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 5 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 208 146 147
Rank change year-on-year -62 +1 +27
Contract jobs citing Unit Testing 202 221 319
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 1.11% 1.57% 1.64%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.30% 1.79% 1.88%
Number of daily rates quoted 102 139 192
10th Percentile £360 £343 £400
25th Percentile £402 £423 £470
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £518 £588
Median % change year-on-year -10.63% -11.91% +11.90%
75th Percentile £525 £650 £653
90th Percentile £604 £663 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £550 £600
% change year-on-year -9.09% -8.33% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 35 9 59
10th Percentile £56.37 £26.22 £48.32
25th Percentile £63.13 £47.50 -
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% -15.38% -
75th Percentile £67.42 £65.00 -
90th Percentile £70.00 - £84.36
UK median hourly rate £65.00 £52.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +23.81% -19.23% -

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 15,528 12,336 16,952
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 85.37% 87.51% 87.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,538 7,210 10,870
10th Percentile £221 £242 £250
25th Percentile £375 £381 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,699 708 1,246
10th Percentile £14.38 £15.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.30 £20.00 £17.30
Median hourly rate £23.83 £30.62 £44.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.18% -31.20% +42.86%
75th Percentile £53.75 £63.84 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.75 £73.75 £77.00
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £42.25
% change year-on-year -22.62% -23.07% +20.71%

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 5 January 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 5 January 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 5 January 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 -7 71 £450 -7.69% 41
North West -4 45 £450 -7.69% 23
Midlands -28 39 £463 -15.14% 35
East of England +1 35 £469 +28.42% 19
South East -69 24 £509 -20.16% 44
West Midlands -29 23 £520 -15.03% 10
Scotland -21 20 £432 -3.94% 13
Yorkshire -29 19 £400 - 13
East Midlands -24 16 £406 -18.80% 24
South West -5 11 £500 +11.11% 22
Wales -6 10 £520 +155.21% 2
North East -6 9 £494 - 5
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 12 (5.94%) Apache Spark
2 10 (4.95%) Confluence
3 9 (4.46%) Apache
4 8 (3.96%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (1.49%) Mule
5 3 (1.49%) NetWeaver
6 1 (0.50%) CMS
6 1 (0.50%) JBoss
6 1 (0.50%) Jupyter
6 1 (0.50%) Mule ESB
6 1 (0.50%) Tomcat
6 1 (0.50%) WebLogic
Applications
1 1 (0.50%) InVision
1 1 (0.50%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 4 (1.98%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 3 (1.49%) SAP MDG
2 3 (1.49%) SAP MDG-F
2 3 (1.49%) SAP MDG-M
2 3 (1.49%) SAP MDG-S
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle Assets
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle Cash Management
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle General Ledger
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle Payables
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle Receivables
3 2 (0.99%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
3 2 (0.99%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.50%) NEC Housing
4 1 (0.50%) SAP HCM
4 1 (0.50%) SAP Payroll
4 1 (0.50%) SAP SD
4 1 (0.50%) SAP Travel Management
Cloud Services
1 46 (22.77%) Azure
2 40 (19.80%) AWS
3 29 (14.36%) Azure DevOps
4 20 (9.90%) Serverless
5 16 (7.92%) GitHub
6 14 (6.93%) AWS Lambda
7 13 (6.44%) OpenShift
8 12 (5.94%) GitHub Actions
9 10 (4.95%) Amazon S3
9 10 (4.95%) AWS Step Functions
10 9 (4.46%) Power Platform
11 8 (3.96%) AWS CloudFormation
11 8 (3.96%) Dynamics 365
12 7 (3.47%) Azure AKS
12 7 (3.47%) Virtual Private Cloud
13 6 (2.97%) Amazon ECS
13 6 (2.97%) Azure Cosmos DB
13 6 (2.97%) GCP
13 6 (2.97%) npm
14 5 (2.48%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 22 (10.89%) TCP/IP
2 15 (7.43%) Ethernet
3 1 (0.50%) DNS
3 1 (0.50%) Internet
3 1 (0.50%) SSL
3 1 (0.50%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 16 (7.92%) NoSQL
2 12 (5.94%) Redis
3 11 (5.45%) MongoDB
4 9 (4.46%) Data Warehouse
5 7 (3.47%) Amazon Athena
5 7 (3.47%) Big Data
6 6 (2.97%) Aerospike
6 6 (2.97%) PostgreSQL
7 5 (2.48%) Delta Lake
7 5 (2.48%) Hadoop
7 5 (2.48%) Relational Database
7 5 (2.48%) SQL Server
8 4 (1.98%) Apache Hive
8 4 (1.98%) DynamoDB
9 3 (1.49%) Data Lake
9 3 (1.49%) DocumentDB
9 3 (1.49%) HBase
9 3 (1.49%) Metadata
9 3 (1.49%) SAP Data Services
10 2 (0.99%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 67 (33.17%) Git
2 37 (18.32%) JIRA
3 23 (11.39%) GitLab
4 22 (10.89%) Jenkins
5 20 (9.90%) Visual Studio
6 17 (8.42%) SonarQube
7 15 (7.43%) Eclipse
8 13 (6.44%) JUnit
8 13 (6.44%) Postman
9 11 (5.45%) Rational DOORS
10 8 (3.96%) PVCS
11 7 (3.47%) Cypress.io
11 7 (3.47%) Selenium
12 6 (2.97%) Xcode
13 5 (2.48%) Artifactory
13 5 (2.48%) Bitbucket
13 5 (2.48%) Gradle
13 5 (2.48%) MLflow
13 5 (2.48%) MSTest
14 4 (1.98%) CircleCI
General
1 73 (36.14%) Social Skills
2 37 (18.32%) Finance
3 33 (16.34%) Public Sector
4 20 (9.90%) Analytical Skills
4 20 (9.90%) Military
5 18 (8.91%) Banking
6 14 (6.93%) Presentation Skills
7 11 (5.45%) Telecoms
8 9 (4.46%) Documentation Skills
8 9 (4.46%) Electronics
9 6 (2.97%) Aerospace
9 6 (2.97%) Manufacturing
10 5 (2.48%) Marketing
11 4 (1.98%) Health Technology
12 3 (1.49%) Law
13 2 (0.99%) General Ledger
13 2 (0.99%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 2 (0.99%) Legal
14 1 (0.50%) Billing
Job Titles
1 76 (37.62%) Developer
2 46 (22.77%) Software Engineer
3 31 (15.35%) Senior
4 22 (10.89%) C++ Software Engineer
4 22 (10.89%) Java Developer
5 18 (8.91%) Senior Developer
6 13 (6.44%) C# Software Engineer
7 11 (5.45%) Lead
8 10 (4.95%) Data Engineer
9 9 (4.46%) AWS Engineer
9 9 (4.46%) Senior Java Developer
10 7 (3.47%) C Software Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Consultant
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C Software Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C/C++ Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C/C++ Software Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C++ Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded C++ Software Engineer
10 7 (3.47%) Embedded Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (16.34%) React
2 30 (14.85%) Node.js
2 30 (14.85%) Spring
2 30 (14.85%) Web Services
3 29 (14.36%) RESTful
4 28 (13.86%) REST
5 25 (12.38%) Spring Boot
6 22 (10.89%) .NET
7 21 (10.40%) AngularJS
7 21 (10.40%) Kafka
8 16 (7.92%) Jest
9 14 (6.93%) HTML
10 13 (6.44%) .NET Core
10 13 (6.44%) CSS
11 12 (5.94%) PySpark
12 11 (5.45%) JSON
13 8 (3.96%) JMS
13 8 (3.96%) pytest
14 7 (3.47%) Redux
15 6 (2.97%) Quarkus
Miscellaneous
1 21 (10.40%) Cloud Native
2 14 (6.93%) Distributed Systems
3 12 (5.94%) Mobile App
4 8 (3.96%) SWIFT Messaging Network
5 5 (2.48%) FPGA
5 5 (2.48%) Onboarding
5 5 (2.48%) PCIe
5 5 (2.48%) Product Ownership
5 5 (2.48%) State Machine
6 4 (1.98%) Client/Server
6 4 (1.98%) NHS
7 3 (1.49%) AI Agents
7 3 (1.49%) Algorithms
7 3 (1.49%) Distributed Computing
7 3 (1.49%) Mobile Banking
7 3 (1.49%) Taxonomies
8 2 (0.99%) Data Structures
8 2 (0.99%) Private Cloud
9 1 (0.50%) Contactless
9 1 (0.50%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 40 (19.80%) Linux
2 36 (17.82%) Windows
3 15 (7.43%) Android
4 9 (4.46%) Apple iOS
4 9 (4.46%) Unix
5 2 (0.99%) VMS
6 1 (0.50%) OpenVMS
6 1 (0.50%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 115 (56.93%) Agile
2 109 (53.96%) CI/CD
3 63 (31.19%) DevOps
4 61 (30.20%) Software Engineering
5 60 (29.70%) Problem-Solving
6 57 (28.22%) Test Automation
7 41 (20.30%) Microservices
8 39 (19.31%) TDD
9 36 (17.82%) Containerisation
9 36 (17.82%) Validation
10 33 (16.34%) Scrum
11 32 (15.84%) Integration Testing
12 31 (15.35%) Code Quality
13 28 (13.86%) Continuous Integration
14 26 (12.87%) Mentoring
15 25 (12.38%) Continuous Improvement
16 24 (11.88%) Front End Development
17 23 (11.39%) Continuous Delivery
18 22 (10.89%) Verification and Validation
19 21 (10.40%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 54 (26.73%) Java
2 46 (22.77%) SQL
3 45 (22.28%) JavaScript
4 41 (20.30%) C#
5 39 (19.31%) Python
6 38 (18.81%) C++
7 16 (7.92%) C
7 16 (7.92%) TypeScript
8 13 (6.44%) PowerShell
9 12 (5.94%) Scala
10 9 (4.46%) Kotlin
10 9 (4.46%) Swift
11 7 (3.47%) Embedded C
11 7 (3.47%) Embedded C++
11 7 (3.47%) PL/SQL
12 5 (2.48%) ABAP
12 5 (2.48%) Objective-C
12 5 (2.48%) Shell Script
13 4 (1.98%) Bicep
14 3 (1.49%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 40 (19.80%) Security Cleared
2 29 (14.36%) SC Cleared
3 13 (6.44%) Degree
4 9 (4.46%) BPSS Clearance
5 5 (2.48%) AWS Certification
5 5 (2.48%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (1.98%) ISTQB
6 4 (1.98%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 3 (1.49%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.50%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.50%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 32 (15.84%) QA
2 20 (9.90%) Accessibility
3 11 (5.45%) Data Quality
4 8 (3.96%) ISO 20022
4 8 (3.96%) PSD2
4 8 (3.96%) SEPA
4 8 (3.96%) SLA
5 6 (2.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 5 (2.48%) WCAG
7 4 (1.98%) HL7
7 4 (1.98%) HMG Security Policy Framework
8 2 (0.99%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.50%) GDPR
9 1 (0.50%) IEC 61508
9 1 (0.50%) IEC 62304
9 1 (0.50%) ISO 26262
System Software
1 35 (17.33%) Docker
2 9 (4.46%) Virtual Machines
2 9 (4.46%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (1.49%) HDFS
Systems Management
1 37 (18.32%) Kubernetes
2 9 (4.46%) Terraform
3 8 (3.96%) Grafana
4 6 (2.97%) Argo
5 5 (2.48%) Ansible
6 3 (1.49%) Hadoop YARN
6 3 (1.49%) Kustomize
6 3 (1.49%) Oozie
6 3 (1.49%) Podman
6 3 (1.49%) Prometheus
6 3 (1.49%) SELinux
7 2 (0.99%) Cilium
7 2 (0.99%) Control-M
7 2 (0.99%) HP ALM
7 2 (0.99%) Kibana
7 2 (0.99%) Rsyslog
7 2 (0.99%) SCOM
7 2 (0.99%) vRealize
8 1 (0.50%) Tivoli
8 1 (0.50%) vRealize Orchestrator
Vendors
1 28 (13.86%) Microsoft
2 19 (9.41%) Oracle
3 12 (5.94%) Databricks
4 10 (4.95%) VMware
5 9 (4.46%) IBM
6 8 (3.96%) ANSYS
6 8 (3.96%) BeyondTrust
6 8 (3.96%) CyberArk
7 7 (3.47%) SAP
8 6 (2.97%) Red Hat
9 5 (2.48%) Google
10 4 (1.98%) Brio
11 3 (1.49%) Dynatrace
11 3 (1.49%) Pega
11 3 (1.49%) Perforce
11 3 (1.49%) Splunk
12 2 (0.99%) Ab Initio
12 2 (0.99%) Atlassian
12 2 (0.99%) HP
12 2 (0.99%) IFS