QA Automation Contracts

Quality Assurance (QA) Automation
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for QA Automation skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited QA Automation over the 6 months to 3 May 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
3 May 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 554 629 752
Rank change year-on-year +75 +123 -133
Contract jobs citing QA Automation 36 74 108
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.083% 0.12% 0.12%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.096% 0.14% 0.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 32 61 80
10th Percentile £413 £363 £399
25th Percentile £461 £410 £419
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £450 £475
Median % change year-on-year +11.11% -5.26% +5.56%
75th Percentile £694 £525 £576
90th Percentile £700 £563 £653
UK excluding London median daily rate £581 £434 £475
% change year-on-year +33.93% -8.63% +35.71%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £68.08
Median hourly rate - - £68.17
75th Percentile - - £68.25
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £68.17
% change year-on-year - - +81.77%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

QA 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 with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 37,452 53,231 80,444
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.33% 89.85% 90.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,130 36,930 56,488
10th Percentile £300 £325 £341
25th Percentile £413 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £530
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +3.77% +8.72%
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% +8.57%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,454 1,752 1,920
10th Percentile £12.75 £11.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £16.25 £15.50
Median hourly rate £35.95 £36.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -0.14% +44.00% +2.04%
75th Percentile £60.00 £65.00 £49.25
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £64.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £35.00 £20.00
% change year-on-year +7.14% +75.00% -6.98%

QA Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing QA Automation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for QA Automation in the UK

QA Automation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for QA Automation in the UK

QA Automation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing QA Automation over the 6 months to 3 May 2024.

Daily rate histogram for QA Automation in the UK

QA Automation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for QA Automation in the UK

QA Automation
Top 13 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing QA Automation within the UK over the 6 months to 3 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 +102 32 £525 +7.69% 17
UK excluding London +40 18 £581 +33.93% 9
Work from Home +111 15 £490 +8.89% 11
London +79 15 £525 +0.48% 10
North of England +34 13 £663 +19.05% 2
North West +22 12 £663 +17.67%
Scotland +28 1 £425 -2.47%
Midlands +24 1 £380 -24.00%
East Midlands +20 1 £380 +2.70%
South East +13 1 £475 +15.15% 2
Wales - 1 £490 -
East of England - 1 - - 2
Yorkshire - 1 - - 2

QA Automation
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 5 (13.89%) Confluence
2 1 (2.78%) Apache
2 1 (2.78%) Apache Spark
2 1 (2.78%) SharePoint
2 1 (2.78%) SharePoint 2013
Cloud Services
1 13 (36.11%) AWS
2 9 (25.00%) Amazon EC2
2 9 (25.00%) Amazon S3
2 9 (25.00%) Amazon SQS
3 8 (22.22%) Amazon ECR
3 8 (22.22%) Amazon EKS
3 8 (22.22%) Route 53
3 8 (22.22%) Virtual Private Cloud
4 6 (16.67%) Azure
5 5 (13.89%) BrowserStack
5 5 (13.89%) GitHub
6 4 (11.11%) Sauce Labs
7 2 (5.56%) AWS Lambda
7 2 (5.56%) BlazeMeter
7 2 (5.56%) Firebase
7 2 (5.56%) GitHub Actions
7 2 (5.56%) Serverless
8 1 (2.78%) Amazon EMR
8 1 (2.78%) Azure DevOps
8 1 (2.78%) Dynamics 365
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (22.22%) Elasticsearch
2 4 (11.11%) NoSQL
3 1 (2.78%) Big Data
3 1 (2.78%) Hadoop
3 1 (2.78%) Relational Database
3 1 (2.78%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 13 (36.11%) Cucumber
1 13 (36.11%) Selenium
2 12 (33.33%) GitLab
3 10 (27.78%) Jenkins
4 8 (22.22%) Postman
4 8 (22.22%) webpack
5 7 (19.44%) Appium
5 7 (19.44%) Git
5 7 (19.44%) JIRA
6 5 (13.89%) Cypress.io
7 4 (11.11%) Bitbucket
7 4 (11.11%) JMeter
8 3 (8.33%) SoapUI
8 3 (8.33%) SpecFlow
9 2 (5.56%) Fiddler
9 2 (5.56%) REST Assured
9 2 (5.56%) WebDriver
10 1 (2.78%) Gradle
10 1 (2.78%) Serenity BDD
10 1 (2.78%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 10 (27.78%) Social Skills
2 5 (13.89%) Banking
2 5 (13.89%) Finance
3 4 (11.11%) Presentation Skills
4 3 (8.33%) Investment Banking
5 1 (2.78%) Analytical Skills
5 1 (2.78%) Financial Institution
5 1 (2.78%) Front Office
5 1 (2.78%) Public Sector
5 1 (2.78%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 9 (25.00%) QA Automation Engineer
1 9 (25.00%) QA Engineer
2 8 (22.22%) Automation Engineer
2 8 (22.22%) Lead
3 6 (16.67%) Tester
4 4 (11.11%) Automation Consultant
4 4 (11.11%) Consultant
4 4 (11.11%) QA Consultant
4 4 (11.11%) Technical Leader
5 3 (8.33%) Analyst
5 3 (8.33%) Architect
5 3 (8.33%) Automation Tester
5 3 (8.33%) QA Analyst
5 3 (8.33%) QA Test Analyst
5 3 (8.33%) Test Analyst
6 2 (5.56%) Developer
6 2 (5.56%) Java Automation Tester
6 2 (5.56%) QA Automation Analyst
6 2 (5.56%) Solutions Architect
6 2 (5.56%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (25.00%) React
2 8 (22.22%) Express.js
2 8 (22.22%) Node.js
2 8 (22.22%) Redux
3 5 (13.89%) WebdriverIO
4 4 (11.11%) .NET
4 4 (11.11%) Playwright
5 3 (8.33%) pytest
5 3 (8.33%) REST
6 2 (5.56%) Gherkin
6 2 (5.56%) Middleware
6 2 (5.56%) Web Services
7 1 (2.78%) .NET Framework
7 1 (2.78%) JSON
7 1 (2.78%) OAuth
7 1 (2.78%) RabbitMQ
7 1 (2.78%) RESTful
7 1 (2.78%) SAML
7 1 (2.78%) Spring
7 1 (2.78%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 3 (8.33%) Greenfield Project
2 2 (5.56%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
3 1 (2.78%) Algorithms
3 1 (2.78%) Data Protection Act
3 1 (2.78%) Data Structures
3 1 (2.78%) Derivative
3 1 (2.78%) Distributed Systems
3 1 (2.78%) Fat Client
3 1 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (2.78%) Product Ownership
3 1 (2.78%) Thin Client
Operating Systems
1 2 (5.56%) Unix
2 1 (2.78%) Linux
2 1 (2.78%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 32 (88.89%) Test Automation
2 17 (47.22%) CI/CD
3 13 (36.11%) BDD
4 12 (33.33%) Agile
5 11 (30.56%) End-to-End Testing
5 11 (30.56%) ETL
6 8 (22.22%) API Development
6 8 (22.22%) Backlog Prioritisation
6 8 (22.22%) Containerisation
6 8 (22.22%) Customer Engagement
6 8 (22.22%) DevOps
6 8 (22.22%) Front End Development
6 8 (22.22%) Full Stack Development
7 7 (19.44%) Performance Testing
7 7 (19.44%) SDET
8 6 (16.67%) API Testing
8 6 (16.67%) Software Testing
9 5 (13.89%) Problem-Solving
10 4 (11.11%) Conversational UI
10 4 (11.11%) Fintech
Programming Languages
1 10 (27.78%) Python
2 9 (25.00%) Java
3 7 (19.44%) C#
4 6 (16.67%) TypeScript
5 4 (11.11%) JavaScript
5 4 (11.11%) SQL
6 1 (2.78%) Go
6 1 (2.78%) Kotlin
6 1 (2.78%) PowerShell
6 1 (2.78%) Shell Script
6 1 (2.78%) Swift
Qualifications
1 9 (25.00%) SC Cleared
1 9 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 3 (8.33%) ISTQB
3 1 (2.78%) ISEB
3 1 (2.78%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 36 (100.00%) QA
2 3 (8.33%) Accessibility
System Software
1 5 (13.89%) Docker
Systems Management
1 11 (30.56%) Kubernetes
2 1 (2.78%) Terraform
Vendors
1 4 (11.11%) Perfecto Mobile
2 3 (8.33%) Microsoft
3 2 (5.56%) Oracle
4 1 (2.78%) Salesforce
4 1 (2.78%) SAP
4 1 (2.78%) ServiceNow