Unit Testing Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Unit Testing
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Unit Testing skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 244 191 159
Rank change year-on-year -53 -32 +8
Contract jobs citing Unit Testing 190 156 283
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.90% 1.19% 1.35%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.08% 1.32% 1.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 98 105 182
10th Percentile £358 £285 £401
25th Percentile £402 £356 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £475 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.05% -13.64% +7.06%
75th Percentile £538 £600 £675
90th Percentile £604 £663 £706
UK median daily rate £489 £550 £551
% change year-on-year -11.03% -0.09% -8.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 43 8 48
10th Percentile £55.69 £26.08 £61.25
25th Percentile £61.25 £42.25 -
Median hourly rate £65.00 £58.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +10.64% -9.62% -
75th Percentile £70.00 £63.75 -
90th Percentile - £64.13 £85.68
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Unit Testing 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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 17,571 11,777 17,969
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 83.58% 90.08% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 10,677 7,210 11,055
10th Percentile £256 £230 £250
25th Percentile £395 £375 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £493 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.13% -1.40% -
75th Percentile £576 £588 £600
90th Percentile £675 £675 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,869 685 1,855
10th Percentile £14.36 £15.25 £13.00
25th Percentile £17.69 £20.19 £15.50
Median hourly rate £25.15 £31.76 £33.50
Median % change year-on-year -20.81% -5.19% -4.29%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £59.80
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £71.55
UK median hourly rate £27.94 £32.50 £32.85
% change year-on-year -14.03% -1.05% -6.16%

Unit Testing
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Unit Testing relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Unit Testing job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Unit Testing
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Unit Testing.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Unit Testing

Unit Testing
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Unit Testing in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 4 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Unit Testing in the UK excluding London

Unit Testing
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Unit Testing.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Unit Testing

Unit Testing
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Unit Testing in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 4 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Unit Testing in the UK excluding London

Unit Testing
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 Unit Testing within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 4 March 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 -30 55 £447 -5.89% 39
South East -31 39 £509 -18.56% 47
North West -19 38 £439 -9.95% 21
East of England +2 32 £613 - 17
Midlands -58 29 £470 -6.00% 24
Scotland -13 20 £432 +2.92% 7
West Midlands -46 16 £600 -15.79% 6
South West -19 15 £500 +12.36% 34
East Midlands -34 13 £402 -3.42% 17
North East -6 12 £494 +47.39% 6
Wales -8 7 £725 +255.83% 9
Yorkshire -55 7 £500 -16.67% 12
Northern Ireland -1 2 £369 -32.95% 3
Unit Testing
UK

Unit Testing
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:

Application Platforms
1 16 (8.42%) Confluence
2 9 (4.74%) Apache Spark
3 5 (2.63%) Apache
3 5 (2.63%) Apache Airflow
4 4 (2.11%) OpenStack
5 3 (1.58%) NetWeaver
5 3 (1.58%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.53%) IIS
6 1 (0.53%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.53%) Mule
6 1 (0.53%) Mule ESB
6 1 (0.53%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 2 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (1.05%) Microsoft Office
1 2 (1.05%) Microsoft PowerPoint
1 2 (1.05%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 5 (2.63%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (2.11%) SAP HCM
2 4 (2.11%) SAP Payroll
3 3 (1.58%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (1.58%) SAP MDG
3 3 (1.58%) SAP MDG-F
3 3 (1.58%) SAP MDG-M
3 3 (1.58%) SAP MDG-S
4 2 (1.05%) NEC Housing
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle Assets
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle Cash Management
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle General Ledger
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle Payables
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle Receivables
4 2 (1.05%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
4 2 (1.05%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.53%) SAP SD
5 1 (0.53%) SAP Travel Management
Cloud Services
1 44 (23.16%) Azure
2 36 (18.95%) AWS
3 26 (13.68%) Azure DevOps
4 21 (11.05%) Serverless
5 20 (10.53%) GitHub
6 13 (6.84%) OpenShift
7 12 (6.32%) Amazon S3
7 12 (6.32%) AWS Lambda
7 12 (6.32%) GitHub Actions
8 10 (5.26%) AWS Step Functions
8 10 (5.26%) Dynamics 365
8 10 (5.26%) Power Platform
9 8 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
9 8 (4.21%) Azure Functions
9 8 (4.21%) GCP
10 7 (3.68%) Amazon ECS
10 7 (3.68%) Virtual Private Cloud
11 6 (3.16%) Azure Logic Apps
12 5 (2.63%) Azure Service Bus
13 4 (2.11%) Azure Cosmos DB
Communications & Networking
1 24 (12.63%) TCP/IP
2 19 (10.00%) Ethernet
3 3 (1.58%) Modbus
3 3 (1.58%) RS-232
3 3 (1.58%) RS-422
3 3 (1.58%) RS-485
4 1 (0.53%) DNS
4 1 (0.53%) Internet
4 1 (0.53%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 9 (4.74%) Data Warehouse
1 9 (4.74%) NoSQL
2 8 (4.21%) PostgreSQL
3 7 (3.68%) Aerospike
3 7 (3.68%) Amazon Athena
3 7 (3.68%) MongoDB
3 7 (3.68%) SQL Server
4 6 (3.16%) Redis
4 6 (3.16%) Relational Database
5 5 (2.63%) Delta Lake
5 5 (2.63%) DynamoDB
6 4 (2.11%) SAP HANA
7 3 (1.58%) Azure SQL Database
7 3 (1.58%) BigQuery
7 3 (1.58%) Data Lake
7 3 (1.58%) SAP Data Services
8 2 (1.05%) Amazon RDS
8 2 (1.05%) Amazon Redshift
8 2 (1.05%) Apache Cassandra
8 2 (1.05%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 43 (22.63%) Git
2 35 (18.42%) GitLab
3 33 (17.37%) JIRA
4 28 (14.74%) Visual Studio
5 21 (11.05%) SonarQube
6 17 (8.95%) Eclipse
7 14 (7.37%) JUnit
8 12 (6.32%) Jenkins
9 8 (4.21%) PVCS
9 8 (4.21%) Rational DOORS
10 6 (3.16%) Selenium
11 5 (2.63%) Gradle
11 5 (2.63%) Maven
11 5 (2.63%) MLflow
11 5 (2.63%) Mockito
11 5 (2.63%) NUnit
12 4 (2.11%) Cucumber
12 4 (2.11%) JMeter
12 4 (2.11%) MSTest
12 4 (2.11%) XCTest
General
1 56 (29.47%) Social Skills
2 38 (20.00%) Finance
3 26 (13.68%) Public Sector
4 21 (11.05%) Military
5 16 (8.42%) Presentation Skills
6 15 (7.89%) Analytical Skills
7 11 (5.79%) Banking
7 11 (5.79%) Electronics
8 4 (2.11%) Aerospace
8 4 (2.11%) Health Technology
8 4 (2.11%) Law
8 4 (2.11%) Marketing
8 4 (2.11%) Telecoms
9 2 (1.05%) General Ledger
9 2 (1.05%) Manufacturing
10 1 (0.53%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 1 (0.53%) Legal
Job Titles
1 81 (42.63%) Developer
2 39 (20.53%) Software Engineer
3 32 (16.84%) Senior
4 18 (9.47%) Java Developer
5 17 (8.95%) C++ Software Engineer
6 16 (8.42%) Senior Developer
7 13 (6.84%) C# Software Engineer
7 13 (6.84%) Full-Stack Developer
8 12 (6.32%) Consultant
9 10 (5.26%) .NET Developer
10 9 (4.74%) Data Engineer
10 9 (4.74%) Lead
11 8 (4.21%) AWS Engineer
11 8 (4.21%) Azure Developer
11 8 (4.21%) Java Engineer
12 7 (3.68%) C/C++ Embedded Software Engineer
12 7 (3.68%) C/C++ Software Engineer
12 7 (3.68%) Embedded C Software Engineer
12 7 (3.68%) Embedded Engineer
12 7 (3.68%) Integration Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (17.37%) RESTful
2 31 (16.32%) Web Services
3 29 (15.26%) Node.js
4 27 (14.21%) .NET
5 22 (11.58%) React
6 21 (11.05%) REST
7 20 (10.53%) Spring
8 19 (10.00%) AngularJS
9 15 (7.89%) Jest
10 13 (6.84%) PySpark
10 13 (6.84%) Spring Boot
10 13 (6.84%) YAML
11 12 (6.32%) Quarkus
12 11 (5.79%) CSS
12 11 (5.79%) HTML
12 11 (5.79%) pytest
13 10 (5.26%) .NET Core
13 10 (5.26%) Kafka
13 10 (5.26%) Swagger
14 9 (4.74%) .NET Framework
Miscellaneous
1 18 (9.47%) Cloud Native
2 16 (8.42%) Distributed Systems
3 9 (4.74%) Product Ownership
4 5 (2.63%) SWIFT Messaging Network
5 4 (2.11%) NHS
6 3 (1.58%) IoT
6 3 (1.58%) Onboarding
6 3 (1.58%) Taxonomies
7 2 (1.05%) Algorithms
7 2 (1.05%) Data Protection Act
7 2 (1.05%) Distributed Architecture
7 2 (1.05%) Enterprise Software
7 2 (1.05%) FPGA
7 2 (1.05%) Mobile App
7 2 (1.05%) PCIe
7 2 (1.05%) Self-Motivation
7 2 (1.05%) State Machine
8 1 (0.53%) Derivative
8 1 (0.53%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
8 1 (0.53%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 34 (17.89%) Windows
2 30 (15.79%) Linux
3 7 (3.68%) Android
4 5 (2.63%) Apple iOS
5 3 (1.58%) Unix
6 1 (0.53%) OpenVMS
6 1 (0.53%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 115 (60.53%) Agile
2 99 (52.11%) CI/CD
3 63 (33.16%) Test Automation
4 55 (28.95%) Problem-Solving
5 54 (28.42%) Software Engineering
6 53 (27.89%) DevOps
7 47 (24.74%) TDD
8 39 (20.53%) Scrum
9 37 (19.47%) Microservices
10 35 (18.42%) Validation
11 32 (16.84%) Continuous Integration
11 32 (16.84%) SDLC
12 29 (15.26%) Integration Testing
13 25 (13.16%) Code Quality
14 24 (12.63%) Data Modelling
14 24 (12.63%) Verification and Validation
15 23 (12.11%) Continuous Delivery
15 23 (12.11%) Full-Stack Development
16 22 (11.58%) Containerisation
17 21 (11.05%) Clean Code
Programming Languages
1 58 (30.53%) Java
2 50 (26.32%) C#
3 45 (23.68%) SQL
4 43 (22.63%) JavaScript
5 39 (20.53%) C++
6 27 (14.21%) Python
7 19 (10.00%) TypeScript
8 18 (9.47%) C
9 7 (3.68%) ABAP
9 7 (3.68%) Embedded C
9 7 (3.68%) Embedded C++
9 7 (3.68%) PL/SQL
10 6 (3.16%) Scala
11 5 (2.63%) PowerShell
11 5 (2.63%) Shell Script
11 5 (2.63%) Swift
12 4 (2.11%) Apex Code
13 2 (1.05%) Go
13 2 (1.05%) Objective-C
14 1 (0.53%) ProC
Qualifications
1 56 (29.47%) Security Cleared
2 41 (21.58%) SC Cleared
3 14 (7.37%) BPSS Clearance
4 12 (6.32%) Degree
5 5 (2.63%) AWS Certification
6 4 (2.11%) ISTQB
6 4 (2.11%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 1 (0.53%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.53%) Azure Certification
7 1 (0.53%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (0.53%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 29 (15.26%) QA
2 12 (6.32%) Accessibility
3 10 (5.26%) Data Quality
4 7 (3.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 5 (2.63%) HMG Security Policy Framework
5 5 (2.63%) ISO 20022
5 5 (2.63%) PSD2
5 5 (2.63%) SEPA
6 4 (2.11%) HL7
7 2 (1.05%) SLA
8 1 (0.53%) Disclosure Scotland
8 1 (0.53%) GDPR
System Software
1 27 (14.21%) Docker
2 9 (4.74%) Virtual Machines
2 9 (4.74%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 27 (14.21%) Kubernetes
2 12 (6.32%) Argo
3 7 (3.68%) Terraform
4 4 (2.11%) Grafana
5 2 (1.05%) Control-M
5 2 (1.05%) HP ALM
5 2 (1.05%) Kibana
5 2 (1.05%) vRealize
6 1 (0.53%) Single Sign-On
6 1 (0.53%) Tivoli
6 1 (0.53%) vRealize Orchestrator
Vendors
1 30 (15.79%) Microsoft
2 19 (10.00%) Oracle
3 13 (6.84%) Databricks
4 12 (6.32%) Red Hat
5 10 (5.26%) VMware
6 9 (4.74%) IBM
6 9 (4.74%) Salesforce
6 9 (4.74%) SAP
7 8 (4.21%) ANSYS
8 6 (3.16%) Veracode
9 5 (2.63%) Splunk
10 4 (2.11%) Brio
11 3 (1.58%) Google
11 3 (1.58%) Pega
12 2 (1.05%) Ab Initio
12 2 (1.05%) Avaloq
12 2 (1.05%) HP
12 2 (1.05%) IFS
12 2 (1.05%) NEC
12 2 (1.05%) Perforce