Automation Engineer Contracts

Automation Engineer
UK

The median Automation Engineer daily rate in the UK is £525, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 2 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
2 May 2025		 Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 402 516 568
Rank change year-on-year +114 +52 +99
Contract jobs requiring an Automation Engineer 120 82 144
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.41% 0.19% 0.24%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.44% 0.20% 0.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 80 52 98
10th Percentile £375 £325 £371
25th Percentile £413 £427 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -
75th Percentile £623 £578 £592
90th Percentile £750 £648 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £531 £525 £475
% change year-on-year +1.19% +10.53% -5.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 1
10th Percentile £35.58 - -
25th Percentile £36.46 £52.50 -
Median hourly rate £37.92 £55.00 £70.00
Median % change year-on-year -31.05% -21.43% -
75th Percentile £39.38 £57.50 -
90th Percentile £40.26 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.84 - -

All Contract IT Job Vacancies
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. 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 with a recognized job title 27,138 40,367 56,304
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.49% 92.78% 94.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,714 26,265 39,350
10th Percentile £300 £275 £313
25th Percentile £406 £410 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £540
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% -2.78% +2.86%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -3.55% -1.50% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,034 2,668 1,565
10th Percentile £14.06 £12.86 £14.25
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.30 £19.40
Median hourly rate £29.00 £36.02 £45.00
Median % change year-on-year -19.49% -19.95% +91.49%
75th Percentile £62.50 £60.75 £65.75
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £28.00 £39.50 £42.43
% change year-on-year -29.11% -6.91% +117.60%

Automation Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for Automation Engineer in the UK

Automation Engineer
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Automation Engineer.

Daily rate trend for Automation Engineer in the UK

Automation Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Automation Engineer over the 6 months to 2 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Automation Engineer in the UK

Automation Engineer
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Automation Engineer.

Hourly rate trend for Automation Engineer in the UK

Automation Engineer
Top 15 Contract Locations

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 over the 6 months to 2 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
England +85 100 £544 +8.75% 243
London +49 53 £550 +10.00% 58
UK excluding London +81 47 £531 +1.19% 217
Work from Home +58 47 £550 +7.32% 91
North of England +30 20 £525 +5.00% 48
South West +52 12 £615 +23.00% 23
Yorkshire +13 12 £463 -25.82% 22
North West +13 6 £625 +25.00% 23
Midlands +21 5 £400 -11.11% 47
East Midlands - 5 £400 - 20
South East +45 4 £425 -32.00% 45
Wales +6 3 £405 -17.35% 11
East of England +30 2 £450 -5.26% 29
North East - 2 £395 - 7
Scotland +12 1 - - 15

Automation Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities

For the 6 months to 2 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 featuring Automation Engineer in the job title.

1 67 (55.83%) Python
2 56 (46.67%) Ansible
3 46 (38.33%) CI/CD
4 33 (27.50%) DevOps
5 30 (25.00%) Terraform
5 30 (25.00%) Test Automation
5 30 (25.00%) AWS
6 28 (23.33%) Jenkins
6 28 (23.33%) Infrastructure Automation
7 27 (22.50%) Azure
8 25 (20.83%) Linux
8 25 (20.83%) Microsoft
8 25 (20.83%) Problem-Solving
9 24 (20.00%) Configuration Management
10 23 (19.17%) PowerShell
10 23 (19.17%) Social Skills
11 22 (18.33%) Java
12 21 (17.50%) Docker
12 21 (17.50%) Kubernetes
13 20 (16.67%) Agile
13 20 (16.67%) Git
14 19 (15.83%) VMware
14 19 (15.83%) Firewall
14 19 (15.83%) GitLab
14 19 (15.83%) Containerisation
15 16 (13.33%) Deployment Automation
15 16 (13.33%) Security Cleared
15 16 (13.33%) QA
15 16 (13.33%) Bash
16 15 (12.50%) Windows

Automation Engineer Skill Set
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities 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 6 (5.00%) Apache
1 6 (5.00%) Confluence
1 6 (5.00%) nginx
2 4 (3.33%) OpenStack
3 3 (2.50%) WebLogic
4 2 (1.67%) JBoss
4 2 (1.67%) SharePoint
4 2 (1.67%) WebLogic Portal
4 2 (1.67%) WebSphere
5 1 (0.83%) Apache Spark
5 1 (0.83%) Oracle Service Bus
5 1 (0.83%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 2 (1.67%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.83%) CATIA
2 1 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.83%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.83%) Trello
Business Applications
1 2 (1.67%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.83%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (0.83%) Oracle Payables
Cloud Services
1 30 (25.00%) AWS
2 27 (22.50%) Azure
3 12 (10.00%) Power Automate
4 11 (9.17%) Power Platform
5 10 (8.33%) GCP
5 10 (8.33%) OpenShift
6 9 (7.50%) PowerApps
7 6 (5.00%) GitHub
8 5 (4.17%) Azure DevOps
8 5 (4.17%) Microsoft 365
8 5 (4.17%) Serverless
9 4 (3.33%) BrowserStack
9 4 (3.33%) Cloud Computing
9 4 (3.33%) Sauce Labs
10 3 (2.50%) Amazon EventBridge
10 3 (2.50%) Amazon SQS
10 3 (2.50%) AWS Lambda
10 3 (2.50%) Azure Logic Apps
10 3 (2.50%) Dynamics 365
10 3 (2.50%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 19 (15.83%) Firewall
2 11 (9.17%) HTTP
3 8 (6.67%) DNS
4 7 (5.83%) DHCP
4 7 (5.83%) TCP/IP
5 4 (3.33%) Network Security
5 4 (3.33%) Wireless
6 3 (2.50%) Cisco Wireless
6 3 (2.50%) LAN
6 3 (2.50%) SAN
6 3 (2.50%) WAN
6 3 (2.50%) WLAN
7 1 (0.83%) BGP
7 1 (0.83%) Ethernet VPN
7 1 (0.83%) IPv6
7 1 (0.83%) MPLS
7 1 (0.83%) SNMP
7 1 (0.83%) VPN
7 1 (0.83%) VXLAN
7 1 (0.83%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 11 (9.17%) Power BI
2 3 (2.50%) PostgreSQL
3 1 (0.83%) DynamoDB
3 1 (0.83%) Flink
3 1 (0.83%) MongoDB
3 1 (0.83%) MySQL
3 1 (0.83%) Oracle Database
3 1 (0.83%) Redis
3 1 (0.83%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 28 (23.33%) Jenkins
2 20 (16.67%) Git
3 19 (15.83%) GitLab
4 10 (8.33%) Cucumber
4 10 (8.33%) JIRA
5 9 (7.50%) Selenium
6 6 (5.00%) TestNG
7 5 (4.17%) Bitbucket
7 5 (4.17%) JUnit
7 5 (4.17%) Visual Studio
8 4 (3.33%) Appium
8 4 (3.33%) Postman
9 3 (2.50%) Cypress.io
9 3 (2.50%) Octopus Deploy
9 3 (2.50%) REST Assured
10 2 (1.67%) SonarQube
10 2 (1.67%) Subversion
10 2 (1.67%) Team Foundation Server
11 1 (0.83%) Chocolatey
11 1 (0.83%) Spinnaker
General
1 23 (19.17%) Social Skills
2 12 (10.00%) Analytical Skills
3 11 (9.17%) Finance
4 9 (7.50%) Banking
5 4 (3.33%) Public Sector
6 3 (2.50%) Manufacturing
6 3 (2.50%) Retail
7 2 (1.67%) Financial Institution
7 2 (1.67%) Investment Banking
8 1 (0.83%) Aerospace
8 1 (0.83%) Aviation
8 1 (0.83%) Corporate Banking
8 1 (0.83%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.83%) Front Office
8 1 (0.83%) Military
8 1 (0.83%) Pharmaceutical
8 1 (0.83%) Retail Banking
8 1 (0.83%) Telecoms
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (10.00%) REST
2 7 (5.83%) pytest
3 6 (5.00%) .NET
3 6 (5.00%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (4.17%) Gherkin
5 4 (3.33%) SOAP
6 3 (2.50%) Kafka
6 3 (2.50%) Playwright
7 2 (1.67%) .NET Framework
7 2 (1.67%) JSON
7 2 (1.67%) React
7 2 (1.67%) RESTful
7 2 (1.67%) Spring Boot
7 2 (1.67%) YAML
8 1 (0.83%) Middleware
8 1 (0.83%) Node.js
8 1 (0.83%) Oracle Fusion
8 1 (0.83%) RabbitMQ
8 1 (0.83%) Spring
8 1 (0.83%) WF
Miscellaneous
1 6 (5.00%) Cloud Native
2 5 (4.17%) Data Centre
3 4 (3.33%) Distributed Systems
3 4 (3.33%) Mainframe
4 3 (2.50%) EMC VMAX
4 3 (2.50%) Enterprise Storage
4 3 (2.50%) Hedge funds
4 3 (2.50%) Mobile App
4 3 (2.50%) Public Cloud
5 2 (1.67%) Algorithms
5 2 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
5 2 (1.67%) Data Structures
5 2 (1.67%) Hybrid Cloud
5 2 (1.67%) Onboarding
5 2 (1.67%) Private Cloud
5 2 (1.67%) Virtual Team
6 1 (0.83%) Cyber Defence
6 1 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
6 1 (0.83%) SCADA
6 1 (0.83%) Security Posture
Operating Systems
1 25 (20.83%) Linux
2 15 (12.50%) Windows
3 9 (7.50%) Windows Server
4 8 (6.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (5.00%) Android
6 5 (4.17%) Unix
7 4 (3.33%) MVS
8 3 (2.50%) Rocky
9 1 (0.83%) CentOS
9 1 (0.83%) Ubuntu
9 1 (0.83%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 46 (38.33%) CI/CD
2 33 (27.50%) DevOps
3 30 (25.00%) Test Automation
4 28 (23.33%) Infrastructure Automation
5 25 (20.83%) Problem-Solving
6 24 (20.00%) Configuration Management
7 20 (16.67%) Agile
8 19 (15.83%) Containerisation
9 16 (13.33%) Deployment Automation
10 13 (10.83%) Infrastructure Engineering
11 12 (10.00%) Security Operations
12 11 (9.17%) Service Management
12 11 (9.17%) Validation
12 11 (9.17%) Workflow
13 10 (8.33%) Business Intelligence
13 10 (8.33%) SIEM
13 10 (8.33%) SOAR
14 9 (7.50%) Hyperautomation
14 9 (7.50%) Incident Response
14 9 (7.50%) QA Automation
Programming Languages
1 67 (55.83%) Python
2 23 (19.17%) PowerShell
3 22 (18.33%) Java
4 16 (13.33%) Bash
5 9 (7.50%) JavaScript
6 6 (5.00%) Shell Script
6 6 (5.00%) TypeScript
7 5 (4.17%) C#
7 5 (4.17%) Groovy
7 5 (4.17%) SQL
8 4 (3.33%) Go
8 4 (3.33%) REXX
9 2 (1.67%) Kotlin
10 1 (0.83%) Assembly Language
10 1 (0.83%) Bicep
10 1 (0.83%) JCL
10 1 (0.83%) Ruby
10 1 (0.83%) Tcl
10 1 (0.83%) VBA
10 1 (0.83%) WebLogic Scripting Tool
Qualifications
1 16 (13.33%) Security Cleared
2 11 (9.17%) SC Cleared
3 5 (4.17%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
4 4 (3.33%) CCNP
4 4 (3.33%) Cisco Certification
4 4 (3.33%) DV Cleared
4 4 (3.33%) OCA
4 4 (3.33%) Oracle Certification
5 3 (2.50%) Degree
5 3 (2.50%) RHCA
5 3 (2.50%) RHCE
6 2 (1.67%) AWS Certification
6 2 (1.67%) Computer Science Degree
6 2 (1.67%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (0.83%) AWS Certified Developer
7 1 (0.83%) HNC
7 1 (0.83%) JNCIP
7 1 (0.83%) MCSA
7 1 (0.83%) MCSE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 16 (13.33%) QA
2 2 (1.67%) Accessibility
2 2 (1.67%) SOC 2
3 1 (0.83%) Data Quality
3 1 (0.83%) GDPR
3 1 (0.83%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 1 (0.83%) PCI DSS
3 1 (0.83%) Sarbanes-Oxley
3 1 (0.83%) SLA
3 1 (0.83%) WCAG
System Software
1 21 (17.50%) Docker
2 12 (10.00%) VMware Infrastructure
3 9 (7.50%) Virtual Machines
4 5 (4.17%) Hyper-V
5 4 (3.33%) Active Directory
6 2 (1.67%) LXC
6 2 (1.67%) VMware NSX
7 1 (0.83%) ACF2
7 1 (0.83%) RACF
7 1 (0.83%) Veritas Cluster Server
7 1 (0.83%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 56 (46.67%) Ansible
2 30 (25.00%) Terraform
3 21 (17.50%) Kubernetes
4 14 (11.67%) Puppet
5 10 (8.33%) Progress Chef
6 4 (3.33%) vCenter Server
6 4 (3.33%) vRealize
7 3 (2.50%) Consul
7 3 (2.50%) Podman
7 3 (2.50%) PowerCLI
8 2 (1.67%) Microsoft Intune
9 1 (0.83%) Argo
9 1 (0.83%) Packer
9 1 (0.83%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 25 (20.83%) Microsoft
2 19 (15.83%) VMware
3 12 (10.00%) Cisco
3 12 (10.00%) Google
4 11 (9.17%) Oracle
5 10 (8.33%) Palo Alto
5 10 (8.33%) Red Hat
6 8 (6.67%) Splunk
7 6 (5.00%) Fortinet
7 6 (5.00%) ServiceNow
8 5 (4.17%) AppDynamics
8 5 (4.17%) Infoblox
9 4 (3.33%) Dynatrace
10 3 (2.50%) Broadcom
10 3 (2.50%) CheckPoint
10 3 (2.50%) EMC
10 3 (2.50%) F5
10 3 (2.50%) Salesforce
11 2 (1.67%) Brocade
11 2 (1.67%) HP
291 Automation Engineer jobs Nationwide