Task Automation Contract Job Trends

Task Automation
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Task Automation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 267 229 388
Rank change year-on-year -38 +159 +67
Contract jobs citing Task Automation 394 346 226
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.98% 1.14% 0.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.13% 1.27% 0.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 282 209 174
10th Percentile £320 £317 £363
25th Percentile £400 £400 £445
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £525
Median % change year-on-year - -9.52% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £588 £609
90th Percentile £750 £656 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £464 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.33% -6.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 11 0
Median hourly rate £46.00 £29.00 -
Median % change year-on-year +58.62% - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £24.66 -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Task Automation 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 34,951 27,281 38,890
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.91% 89.56% 87.08%
Number of daily rates quoted 22,148 16,723 25,428
10th Percentile £310 £306 £300
25th Percentile £410 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £720 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £493 £500
% change year-on-year -2.59% -1.45% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,114 833 2,148
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.25
25th Percentile £17.87 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £34.00
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -4.41% -2.86%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.75 £60.75
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.12
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £30.78 £35.00
% change year-on-year -18.29% -12.06% +7.63%

Task Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Task Automation job vacancy trend in the UK

Task Automation
Daily Rate Trend

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

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Task Automation

Task Automation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Task Automation over the 6 months to 17 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Task Automation in the UK

Task Automation
Hourly Rate Trend

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

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Task Automation

Task Automation
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 Task Automation within the UK over the 6 months to 17 February 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
England -39 328 £500 +5.26% 105
UK excluding London -45 188 £464 -1.33% 91
London -21 163 £575 +9.52% 30
Work from Home +13 151 £550 +15.79% 50
North of England -36 60 £450 -4.26% 25
South East -17 39 £440 +12.76% 29
Yorkshire -26 38 £450 +1.98% 8
Midlands -43 33 £527 +10.03% 13
West Midlands -35 31 £550 +13.64% 9
Scotland +3 27 £438 -8.85% 3
North West -33 18 £448 -4.68% 13
South West -33 18 £525 +11.11% 15
East of England -32 7 £500 +8.11% 9
North East -11 4 £365 -22.34% 4
Wales - 4 £525 - 1
East Midlands -24 2 £450 +13.92% 4
Northern Ireland - 2 £683 - 2

Task Automation
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 26 (6.60%) Microsoft Exchange
2 23 (5.84%) SharePoint
3 9 (2.28%) Confluence
4 8 (2.03%) Appian
4 8 (2.03%) IIS
5 6 (1.52%) Apache
6 5 (1.27%) iPlanet
6 5 (1.27%) JBoss
6 5 (1.27%) WebSphere
6 5 (1.27%) WebSphere Application Server
7 4 (1.02%) OpenStack
8 3 (0.76%) Apache Airflow
9 2 (0.51%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.51%) Oracle Workflow
9 2 (0.51%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.25%) Apache Spark
10 1 (0.25%) CMS
10 1 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
10 1 (0.25%) SharePoint 2013
Applications
1 20 (5.08%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (1.02%) MS Visio
3 3 (0.76%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.51%) Maximo
1 2 (0.51%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.51%) Oracle EBS R12
1 2 (0.51%) Oracle ERP
1 2 (0.51%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.25%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 194 (49.24%) Azure
2 136 (34.52%) AWS
3 99 (25.13%) GCP
4 52 (13.20%) Entra ID
5 44 (11.17%) Microsoft 365
6 39 (9.90%) GitHub
7 37 (9.39%) OpenShift
8 28 (7.11%) GitHub Actions
9 26 (6.60%) Azure DevOps
10 24 (6.09%) AWS CloudFormation
11 23 (5.84%) Serverless
12 22 (5.58%) Power Automate
13 21 (5.33%) Power Platform
14 16 (4.06%) Amazon S3
15 14 (3.55%) OneDrive
16 13 (3.30%) Amazon EKS
17 12 (3.05%) AWS Lambda
17 12 (3.05%) Azure Monitor
17 12 (3.05%) Datadog
17 12 (3.05%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 37 (9.39%) DNS
2 30 (7.61%) Firewall
3 29 (7.36%) DHCP
4 21 (5.33%) Kerberos
5 18 (4.57%) SSH
6 14 (3.55%) TCP/IP
7 12 (3.05%) VPN
8 10 (2.54%) Network Security
9 5 (1.27%) WAN
10 4 (1.02%) AMQP
10 4 (1.02%) HTTP
10 4 (1.02%) LAN
11 3 (0.76%) Cisco Nexus
11 3 (0.76%) SSL
12 2 (0.51%) DWDM
12 2 (0.51%) Internet
12 2 (0.51%) NetScaler
12 2 (0.51%) SAN
12 2 (0.51%) SD-WAN
12 2 (0.51%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (7.36%) SQL Server
2 27 (6.85%) PostgreSQL
3 20 (5.08%) Relational Database
4 15 (3.81%) Power BI
5 13 (3.30%) Oracle Database
6 10 (2.54%) Amazon RDS
6 10 (2.54%) MySQL
7 9 (2.28%) Pinecone
8 8 (2.03%) Data Warehouse
9 6 (1.52%) RDBMS
10 5 (1.27%) Azure SQL Database
10 5 (1.27%) Metadata
10 5 (1.27%) MongoDB
10 5 (1.27%) NoSQL
11 4 (1.02%) BigQuery
11 4 (1.02%) Elasticsearch
11 4 (1.02%) Oracle Reports
11 4 (1.02%) Power Query
11 4 (1.02%) Snowflake Schema
11 4 (1.02%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 53 (13.45%) Jenkins
2 44 (11.17%) Git
3 35 (8.88%) GitLab
4 18 (4.57%) JIRA
4 18 (4.57%) Sonatype Nexus
5 10 (2.54%) CircleCI
6 8 (2.03%) Bitbucket
6 8 (2.03%) Maven
6 8 (2.03%) MLflow
7 7 (1.78%) SonarQube
8 5 (1.27%) Artifactory
8 5 (1.27%) Bitbucket Server
8 5 (1.27%) CA Release Automation
8 5 (1.27%) Gatling
8 5 (1.27%) JMeter
8 5 (1.27%) JUnit
8 5 (1.27%) LoadRunner
8 5 (1.27%) Postman
8 5 (1.27%) Selenium
9 4 (1.02%) Cypress.io
General
1 154 (39.09%) Social Skills
2 73 (18.53%) Finance
3 50 (12.69%) Analytical Skills
4 36 (9.14%) Public Sector
5 27 (6.85%) Banking
6 7 (1.78%) Investment Banking
6 7 (1.78%) Legal
6 7 (1.78%) Presentation Skills
7 6 (1.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.52%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.27%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.27%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (1.27%) Retail
9 4 (1.02%) Military
10 3 (0.76%) Financial Institution
10 3 (0.76%) Games
10 3 (0.76%) Law
11 2 (0.51%) Corporate Banking
11 2 (0.51%) Retail Banking
12 1 (0.25%) Private Banking
Job Titles
1 48 (12.18%) Developer
2 42 (10.66%) Architect
3 37 (9.39%) CyberArk Architect
4 27 (6.85%) DevOps Engineer
5 24 (6.09%) Administrator
5 24 (6.09%) Automation Engineer
6 22 (5.58%) Analyst
7 21 (5.33%) Senior
8 20 (5.08%) Platform Engineer
9 17 (4.31%) Java Developer
9 17 (4.31%) Site Reliability Engineer
10 15 (3.81%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
10 15 (3.81%) Infrastructure Engineer
11 13 (3.30%) Lead
12 12 (3.05%) DBA
12 12 (3.05%) Site Engineer
13 11 (2.79%) Consultant
13 11 (2.79%) Support Engineer
14 10 (2.54%) Data Engineer
15 9 (2.28%) Applications Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 64 (16.24%) REST
2 54 (13.71%) LDAP
3 41 (10.41%) SOAP
4 33 (8.38%) OAuth
5 25 (6.35%) Node.js
6 24 (6.09%) Elastic Stack
7 23 (5.84%) SAML
8 17 (4.31%) .NET
8 17 (4.31%) Web Services
9 14 (3.55%) RESTful
10 13 (3.30%) Kafka
11 12 (3.05%) Pandas
12 11 (2.79%) FastAPI
12 11 (2.79%) JWT
12 11 (2.79%) Microsoft Graph
12 11 (2.79%) NumPy
13 10 (2.54%) PyTorch
14 9 (2.28%) Faiss
14 9 (2.28%) Hugging Face
14 9 (2.28%) OpenID
Miscellaneous
1 44 (11.17%) Security Posture
2 43 (10.91%) Enterprise Software
3 23 (5.84%) Onboarding
4 21 (5.33%) Cloud Native
5 19 (4.82%) Replication
6 12 (3.05%) Distributed Systems
6 12 (3.05%) Legacy Systems
7 10 (2.54%) Low-Code
8 8 (2.03%) Clustering
8 8 (2.03%) Data Protection Act
9 7 (1.78%) Data Centre
9 7 (1.78%) Hybrid Cloud
9 7 (1.78%) PKI
10 6 (1.52%) Management Information System
11 5 (1.27%) AI Agents
11 5 (1.27%) Linux Command Line
11 5 (1.27%) Private Cloud
11 5 (1.27%) Product Ownership
12 4 (1.02%) Security Operations Centre
12 4 (1.02%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 101 (25.63%) Linux
2 81 (20.56%) Windows
3 37 (9.39%) Windows Server
4 22 (5.58%) Unix
5 15 (3.81%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 9 (2.28%) VMS
7 8 (2.03%) CentOS
8 5 (1.27%) Mac OS
9 4 (1.02%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.76%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.51%) AIX
11 2 (0.51%) Android
11 2 (0.51%) Apple iOS
11 2 (0.51%) CoreOS
11 2 (0.51%) Data ONTAP
12 1 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 146 (37.06%) Problem-Solving
2 136 (34.52%) CI/CD
3 100 (25.38%) DevOps
4 68 (17.26%) Infrastructure as Code
5 63 (15.99%) Containerisation
6 56 (14.21%) Agile
7 52 (13.20%) SIEM
8 48 (12.18%) Continuous Improvement
8 48 (12.18%) Stakeholder Engagement
9 44 (11.17%) Migration
9 44 (11.17%) Site Reliability Engineering
10 43 (10.91%) Observability
10 43 (10.91%) Technical Leadership
11 42 (10.66%) AI
11 42 (10.66%) Disaster Recovery
12 41 (10.41%) Configuration Management
13 40 (10.15%) Root Cause Analysis
14 39 (9.90%) High Availability
14 39 (9.90%) Privileged Access Management
14 39 (9.90%) Workflow
Programming Languages
1 204 (51.78%) Python
2 155 (39.34%) PowerShell
3 67 (17.01%) Bash
3 67 (17.01%) SQL
4 51 (12.94%) Java
5 35 (8.88%) Shell Script
6 26 (6.60%) JavaScript
7 25 (6.35%) Go
8 21 (5.33%) TypeScript
9 18 (4.57%) C#
10 14 (3.55%) Kusto Query Language
11 11 (2.79%) VBA
12 8 (2.03%) Bicep
12 8 (2.03%) Perl
13 7 (1.78%) PL/SQL
14 6 (1.52%) Groovy
15 3 (0.76%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 3 (0.76%) PHP
15 3 (0.76%) Ruby
16 2 (0.51%) Korn
Qualifications
1 130 (32.99%) Security Cleared
2 98 (24.87%) SC Cleared
3 29 (7.36%) Degree
4 24 (6.09%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (4.06%) Computer Science Degree
6 15 (3.81%) DV Cleared
7 13 (3.30%) Azure Certification
8 11 (2.79%) CISSP
9 9 (2.28%) AWS Certification
9 9 (2.28%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (1.78%) OCP
10 7 (1.78%) Oracle Certification
11 5 (1.27%) Master's Degree
12 4 (1.02%) CFCE
12 4 (1.02%) Cisco Certification
12 4 (1.02%) CISM
12 4 (1.02%) GCFA
12 4 (1.02%) GCIA
12 4 (1.02%) GCIH
12 4 (1.02%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 38 (9.64%) GDPR
2 25 (6.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 19 (4.82%) NIST
4 16 (4.06%) Data Quality
5 14 (3.55%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 10 (2.54%) QA
7 7 (1.78%) SLA
8 5 (1.27%) HIPAA
8 5 (1.27%) PCI DSS
9 4 (1.02%) SOC 2
10 2 (0.51%) Accessibility
10 2 (0.51%) EU AI Act
10 2 (0.51%) GRC
11 1 (0.25%) COBIT
11 1 (0.25%) GMP
11 1 (0.25%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 1 (0.25%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 1 (0.25%) PMO
System Software
1 96 (24.37%) Active Directory
2 64 (16.24%) Docker
3 26 (6.60%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (2.54%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (1.27%) Tivoli Directory Server
6 4 (1.02%) Hyper-V
6 4 (1.02%) KVM
7 3 (0.76%) Virtual Desktop
7 3 (0.76%) vSphere
7 3 (0.76%) Xen
8 2 (0.51%) NFS
8 2 (0.51%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.25%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.25%) HDFS
9 1 (0.25%) Microsoft App-V
9 1 (0.25%) RHEV
9 1 (0.25%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.25%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.25%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 85 (21.57%) Kubernetes
2 84 (21.32%) Terraform
3 72 (18.27%) Ansible
4 44 (11.17%) Grafana
5 36 (9.14%) Prometheus
6 25 (6.35%) Single Sign-On
7 23 (5.84%) Progress Chef
8 18 (4.57%) Microsoft Intune
9 16 (4.06%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 14 (3.55%) Puppet
11 12 (3.05%) SCCM
12 11 (2.79%) Oracle RMAN
13 7 (1.78%) Podman
14 6 (1.52%) CA Single Sign-On
14 6 (1.52%) NetBackup
14 6 (1.52%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 5 (1.27%) CA Wily
15 5 (1.27%) Kibana
15 5 (1.27%) logstash
15 5 (1.27%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 105 (26.65%) Microsoft
2 45 (11.42%) CyberArk
3 38 (9.64%) Google
4 37 (9.39%) Oracle
5 35 (8.88%) BeyondTrust
6 34 (8.63%) Centrify
7 33 (8.38%) Splunk
8 27 (6.85%) VMware
9 20 (5.08%) Red Hat
10 19 (4.82%) Okta
11 18 (4.57%) ServiceNow
12 15 (3.81%) OpenAI
13 8 (2.03%) Automation Anywhere
13 8 (2.03%) Databricks
13 8 (2.03%) UiPath
14 7 (1.78%) Cisco
14 7 (1.78%) IBM
15 6 (1.52%) AppDynamics
15 6 (1.52%) Veritas
16 5 (1.27%) Palo Alto