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 10 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 253 229 382
Rank change year-on-year -24 +153 +74
Contract jobs citing Task Automation 407 349 223
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.03% 1.14% 0.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.19% 1.27% 0.57%
Number of daily rates quoted 285 216 171
10th Percentile £320 £328 £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 £599 £578 £600
90th Percentile £750 £663 £675
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.06% -6.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 10 0
10th Percentile £47.98 £21.00 -
25th Percentile £50.94 £21.31 -
Median hourly rate £56.25 £26.83 -
Median % change year-on-year +109.65% - -
75th Percentile £61.94 £57.79 -
90th Percentile £65.13 £66.81 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.50 £23.77 -
% change year-on-year +179.79% - -

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 34,251 27,445 39,124
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.02% 89.42% 87.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,718 16,700 25,680
10th Percentile £306 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £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 £716 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £478 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.50% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,071 843 2,128
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.29
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.05 £16.25
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £33.07
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -1.71% +1.74%
75th Percentile £60.00 £63.50 £60.00
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £73.12
UK excluding London median hourly rate £25.15 £31.08 £35.00
% change year-on-year -19.08% -11.20% +10.55%

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 10 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
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Task Automation over the 6 months to 10 February 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Task Automation in the UK

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 10 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 -33 342 £500 +5.26% 109
UK excluding London -26 199 £465 -1.06% 90
London -29 165 £563 +7.14% 33
Work from Home +24 152 £540 +12.40% 44
North of England -38 62 £449 -3.55% 29
South East -10 42 £430 +7.44% 22
Midlands -37 39 £519 +8.46% 13
West Midlands -28 37 £520 +7.33% 10
Yorkshire -32 37 £450 +9.09% 8
Scotland +9 26 £460 -4.17% 5
North West -30 21 £448 -4.68% 17
South West -29 18 £525 +11.11% 12
East of England -23 8 £500 +8.11% 12
North East -10 4 £365 -22.34% 4
Wales - 4 £525 - 1
East Midlands -32 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 24 (5.90%) Microsoft Exchange
2 21 (5.16%) SharePoint
3 9 (2.21%) Confluence
4 8 (1.97%) Appian
4 8 (1.97%) IIS
5 6 (1.47%) Apache
6 5 (1.23%) iPlanet
6 5 (1.23%) JBoss
6 5 (1.23%) WebSphere
6 5 (1.23%) WebSphere Application Server
7 4 (0.98%) OpenStack
8 3 (0.74%) Apache Airflow
9 2 (0.49%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.49%) Oracle Workflow
9 2 (0.49%) 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 (4.91%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.98%) MS Visio
3 3 (0.74%) Chatbot
3 3 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
4 2 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 2 (0.49%) Maximo
1 2 (0.49%) Oracle EBS
1 2 (0.49%) Oracle EBS R12
1 2 (0.49%) Oracle ERP
1 2 (0.49%) Remedy ITSM
2 1 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.25%) Oracle Applications
2 1 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 196 (48.16%) Azure
2 138 (33.91%) AWS
3 100 (24.57%) GCP
4 50 (12.29%) Entra ID
5 42 (10.32%) Microsoft 365
6 40 (9.83%) GitHub
7 37 (9.09%) OpenShift
8 29 (7.13%) GitHub Actions
9 26 (6.39%) Azure DevOps
10 25 (6.14%) AWS CloudFormation
11 23 (5.65%) Serverless
12 20 (4.91%) Power Automate
13 19 (4.67%) Power Platform
14 16 (3.93%) Amazon S3
15 13 (3.19%) Amazon EKS
15 13 (3.19%) Datadog
16 12 (2.95%) AWS Lambda
16 12 (2.95%) Azure Monitor
16 12 (2.95%) OneDrive
16 12 (2.95%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 37 (9.09%) DNS
2 33 (8.11%) Firewall
3 29 (7.13%) DHCP
4 21 (5.16%) Kerberos
5 18 (4.42%) SSH
6 16 (3.93%) TCP/IP
7 12 (2.95%) Network Security
7 12 (2.95%) VPN
8 7 (1.72%) WAN
9 6 (1.47%) LAN
10 4 (0.98%) AMQP
10 4 (0.98%) HTTP
11 3 (0.74%) Cisco IOS
11 3 (0.74%) SSL
11 3 (0.74%) WLAN
12 2 (0.49%) BGP
12 2 (0.49%) DWDM
12 2 (0.49%) Internet
12 2 (0.49%) SAN
12 2 (0.49%) VLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (7.13%) SQL Server
2 26 (6.39%) PostgreSQL
3 20 (4.91%) Relational Database
4 13 (3.19%) Oracle Database
4 13 (3.19%) Power BI
5 10 (2.46%) Amazon RDS
5 10 (2.46%) MySQL
6 9 (2.21%) Pinecone
7 8 (1.97%) Data Warehouse
8 6 (1.47%) RDBMS
9 5 (1.23%) Azure SQL Database
9 5 (1.23%) Metadata
9 5 (1.23%) MongoDB
9 5 (1.23%) NoSQL
10 4 (0.98%) BigQuery
10 4 (0.98%) Elasticsearch
10 4 (0.98%) InfluxDB
10 4 (0.98%) Power Query
10 4 (0.98%) Snowflake Schema
10 4 (0.98%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 54 (13.27%) Jenkins
2 44 (10.81%) Git
3 36 (8.85%) GitLab
4 18 (4.42%) JIRA
5 17 (4.18%) Sonatype Nexus
6 10 (2.46%) CircleCI
7 8 (1.97%) Bitbucket
7 8 (1.97%) Maven
7 8 (1.97%) MLflow
8 7 (1.72%) SonarQube
9 5 (1.23%) Artifactory
9 5 (1.23%) Bitbucket Server
9 5 (1.23%) CA Release Automation
9 5 (1.23%) Gatling
9 5 (1.23%) JMeter
9 5 (1.23%) JUnit
9 5 (1.23%) LoadRunner
9 5 (1.23%) Postman
9 5 (1.23%) Selenium
10 4 (0.98%) Snyk
General
1 160 (39.31%) Social Skills
2 72 (17.69%) Finance
3 58 (14.25%) Analytical Skills
4 38 (9.34%) Public Sector
5 27 (6.63%) Banking
6 7 (1.72%) Investment Banking
6 7 (1.72%) Legal
6 7 (1.72%) Presentation Skills
7 6 (1.47%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.23%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.23%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (1.23%) Retail
9 4 (0.98%) Games
9 4 (0.98%) Military
10 3 (0.74%) Financial Institution
10 3 (0.74%) Law
11 2 (0.49%) Corporate Banking
11 2 (0.49%) Front Office
11 2 (0.49%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 47 (11.55%) Developer
2 41 (10.07%) Architect
3 37 (9.09%) CyberArk Architect
4 28 (6.88%) DevOps Engineer
5 27 (6.63%) Administrator
6 23 (5.65%) Automation Engineer
7 21 (5.16%) Analyst
7 21 (5.16%) Platform Engineer
7 21 (5.16%) Senior
8 17 (4.18%) Java Developer
8 17 (4.18%) Site Reliability Engineer
9 15 (3.69%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
9 15 (3.69%) Infrastructure Engineer
10 14 (3.44%) DBA
11 13 (3.19%) Lead
12 12 (2.95%) Site Engineer
13 11 (2.70%) Support Engineer
14 10 (2.46%) Consultant
14 10 (2.46%) Data Engineer
15 9 (2.21%) Network Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 64 (15.72%) REST
2 54 (13.27%) LDAP
3 41 (10.07%) SOAP
4 33 (8.11%) OAuth
5 25 (6.14%) Elastic Stack
5 25 (6.14%) Node.js
6 23 (5.65%) SAML
7 17 (4.18%) .NET
7 17 (4.18%) Web Services
8 13 (3.19%) Kafka
8 13 (3.19%) RESTful
9 12 (2.95%) Pandas
10 11 (2.70%) FastAPI
10 11 (2.70%) JWT
10 11 (2.70%) Microsoft Graph
10 11 (2.70%) NumPy
11 10 (2.46%) PyTorch
12 9 (2.21%) Faiss
12 9 (2.21%) Hugging Face
12 9 (2.21%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 44 (10.81%) Security Posture
2 43 (10.57%) Enterprise Software
3 23 (5.65%) Onboarding
4 22 (5.41%) Cloud Native
5 20 (4.91%) Replication
6 13 (3.19%) Distributed Systems
7 11 (2.70%) Legacy Systems
8 10 (2.46%) Low-Code
9 8 (1.97%) Clustering
9 8 (1.97%) Data Centre
10 7 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
10 7 (1.72%) Hybrid Cloud
10 7 (1.72%) PKI
10 7 (1.72%) Private Cloud
11 6 (1.47%) Management Information System
12 5 (1.23%) AI Agents
12 5 (1.23%) Linux Command Line
12 5 (1.23%) Product Ownership
13 4 (0.98%) Security Operations Centre
13 4 (0.98%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 111 (27.27%) Linux
2 88 (21.62%) Windows
3 37 (9.09%) Windows Server
4 28 (6.88%) Unix
5 15 (3.69%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 10 (2.46%) VMS
7 8 (1.97%) CentOS
8 5 (1.23%) Mac OS
9 4 (0.98%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.74%) AIX
10 3 (0.74%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.49%) Android
11 2 (0.49%) Apple iOS
11 2 (0.49%) CoreOS
11 2 (0.49%) Data ONTAP
12 1 (0.25%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 157 (38.57%) Problem-Solving
2 139 (34.15%) CI/CD
3 102 (25.06%) DevOps
4 69 (16.95%) Infrastructure as Code
5 65 (15.97%) Containerisation
6 57 (14.00%) Agile
6 57 (14.00%) SIEM
7 48 (11.79%) Continuous Improvement
7 48 (11.79%) Stakeholder Engagement
8 46 (11.30%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 45 (11.06%) Disaster Recovery
9 45 (11.06%) Migration
10 44 (10.81%) Observability
11 43 (10.57%) High Availability
11 43 (10.57%) Technical Leadership
12 42 (10.32%) AI
13 41 (10.07%) Configuration Management
14 40 (9.83%) Identity Access Management
14 40 (9.83%) Privileged Access Management
14 40 (9.83%) Root Cause Analysis
Programming Languages
1 216 (53.07%) Python
2 160 (39.31%) PowerShell
3 71 (17.44%) Bash
4 67 (16.46%) SQL
5 51 (12.53%) Java
6 38 (9.34%) Shell Script
7 27 (6.63%) Go
8 26 (6.39%) JavaScript
9 21 (5.16%) TypeScript
10 18 (4.42%) C#
11 14 (3.44%) Kusto Query Language
12 11 (2.70%) VBA
13 10 (2.46%) Perl
14 8 (1.97%) Bicep
15 7 (1.72%) PL/SQL
16 6 (1.47%) Groovy
17 3 (0.74%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 3 (0.74%) PHP
17 3 (0.74%) Ruby
18 2 (0.49%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 139 (34.15%) Security Cleared
2 107 (26.29%) SC Cleared
3 29 (7.13%) Degree
4 25 (6.14%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (3.93%) Computer Science Degree
6 15 (3.69%) DV Cleared
7 13 (3.19%) Azure Certification
8 11 (2.70%) CISSP
9 9 (2.21%) AWS Certification
9 9 (2.21%) Microsoft Certification
10 7 (1.72%) OCP
10 7 (1.72%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
12 5 (1.23%) CCNP
12 5 (1.23%) Master's Degree
13 4 (0.98%) CFCE
13 4 (0.98%) CISM
13 4 (0.98%) GCIA
13 4 (0.98%) GCIH
13 4 (0.98%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 38 (9.34%) GDPR
2 25 (6.14%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 19 (4.67%) NIST
4 15 (3.69%) Data Quality
5 14 (3.44%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 10 (2.46%) QA
7 7 (1.72%) SLA
8 5 (1.23%) HIPAA
8 5 (1.23%) PCI DSS
9 4 (0.98%) SOC 2
10 2 (0.49%) Accessibility
10 2 (0.49%) EU AI Act
10 2 (0.49%) 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 94 (23.10%) Active Directory
2 64 (15.72%) Docker
3 26 (6.39%) VMware Infrastructure
4 10 (2.46%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (1.23%) Tivoli Directory Server
6 4 (0.98%) Hyper-V
6 4 (0.98%) KVM
7 3 (0.74%) Virtual Desktop
7 3 (0.74%) vSphere
7 3 (0.74%) Xen
8 2 (0.49%) NFS
8 2 (0.49%) 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%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.25%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 87 (21.38%) Kubernetes
2 85 (20.88%) Terraform
3 72 (17.69%) Ansible
4 45 (11.06%) Grafana
5 37 (9.09%) Prometheus
6 25 (6.14%) Single Sign-On
7 23 (5.65%) Progress Chef
8 16 (3.93%) Active Directory Federation Services
8 16 (3.93%) Microsoft Intune
9 14 (3.44%) Puppet
10 12 (2.95%) SCCM
11 11 (2.70%) Oracle RMAN
12 7 (1.72%) Podman
13 6 (1.47%) CA Single Sign-On
13 6 (1.47%) NetBackup
13 6 (1.47%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
14 5 (1.23%) CA Wily
14 5 (1.23%) Kibana
14 5 (1.23%) logstash
14 5 (1.23%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 103 (25.31%) Microsoft
2 51 (12.53%) CyberArk
3 41 (10.07%) BeyondTrust
4 38 (9.34%) Google
5 37 (9.09%) Oracle
6 34 (8.35%) Centrify
7 33 (8.11%) Splunk
8 28 (6.88%) VMware
9 20 (4.91%) Red Hat
10 19 (4.67%) Okta
11 17 (4.18%) ServiceNow
12 15 (3.69%) OpenAI
13 9 (2.21%) Cisco
14 8 (1.97%) Automation Anywhere
14 8 (1.97%) Databricks
14 8 (1.97%) UiPath
15 7 (1.72%) IBM
16 6 (1.47%) AppDynamics
16 6 (1.47%) Palo Alto
16 6 (1.47%) Veritas