Manual Testing Contracts

Manual Testing
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for Manual Testing skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited Manual Testing over the 6 months to 1 May 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
1 May 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 461 508 518
Rank change year-on-year +47 +10 -20
Contract jobs citing Manual Testing 137 207 359
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.31% 0.35% 0.40%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.36% 0.39% 0.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 95 164 249
10th Percentile £316 £313 £306
25th Percentile £375 £405 £363
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £500 £450
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% +11.11% +20.00%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £534
90th Percentile £641 £675 £625
UK excluding London median daily rate £444 £469 £425
% change year-on-year -5.33% +10.29% +17.24%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 15
10th Percentile - - £16.25
25th Percentile £58.75 - £17.63
Median hourly rate £60.00 - £47.50
75th Percentile £61.25 - £49.75
90th Percentile - - £58.45
UK excluding London median hourly rate £60.00 - £49.63
% change year-on-year - - +1.79%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Manual Testing 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 with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 37,562 53,490 80,370
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.33% 89.88% 90.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,188 37,115 56,434
10th Percentile £300 £325 £340
25th Percentile £413 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +4.76% +7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £475
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +8.63%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,451 1,742 1,926
10th Percentile £12.75 £11.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £16.25 £15.27
Median hourly rate £35.50 £36.42 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -2.53% +45.69% -
75th Percentile £59.95 £65.00 £49.25
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £64.31
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.50 £35.00 £20.00
% change year-on-year +4.29% +75.00% -8.00%

Manual Testing
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Manual Testing as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Manual Testing in the UK

Manual Testing
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Manual Testing.

Daily rate trend for Manual Testing in the UK

Manual Testing
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Manual Testing over the 6 months to 1 May 2024.

Daily rate histogram for Manual Testing in the UK

Manual Testing
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Manual Testing.

Hourly rate trend for Manual Testing in the UK

Manual Testing
Top 14 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Manual Testing within the UK over the 6 months to 1 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
England +72 119 £450 -10.00% 76
London +61 63 £513 -6.82% 32
Work from Home +105 60 £450 -10.00% 32
UK excluding London +19 58 £444 -5.33% 44
North of England +16 18 £406 -13.33% 13
South East +19 16 £444 -11.25% 13
Midlands +36 13 £363 - 8
North West +24 9 £450 -4.00% 7
Yorkshire +23 8 £400 -5.88% 6
West Midlands +32 7 £288 -32.35% 7
South West +10 7 £590 +12.38% 6
East Midlands +21 6 £363 +21.85% 1
Wales +19 4 £509 +27.13% 2
North East +15 1 £500 -13.04%

Manual Testing
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 8 (5.84%) Confluence
2 3 (2.19%) Apache Spark
3 1 (0.73%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 1 (0.73%) SharePoint
3 1 (0.73%) SharePoint 2013
Applications
1 2 (1.46%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (1.46%) Microsoft Office
1 2 (1.46%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.73%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (2.92%) Oracle EBS
2 1 (0.73%) Cerner Millennium
2 1 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.73%) Endur
2 1 (0.73%) Magento
2 1 (0.73%) MIS ActiveH
2 1 (0.73%) NEC Housing
Cloud Services
1 38 (27.74%) Azure
2 29 (21.17%) Azure DevOps
3 9 (6.57%) AWS
3 9 (6.57%) GitHub
4 4 (2.92%) GCP
4 4 (2.92%) GitHub Actions
5 3 (2.19%) OpenShift
5 3 (2.19%) Power Platform
6 2 (1.46%) AWS CloudFormation
6 2 (1.46%) Dynamics 365
6 2 (1.46%) PowerApps
6 2 (1.46%) SaaS
7 1 (0.73%) Boomi
7 1 (0.73%) BrowserStack
7 1 (0.73%) Entra ID
7 1 (0.73%) PaaS
7 1 (0.73%) Salesforce Commerce Cloud
7 1 (0.73%) Salesforce Service Cloud
7 1 (0.73%) Sauce Labs
7 1 (0.73%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 4 (2.92%) HTTP
1 4 (2.92%) TCP/IP
1 4 (2.92%) VLAN
1 4 (2.92%) Wireless
2 3 (2.19%) 5G
3 1 (0.73%) SMS
3 1 (0.73%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (3.65%) SQL Server
2 4 (2.92%) MongoDB
2 4 (2.92%) Oracle Database
3 3 (2.19%) Big Data
3 3 (2.19%) Elasticsearch
3 3 (2.19%) Hadoop
3 3 (2.19%) Relational Database
4 2 (1.46%) MySQL
4 2 (1.46%) RDBMS
5 1 (0.73%) Oracle Reports
5 1 (0.73%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 31 (22.63%) Selenium
2 25 (18.25%) JIRA
3 24 (17.52%) Postman
4 21 (15.33%) Git
5 18 (13.14%) Visual Studio
6 17 (12.41%) Jenkins
7 14 (10.22%) Cucumber
8 13 (9.49%) WebDriver
9 11 (8.03%) Cypress.io
9 11 (8.03%) SpecFlow
10 7 (5.11%) Gatling
10 7 (5.11%) JMeter
10 7 (5.11%) NUnit
11 6 (4.38%) Appium
11 6 (4.38%) Bitbucket
12 4 (2.92%) Artifactory
12 4 (2.92%) Moq
13 3 (2.19%) LoadRunner
13 3 (2.19%) Maven
13 3 (2.19%) Rational Performance Tester
General
1 33 (24.09%) Social Skills
2 22 (16.06%) Finance
3 15 (10.95%) Public Sector
4 14 (10.22%) Analytical Skills
5 10 (7.30%) Banking
6 5 (3.65%) Back Office
7 4 (2.92%) Marketing
7 4 (2.92%) Telecoms
8 3 (2.19%) Electronics
8 3 (2.19%) Legal
8 3 (2.19%) Manufacturing
9 2 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 2 (1.46%) Investment Banking
9 2 (1.46%) Presentation Skills
9 2 (1.46%) Retail
10 1 (0.73%) Health Technology
Job Titles
1 38 (27.74%) Analyst
2 36 (26.28%) Test Analyst
3 35 (25.55%) Tester
4 28 (20.44%) Senior
5 25 (18.25%) Test Engineer
6 16 (11.68%) Manual Tester
7 13 (9.49%) Senior Test Engineer
8 10 (7.30%) Automation Tester
9 9 (6.57%) Senior Analyst
9 9 (6.57%) Senior Test Analyst
10 8 (5.84%) Lead
10 8 (5.84%) QA Engineer
11 7 (5.11%) Test Automation Engineer
12 6 (4.38%) Developer
12 6 (4.38%) Senior Test Automation Engineer
12 6 (4.38%) Test Manager
13 5 (3.65%) Manual Test Analyst
14 4 (2.92%) Development Engineer
14 4 (2.92%) QA Leader
14 4 (2.92%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (17.52%) .NET
2 10 (7.30%) Playwright
3 9 (6.57%) .NET Framework
3 9 (6.57%) AngularJS
3 9 (6.57%) XML
4 8 (5.84%) Kafka
5 7 (5.11%) ADO
6 6 (4.38%) GraphQL
6 6 (4.38%) REST
6 6 (4.38%) RESTful
7 5 (3.65%) Elastic Stack
8 4 (2.92%) ActiveMQ
8 4 (2.92%) Entity Framework
8 4 (2.92%) JSON
8 4 (2.92%) SOAP
8 4 (2.92%) Web Services
9 3 (2.19%) .NET Core
9 3 (2.19%) Gherkin
9 3 (2.19%) HTML
9 3 (2.19%) Oracle Fusion
Miscellaneous
1 10 (7.30%) Product Ownership
2 9 (6.57%) Mobile App
3 6 (4.38%) Derivative
4 4 (2.92%) Interest Rate Derivative
4 4 (2.92%) NHS
5 3 (2.19%) Cloud Native
5 3 (2.19%) Fixed Income
5 3 (2.19%) Public Cloud
6 2 (1.46%) Greenfield Project
6 2 (1.46%) Management Information System
7 1 (0.73%) Analytical Mindset
7 1 (0.73%) Data Protection Act
7 1 (0.73%) Equities
7 1 (0.73%) Market Risk
7 1 (0.73%) Reinsurance
7 1 (0.73%) Replication
7 1 (0.73%) Robotics
7 1 (0.73%) Self-Motivation
7 1 (0.73%) SWIFT Messaging Network
7 1 (0.73%) W3C
Operating Systems
1 12 (8.76%) Linux
2 7 (5.11%) Unix
2 7 (5.11%) Windows
3 4 (2.92%) Android
3 4 (2.92%) Embedded Linux
3 4 (2.92%) Mac OS X
4 2 (1.46%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 88 (64.23%) Test Automation
2 68 (49.64%) Agile
3 43 (31.39%) DevOps
4 37 (27.01%) Software Testing
5 34 (24.82%) Test Strategy
6 29 (21.17%) BDD
6 29 (21.17%) Scenario Testing
7 28 (20.44%) Scrum
8 25 (18.25%) CI/CD
8 25 (18.25%) User Acceptance Testing
9 24 (17.52%) Performance Testing
10 23 (16.79%) Test Scripting
11 22 (16.06%) Continuous Integration
12 19 (13.87%) Regression Testing
13 17 (12.41%) End-to-End Testing
14 16 (11.68%) Kanban
14 16 (11.68%) TDD
14 16 (11.68%) Waterfall
15 15 (10.95%) Acceptance Criteria
15 15 (10.95%) Non-Functional Testing
Programming Languages
1 25 (18.25%) Java
2 23 (16.79%) SQL
3 22 (16.06%) C#
4 20 (14.60%) Python
5 14 (10.22%) JavaScript
6 9 (6.57%) TypeScript
7 5 (3.65%) Bash
8 4 (2.92%) C++
8 4 (2.92%) Groovy
8 4 (2.92%) Perl
8 4 (2.92%) Scala
8 4 (2.92%) Shell Script
9 3 (2.19%) Kotlin
9 3 (2.19%) PowerShell
10 2 (1.46%) R
11 1 (0.73%) Ruby
11 1 (0.73%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 15 (10.95%) Security Cleared
2 10 (7.30%) Degree
2 10 (7.30%) SC Cleared
3 9 (6.57%) ISTQB
4 6 (4.38%) DV Cleared
5 3 (2.19%) ISEB
6 2 (1.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 2 (1.46%) SANS
7 1 (0.73%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (0.73%) CTC Cleared
7 1 (0.73%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.73%) Numerate Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 26 (18.98%) QA
2 16 (11.68%) Accessibility
3 2 (1.46%) PCI DSS
4 1 (0.73%) GxP
4 1 (0.73%) ISO 9001
4 1 (0.73%) WCAG
System Software
1 11 (8.03%) Docker
2 4 (2.92%) Virtual Machines
2 4 (2.92%) VirtualBox
3 1 (0.73%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 5 (3.65%) Kubernetes
2 4 (2.92%) Iperf
3 3 (2.19%) Grafana
3 3 (2.19%) HP ALM
4 2 (1.46%) Ansible
4 2 (1.46%) Graylog
4 2 (1.46%) HP Fortify
4 2 (1.46%) HP Quality Center
4 2 (1.46%) Nagios
4 2 (1.46%) Nessus
4 2 (1.46%) Progress Chef
4 2 (1.46%) Prometheus
4 2 (1.46%) Puppet
4 2 (1.46%) Terraform
4 2 (1.46%) WebInspect
5 1 (0.73%) Kibana
5 1 (0.73%) Opsgenie
Vendors
1 18 (13.14%) Microsoft
2 16 (11.68%) Oracle
3 7 (5.11%) SAP
4 5 (3.65%) Salesforce
5 4 (2.92%) HP
6 3 (2.19%) IBM
6 3 (2.19%) Splunk
7 2 (1.46%) Aderant
7 2 (1.46%) Adobe
7 2 (1.46%) Checkmarx
7 2 (1.46%) Veracode
8 1 (0.73%) Brio
8 1 (0.73%) Cerner
8 1 (0.73%) Dell
8 1 (0.73%) Fujitsu
8 1 (0.73%) NEC
8 1 (0.73%) PagerDuty
8 1 (0.73%) Perfecto Mobile
8 1 (0.73%) ServiceNow