (0.70%) CMDB
10 4 (0.70%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 59 (10.26%) Linux
2 51 (8.87%) Windows
3 25 (4.35%) Windows Server
4 17 (2.96%) Unix
5 14 (2.43%) Windows Server 2019
6 12 (2.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 6 (1.04%) Android
7 6 (1.04%) Mac OS X
7 6 (1.04%) Ubuntu
8 5 (0.87%) VMS
9 4 (0.70%) Apple iOS
9 4 (0.70%) Embedded Linux
10 3 (0.52%) Windows 2000
10 3 (0.52%) Windows XP
11 1 (0.17%) VxWorks
Processes & Methodologies
1 295 (51.30%) Agile
2 182 (31.65%) DevOps
3 169 (29.39%) CI/CD
4 124 (21.57%) Continuous Integration
5 114 (19.83%) Software Engineering
6 97 (16.87%) Scrum
7 83 (14.43%) Problem-Solving
8 77 (13.39%) Software Testing
9 73 (12.70%) Containerisation
10 66 (11.48%) Infrastructure as Code
10 66 (11.48%) TDD
11 64 (11.13%) Test Strategy
12 62 (10.78%) Test Scripting
13 55 (9.57%) Unit Testing
14 51 (8.87%) Microservices
14 51 (8.87%) SDLC
15 50 (8.70%) Full Stack Development
16 45 (7.83%) Test Management
17 44 (7.65%) BDD
17 44 (7.65%) Computer Science
Programming Languages
1 156 (27.13%) Java
2 119 (20.70%) Python
3 83 (14.43%) SQL
4 72 (12.52%) JavaScript
5 68 (11.83%) C#
6 54 (9.39%) PowerShell
7 46 (8.00%) TypeScript
8 31 (5.39%) Bash
9 29 (5.04%) C
10 27 (4.70%) C++
11 20 (3.48%) Shell Script
12 17 (2.96%) Scala
13 16 (2.78%) Kotlin
14 15 (2.61%) MATLAB
15 13 (2.26%) PHP
16 12 (2.09%) Go
16 12 (2.09%) VBScript
17 9 (1.57%) Groovy
18 8 (1.39%) Embedded C
19 7 (1.22%) Perl
Qualifications
1 134 (23.30%) Security Cleared
2 75 (13.04%) SC Cleared
3 51 (8.87%) ISTQB
4 45 (7.83%) Degree
5 40 (6.96%) DV Cleared
6 30 (5.22%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 18 (3.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (2.26%) ISEB
9 7 (1.22%) BPSS Clearance
10 6 (1.04%) AAT
11 5 (0.87%) Master's Degree
12 3 (0.52%) HNC
12 3 (0.52%) ITIL Certification
13 2 (0.35%) HND
13 2 (0.35%) ISEB Practitioner
14 1 (0.17%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.17%) SANS
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 112 (19.48%) QA
2 31 (5.39%) Accessibility
3 11 (1.91%) Data Quality
4 8 (1.39%) Disclosure Scotland
5 7 (1.22%) RMADS
6 6 (1.04%) HL7
7 5 (0.87%) PMO
7 5 (0.87%) SLA
8 2 (0.35%) GDPR
8 2 (0.35%) JTAG
8 2 (0.35%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.35%) Software Quality Assurance
8 2 (0.35%) WCAG
9 1 (0.17%) GRC
9 1 (0.17%) IEC 61508
9 1 (0.17%) MISRA
9 1 (0.17%) MISRA C
System Software
1 68 (11.83%) Docker
2 30 (5.22%) Active Directory
3 26 (4.52%) VMware Infrastructure
4 7 (1.22%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (0.70%) VirtualBox
5 4 (0.70%) zsh
6 3 (0.52%) vSphere
7 1 (0.17%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.17%) Firmware
7 1 (0.17%) Terminal Services
7 1 (0.17%) Virtual Servers
7 1 (0.17%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 76 (13.22%) Kubernetes
2 67 (11.65%) Ansible
3 62 (10.78%) Terraform
4 16 (2.78%) Grafana
4 16 (2.78%) Puppet
5 12 (2.09%) Docker Swarm
5 12 (2.09%) Podman
6 10 (1.74%) Progress Chef
7 9 (1.57%) Kibana
7 9 (1.57%) Prometheus
8 8 (1.39%) Zipkin
9 6 (1.04%) Single Sign-On
10 4 (0.70%) HP Quality Center
10 4 (0.70%) Nagios
10 4 (0.70%) Rancher
11 2 (0.35%) Functional Safety
11 2 (0.35%) HP Fortify
11 2 (0.35%) Nessus
12 1 (0.17%) Graylog
12 1 (0.17%) vRealize
Vendors
1 52 (9.04%) Microsoft
2 31 (5.39%) VMware
3 30 (5.22%) Oracle
4 13 (2.26%) SAP
4 13 (2.26%) ServiceNow
5 11 (1.91%) Google
6 8 (1.39%) Databricks
7 7 (1.22%) Cadence
8 6 (1.04%) Ericsson
8 6 (1.04%) Informatica
8 6 (1.04%) Pega
8 6 (1.04%) Splunk
9 5 (0.87%) Red Hat
9 5 (0.87%) Talend
10 4 (0.70%) Atlassian
10 4 (0.70%) Infragistics
11 3 (0.52%) Fortinet
11 3 (0.52%) Juniper
11 3 (0.52%) Salesforce
11 3 (0.52%) Siemens