QA Contract Job Trends

Quality Assurance (QA)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring QA skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 11 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 60 65 63
Rank change year-on-year +5 -2 +14
Contract jobs citing QA 1,423 1,195 1,523
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 3.92% 3.35% 3.35%
As % of the Quality Assurance & Compliance category 22.52% 24.11% 23.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 936 713 1,098
10th Percentile £307 £300 £350
25th Percentile £400 £370 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £475 £523
Median % change year-on-year +3.58% -9.09% -0.48%
75th Percentile £588 £575 £638
90th Percentile £675 £700 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £450 £475
% change year-on-year +6.67% -5.26% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 55 47 44
10th Percentile £12.26 £12.24 £21.50
25th Percentile £13.50 £13.26 £25.00
Median hourly rate £16.24 £15.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.77% -69.00% +100.00%
75th Percentile £54.38 £28.75 £70.69
90th Percentile £73.75 £63.53 £77.85
UK excluding London median hourly rate £15.96 £15.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year +6.40% -70.00% +108.33%

All Quality Assurance and Compliance Skills
UK

QA falls under the Quality Assurance and Compliance category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring quality assurance or compliance skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for quality assurance or compliance skills 6,319 4,956 6,577
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 17.42% 13.88% 14.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,072 2,915 4,399
10th Percentile £313 £263 £313
25th Percentile £405 £381 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -
75th Percentile £601 £623 £640
90th Percentile £700 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +3.58% -5.00% +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 309 205 241
10th Percentile £13.60 £13.88 £14.54
25th Percentile £17.69 £17.63 £20.00
Median hourly rate £25.15 £26.50 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year -5.09% -25.35% +56.49%
75th Percentile £56.75 £55.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £70.00 £83.11
UK excluding London median hourly rate £21.49 £25.48 £35.50
% change year-on-year -15.68% -28.23% +69.05%

QA
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing QA relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

QA job vacancy trend in the UK

QA
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing QA.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing QA

QA
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing QA over the 6 months to 11 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for QA in the UK

QA
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing QA.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing QA

QA
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing QA over the 6 months to 11 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for QA in the UK

QA
Top 17 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing QA within the UK over the 6 months to 11 December 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 +11 1,227 £500 +3.09% 863
London +8 639 £500 - 277
UK excluding London -4 609 £480 +6.67% 743
Work from Home +7 374 £463 -5.61% 1,045
North of England +8 170 £430 +1.84% 185
South East +17 145 £500 +21.21% 238
Midlands -26 101 £500 +6.67% 101
North West +9 83 £405 -1.82% 100
West Midlands -23 73 £508 +2.63% 66
South West -12 70 £475 -2.56% 78
East of England +7 61 £500 +25.00% 86
Yorkshire -10 56 £450 - 64
Scotland +6 55 £513 +34.87% 59
North East +16 32 £500 +5.26% 21
East Midlands -7 28 £438 -4.63% 35
Wales -12 16 £419 -20.28% 14
Northern Ireland -3 7 - - 8

QA
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 87 (6.11%) Confluence
2 36 (2.53%) SharePoint
3 20 (1.41%) Apache
3 20 (1.41%) CMS
4 17 (1.19%) IIS
5 11 (0.77%) Apache Spark
5 11 (0.77%) SugarCRM
6 10 (0.70%) Anypoint
7 9 (0.63%) WebSphere
8 7 (0.49%) Apache Airflow
9 6 (0.42%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 6 (0.42%) Mule
9 6 (0.42%) Oracle Workflow
10 5 (0.35%) MQSeries
10 5 (0.35%) Oracle Collaboration Suite
11 4 (0.28%) Drupal
11 4 (0.28%) OpenStack
11 4 (0.28%) SAS
11 4 (0.28%) WebLogic
12 2 (0.14%) Jupyter
Applications
1 73 (5.13%) Microsoft Excel
2 31 (2.18%) Microsoft Office
3 22 (1.55%) Microsoft Project
4 19 (1.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 17 (1.19%) MS Visio
6 6 (0.42%) Trello
7 5 (0.35%) Chatbot
7 5 (0.35%) Spreadsheet
8 4 (0.28%) Autodesk Inventor
8 4 (0.28%) Simulink
8 4 (0.28%) Stateflow
9 3 (0.21%) Revit
10 2 (0.14%) AutoCAD
10 2 (0.14%) MicroStation
10 2 (0.14%) Navisworks
11 1 (0.070%) Adobe XD
11 1 (0.070%) Autodesk Smoke
11 1 (0.070%) Notion
11 1 (0.070%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 28 (1.97%) SAP S/4HANA
2 11 (0.77%) Dynamics CRM
3 9 (0.63%) Oracle EBS
4 7 (0.49%) Oracle Payables
4 7 (0.49%) Payment Gateway
4 7 (0.49%) Temenos T24
5 6 (0.42%) Maximo
5 6 (0.42%) Oracle Cash Management
5 6 (0.42%) Oracle General Ledger
5 6 (0.42%) Oracle Receivables
5 6 (0.42%) SAP ERP
6 4 (0.28%) OpenText MBPM
6 4 (0.28%) Oracle BPM
6 4 (0.28%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 4 (0.28%) Salesforce CRM
6 4 (0.28%) Unit4 Business World
6 4 (0.28%) Workday HCM
7 3 (0.21%) Algo Collateral
7 3 (0.21%) Endur
7 3 (0.21%) Oracle EBS R12
Cloud Services
1 318 (22.35%) Azure
2 271 (19.04%) AWS
3 102 (7.17%) Azure DevOps
4 95 (6.68%) GCP
5 85 (5.97%) GitHub
6 82 (5.76%) Power Platform
7 59 (4.15%) GitHub Actions
8 58 (4.08%) Serverless
9 43 (3.02%) AWS Lambda
10 39 (2.74%) Amazon S3
11 34 (2.39%) SaaS
12 27 (1.90%) Dynamics 365
13 23 (1.62%) Power Automate
14 22 (1.55%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 22 (1.55%) Amazon EC2
15 21 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
16 20 (1.41%) Amazon ECS
17 15 (1.05%) OCI
17 15 (1.05%) Snowflake
17 15 (1.05%) Tricentis Tosca
Communications & Networking
1 22 (1.55%) Firewall
2 18 (1.26%) HTTP
3 15 (1.05%) Internet
4 6 (0.42%) 5G
4 6 (0.42%) Broadband
4 6 (0.42%) Wireless
5 5 (0.35%) OpenLDAP
5 5 (0.35%) SMS
6 4 (0.28%) Structured Cabling
6 4 (0.28%) VPN
7 3 (0.21%) DNS
7 3 (0.21%) HTTPS
7 3 (0.21%) Network Security
7 3 (0.21%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.21%) WAN
7 3 (0.21%) WebEx
8 2 (0.14%) Remote Desktop
8 2 (0.14%) SSL
9 1 (0.070%) MQTT
9 1 (0.070%) VoWiFi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 73 (5.13%) Power BI
2 68 (4.78%) SQL Server
3 53 (3.72%) PostgreSQL
3 53 (3.72%) Relational Database
4 43 (3.02%) MySQL
5 41 (2.88%) MongoDB
6 36 (2.53%) Data Warehouse
7 32 (2.25%) NoSQL
8 24 (1.69%) Tableau
9 23 (1.62%) BigQuery
9 23 (1.62%) Oracle Database
10 20 (1.41%) Metadata
11 19 (1.34%) Amazon RDS
12 14 (0.98%) Data Lake
13 12 (0.84%) Redis
14 11 (0.77%) Big Data
14 11 (0.77%) Looker
15 9 (0.63%) Azure SQL Database
16 8 (0.56%) DB2
16 8 (0.56%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 259 (18.20%) JIRA
2 134 (9.42%) Git
3 120 (8.43%) GitLab
4 119 (8.36%) Jenkins
5 99 (6.96%) Selenium
6 74 (5.20%) Cucumber
7 66 (4.64%) Postman
8 64 (4.50%) Cypress.io
9 41 (2.88%) JUnit
10 35 (2.46%) JMeter
11 34 (2.39%) REST Assured
12 20 (1.41%) Appium
13 16 (1.12%) Bitbucket
13 16 (1.12%) Gatling
13 16 (1.12%) SonarQube
14 14 (0.98%) TestNG
15 13 (0.91%) WebDriver
16 12 (0.84%) Zephyr
17 11 (0.77%) CircleCI
18 10 (0.70%) TestRail
General
1 591 (41.53%) Social Skills
2 380 (26.70%) Finance
3 254 (17.85%) Analytical Skills
4 153 (10.75%) Public Sector
5 152 (10.68%) Banking
6 59 (4.15%) Documentation Skills
7 40 (2.81%) Marketing
8 37 (2.60%) Legal
8 37 (2.60%) Telecoms
9 33 (2.32%) Manufacturing
10 30 (2.11%) Investment Banking
11 28 (1.97%) Organisational Skills
11 28 (1.97%) Presentation Skills
12 27 (1.90%) Front Office
13 26 (1.83%) Retail
14 23 (1.62%) Back Office
15 20 (1.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 17 (1.19%) Aerospace
16 17 (1.19%) Financial Institution
16 17 (1.19%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 201 (14.13%) Developer
2 186 (13.07%) Analyst
3 166 (11.67%) Senior
4 151 (10.61%) Lead
5 96 (6.75%) QA Engineer
6 89 (6.25%) Business Analyst
7 85 (5.97%) Tester
8 66 (4.64%) Test Engineer
9 60 (4.22%) Project Manager
10 56 (3.94%) Consultant
11 52 (3.65%) Java Developer
12 50 (3.51%) Architect
12 50 (3.51%) Test Manager
13 41 (2.88%) Test Analyst
14 38 (2.67%) QA Leader
15 36 (2.53%) QA Tester
16 35 (2.46%) Test Leader
17 32 (2.25%) DevOps Engineer
18 31 (2.18%) Java Engineer
19 30 (2.11%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 140 (9.84%) REST
2 88 (6.18%) .NET
3 80 (5.62%) RESTful
4 78 (5.48%) Playwright
5 72 (5.06%) React
6 71 (4.99%) Spring
6 71 (4.99%) Spring Boot
7 51 (3.58%) SOAP
8 49 (3.44%) HTML
9 46 (3.23%) Node.js
10 44 (3.09%) CSS
11 42 (2.95%) Kafka
12 40 (2.81%) AngularJS
13 32 (2.25%) XML
14 29 (2.04%) .NET Framework
15 27 (1.90%) JMS
16 26 (1.83%) JSON
17 25 (1.76%) Oracle Fusion
18 24 (1.69%) Web Services
19 20 (1.41%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 142 (9.98%) Product Ownership
2 59 (4.15%) Cloud Native
2 59 (4.15%) Onboarding
3 49 (3.44%) Mobile App
4 35 (2.46%) Data Protection Act
5 29 (2.04%) Distributed Systems
5 29 (2.04%) Management Information System
6 28 (1.97%) Legacy Systems
7 26 (1.83%) Enterprise Software
7 26 (1.83%) SWIFT Messaging Network
8 25 (1.76%) Analytical Mindset
9 23 (1.62%) Data Structures
10 21 (1.48%) PMI
11 19 (1.34%) Self-Motivation
12 17 (1.19%) Algorithms
13 15 (1.05%) Derivative
13 15 (1.05%) Virtual Team
14 14 (0.98%) Data Centre
15 13 (0.91%) Reinsurance
15 13 (0.91%) Synthetic Data
Operating Systems
1 77 (5.41%) Windows
2 46 (3.23%) Linux
3 23 (1.62%) Android
4 22 (1.55%) Apple iOS
5 19 (1.34%) Unix
5 19 (1.34%) Windows Server
6 8 (0.56%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 6 (0.42%) Ubuntu
8 4 (0.28%) CentOS
8 4 (0.28%) VMS
9 3 (0.21%) Debian
9 3 (0.21%) Windows 10
10 2 (0.14%) Mac OS
10 2 (0.14%) Solaris
11 1 (0.070%) Mac OS X
11 1 (0.070%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 652 (45.82%) Agile
2 412 (28.95%) CI/CD
3 394 (27.69%) DevOps
4 389 (27.34%) Problem-Solving
5 372 (26.14%) Test Automation
6 218 (15.32%) Stakeholder Management
7 198 (13.91%) Scrum
8 188 (13.21%) Continuous Improvement
9 186 (13.07%) User Acceptance Testing
10 174 (12.23%) Validation
11 164 (11.52%) Migration
12 161 (11.31%) Test Strategy
13 156 (10.96%) Microservices
14 145 (10.19%) SDLC
15 133 (9.35%) Test Scripting
16 129 (9.07%) Stakeholder Engagement
17 122 (8.57%) User Experience
18 110 (7.73%) Project Management
19 107 (7.52%) AI
20 106 (7.45%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 262 (18.41%) SQL
2 199 (13.98%) Java
3 180 (12.65%) Python
4 122 (8.57%) JavaScript
5 105 (7.38%) C#
6 81 (5.69%) TypeScript
7 39 (2.74%) PL/SQL
8 25 (1.76%) T-SQL
9 24 (1.69%) PHP
10 22 (1.55%) PowerShell
11 20 (1.41%) Go
12 18 (1.26%) Bash
13 17 (1.19%) C++
14 15 (1.05%) Kotlin
15 13 (0.91%) C
16 12 (0.84%) Ruby
16 12 (0.84%) VBA
17 9 (0.63%) VB
18 8 (0.56%) Perl
18 8 (0.56%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 234 (16.44%) Security Cleared
2 198 (13.91%) SC Cleared
3 145 (10.19%) Degree
4 54 (3.79%) PMI Certification
5 48 (3.37%) Computer Science Degree
6 43 (3.02%) PMP
7 40 (2.81%) ISTQB
8 38 (2.67%) BPSS Clearance
9 34 (2.39%) Master's Degree
10 19 (1.34%) AWS Certification
10 19 (1.34%) CISSP
11 16 (1.12%) Oracle Certification
12 15 (1.05%) DV Cleared
13 13 (0.91%) CBAP
14 11 (0.77%) Azure Certification
14 11 (0.77%) CISM
14 11 (0.77%) OCA
15 8 (0.56%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 7 (0.49%) CEH
16 7 (0.49%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 107 (7.52%) Accessibility
2 66 (4.64%) Data Quality
3 43 (3.02%) GDPR
4 29 (2.04%) PMO
5 22 (1.55%) WCAG
6 21 (1.48%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 19 (1.34%) PSD2
8 16 (1.12%) SEPA
9 15 (1.05%) NIST
9 15 (1.05%) PCI DSS
10 13 (0.91%) ISO 20022
11 12 (0.84%) SLA
11 12 (0.84%) Software Quality Assurance
12 9 (0.63%) COBIT
13 8 (0.56%) GxP
13 8 (0.56%) ISO 9001
14 7 (0.49%) IFRS
15 6 (0.42%) EU AI Act
15 6 (0.42%) ISO 8583
15 6 (0.42%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 109 (7.66%) Docker
2 10 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (0.42%) Active Directory
4 5 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 4 (0.28%) Virtual Desktop
6 2 (0.14%) VirtualBox
7 1 (0.070%) Firmware
7 1 (0.070%) GridGain
7 1 (0.070%) Oracle RAC
7 1 (0.070%) VMware ESXi
7 1 (0.070%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 112 (7.87%) Kubernetes
2 67 (4.71%) Terraform
3 43 (3.02%) Ansible
4 31 (2.18%) Grafana
5 15 (1.05%) Prometheus
6 10 (0.70%) HP ALM
7 9 (0.63%) Argo
8 8 (0.56%) Puppet
9 7 (0.49%) Progress Chef
10 5 (0.35%) CloudHub
10 5 (0.35%) Control-M
11 4 (0.28%) Consul
11 4 (0.28%) Nmap
11 4 (0.28%) Rsyslog
11 4 (0.28%) SCOM
11 4 (0.28%) Single Sign-On
12 3 (0.21%) Nagios
12 3 (0.21%) PingFederate
12 3 (0.21%) RSA Archer
12 3 (0.21%) Salt
Vendors
1 164 (11.52%) Microsoft
2 123 (8.64%) Oracle
3 73 (5.13%) SAP
4 58 (4.08%) ServiceNow
5 55 (3.87%) Salesforce
6 35 (2.46%) Google
7 25 (1.76%) Citrix
8 21 (1.48%) Splunk
9 18 (1.26%) Databricks
10 17 (1.19%) HP
10 17 (1.19%) IBM
10 17 (1.19%) MuleSoft
11 15 (1.05%) Red Hat
12 14 (0.98%) Workday
13 11 (0.77%) VMware
14 10 (0.70%) UiPath
15 9 (0.63%) Adobe
15 9 (0.63%) Blue Prism
16 8 (0.56%) Pega
17 7 (0.49%) Dynatrace