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 21 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 236 226 377
Rank change year-on-year -10 +151 +70
Contract jobs citing Task Automation 420 346 242
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.11% 1.10% 0.56%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.27% 1.24% 0.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 297 211 184
10th Percentile £331 £341 £365
25th Percentile £400 £400 £449
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £475 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.58% -9.52% -8.70%
75th Percentile £599 £575 £625
90th Percentile £750 £670 £680
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -0.21% -6.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 8 0
10th Percentile £47.98 £21.00 -
25th Percentile £50.94 £21.92 -
Median hourly rate £56.25 £26.83 -
Median % change year-on-year +109.65% - -
75th Percentile £61.94 £42.12 -
90th Percentile £65.13 £65.62 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.50 £24.66 -
% change year-on-year +169.67% - -

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 33,018 28,000 37,979
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.63% 88.93% 87.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 20,947 16,996 25,071
10th Percentile £305 £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 £645
90th Percentile £720 £743 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,000 892 1,828
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £14.00
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £17.10
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -13.33% +17.19%
75th Percentile £57.50 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £69.37 £74.99 £75.05
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.55 £30.78 £40.00
% change year-on-year -20.24% -23.05% +53.85%

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 21 January 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 21 January 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 21 January 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 -15 355 £500 +5.26% 161
UK excluding London -19 206 £469 -0.21% 140
London -15 168 £563 +7.14% 36
Work from Home +33 153 £550 +15.79% 65
North of England -26 65 £450 -2.70% 21
South East -10 45 £435 +8.63% 47
Midlands -27 42 £550 +13.64% 23
West Midlands -17 41 £550 +11.79% 12
Yorkshire -28 36 £450 +9.09% 7
Scotland +15 26 £413 -17.50% 2
North West -36 25 £446 -4.34% 9
South West -24 18 £525 +11.70% 26
East of England -24 8 £500 -2.44% 21
North East -12 4 £365 -22.34% 6
Wales - 2 £506 - 5
Northern Ireland - 2 £683 - 2
East Midlands -31 1 £450 +13.92% 10

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 21 (5.00%) Microsoft Exchange
2 19 (4.52%) SharePoint
3 14 (3.33%) Confluence
4 8 (1.90%) Apache
4 8 (1.90%) IIS
5 5 (1.19%) Appian
5 5 (1.19%) iPlanet
5 5 (1.19%) JBoss
5 5 (1.19%) OpenStack
5 5 (1.19%) WebSphere
5 5 (1.19%) WebSphere Application Server
6 2 (0.48%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.48%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 2 (0.48%) Oracle Workflow
6 2 (0.48%) WebLogic
7 1 (0.24%) Apache Spark
7 1 (0.24%) CMS
7 1 (0.24%) SharePoint 2013
Applications
1 25 (5.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.71%) Chatbot
2 3 (0.71%) Microsoft Project
2 3 (0.71%) MS Visio
3 2 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 3 (0.71%) SAP ERP
2 2 (0.48%) Maximo
2 2 (0.48%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.48%) Oracle EBS R12
2 2 (0.48%) Oracle ERP
2 2 (0.48%) Remedy ITSM
3 1 (0.24%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.24%) Oracle Applications
3 1 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 200 (47.62%) Azure
2 140 (33.33%) AWS
3 100 (23.81%) GCP
4 47 (11.19%) Entra ID
5 39 (9.29%) GitHub
6 36 (8.57%) Microsoft 365
7 35 (8.33%) OpenShift
8 30 (7.14%) GitHub Actions
9 28 (6.67%) Azure DevOps
10 26 (6.19%) AWS CloudFormation
11 23 (5.48%) Power Platform
11 23 (5.48%) Serverless
12 18 (4.29%) Power Automate
13 15 (3.57%) Amazon EKS
14 14 (3.33%) Amazon S3
14 14 (3.33%) Datadog
15 13 (3.10%) Azure AKS
16 12 (2.86%) OneDrive
17 10 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
17 10 (2.38%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 36 (8.57%) Firewall
2 35 (8.33%) DNS
3 28 (6.67%) DHCP
4 20 (4.76%) Kerberos
5 19 (4.52%) SSH
6 17 (4.05%) TCP/IP
7 14 (3.33%) Network Security
8 10 (2.38%) VPN
8 10 (2.38%) WAN
9 7 (1.67%) LAN
10 6 (1.43%) Cisco IOS
11 5 (1.19%) BGP
11 5 (1.19%) NX-OS
11 5 (1.19%) WLAN
12 4 (0.95%) AMQP
12 4 (0.95%) HTTP
12 4 (0.95%) SD-WAN
13 3 (0.71%) SSL
14 2 (0.48%) Internet
14 2 (0.48%) SMTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 36 (8.57%) SQL Server
2 31 (7.38%) PostgreSQL
3 24 (5.71%) Relational Database
4 21 (5.00%) Oracle Database
5 17 (4.05%) Power BI
6 10 (2.38%) Amazon RDS
6 10 (2.38%) MySQL
7 7 (1.67%) Data Warehouse
7 7 (1.67%) NoSQL
7 7 (1.67%) RDBMS
8 6 (1.43%) MongoDB
8 6 (1.43%) Oracle Reports
8 6 (1.43%) Pinecone
9 5 (1.19%) Power Query
9 5 (1.19%) Tableau
10 4 (0.95%) Azure SQL Database
10 4 (0.95%) BigQuery
10 4 (0.95%) Elasticsearch
10 4 (0.95%) InfluxDB
10 4 (0.95%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 58 (13.81%) Git
2 52 (12.38%) Jenkins
3 39 (9.29%) GitLab
4 20 (4.76%) JIRA
5 18 (4.29%) Sonatype Nexus
6 12 (2.86%) Bitbucket
7 11 (2.62%) CircleCI
8 10 (2.38%) Maven
9 8 (1.90%) JUnit
9 8 (1.90%) SonarQube
10 6 (1.43%) Artifactory
10 6 (1.43%) Postman
10 6 (1.43%) Selenium
11 5 (1.19%) Bitbucket Server
11 5 (1.19%) CA Release Automation
11 5 (1.19%) Gatling
11 5 (1.19%) JMeter
11 5 (1.19%) MLflow
11 5 (1.19%) Snyk
11 5 (1.19%) webpack
General
1 173 (41.19%) Social Skills
2 69 (16.43%) Finance
3 60 (14.29%) Analytical Skills
4 40 (9.52%) Public Sector
5 27 (6.43%) Banking
6 7 (1.67%) Investment Banking
6 7 (1.67%) Legal
6 7 (1.67%) Presentation Skills
7 6 (1.43%) Documentation Skills
7 6 (1.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 6 (1.43%) Retail
8 5 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
9 4 (0.95%) Games
10 3 (0.71%) Front Office
10 3 (0.71%) Law
10 3 (0.71%) Manufacturing
10 3 (0.71%) Military
11 2 (0.48%) Corporate Banking
11 2 (0.48%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (0.48%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 47 (11.19%) Developer
2 41 (9.76%) Architect
3 37 (8.81%) CyberArk Architect
4 29 (6.90%) Administrator
4 29 (6.90%) DevOps Engineer
5 28 (6.67%) Senior
6 25 (5.95%) Analyst
6 25 (5.95%) Automation Engineer
7 21 (5.00%) Site Reliability Engineer
8 19 (4.52%) Java Developer
9 18 (4.29%) Platform Engineer
10 16 (3.81%) DBA
11 15 (3.57%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 14 (3.33%) Site Engineer
13 13 (3.10%) Lead
14 12 (2.86%) Network Engineer
15 11 (2.62%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
15 11 (2.62%) Consultant
15 11 (2.62%) Support Engineer
16 9 (2.14%) Applications Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 64 (15.24%) REST
2 53 (12.62%) LDAP
3 40 (9.52%) SOAP
4 29 (6.90%) OAuth
5 26 (6.19%) Elastic Stack
6 25 (5.95%) Node.js
7 22 (5.24%) SAML
8 16 (3.81%) FastAPI
9 15 (3.57%) .NET
10 12 (2.86%) Web Services
11 11 (2.62%) Kafka
11 11 (2.62%) RESTful
12 9 (2.14%) JSON
12 9 (2.14%) Microsoft Graph
12 9 (2.14%) OpenID
12 9 (2.14%) Pandas
12 9 (2.14%) YAML
13 7 (1.67%) GraphQL
13 7 (1.67%) JWT
13 7 (1.67%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 44 (10.48%) Security Posture
2 41 (9.76%) Enterprise Software
3 24 (5.71%) Onboarding
4 21 (5.00%) Distributed Systems
5 20 (4.76%) Cloud Native
5 20 (4.76%) Replication
6 9 (2.14%) Data Centre
7 8 (1.90%) Clustering
7 8 (1.90%) Legacy Systems
7 8 (1.90%) Private Cloud
8 7 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
8 7 (1.67%) Linux Command Line
8 7 (1.67%) Low-Code
8 7 (1.67%) PKI
9 6 (1.43%) AI Agents
10 5 (1.19%) Management Information System
10 5 (1.19%) Product Ownership
11 4 (0.95%) Analytical Mindset
11 4 (0.95%) NHS
11 4 (0.95%) Security Operations Centre
Operating Systems
1 116 (27.62%) Linux
2 82 (19.52%) Windows
3 32 (7.62%) Windows Server
4 29 (6.90%) Unix
5 13 (3.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 9 (2.14%) VMS
7 8 (1.90%) CentOS
8 4 (0.95%) AIX
8 4 (0.95%) Ubuntu
9 3 (0.71%) Windows 10
10 2 (0.48%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.24%) Android
11 1 (0.24%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 173 (41.19%) Problem-Solving
2 144 (34.29%) CI/CD
3 112 (26.67%) DevOps
4 73 (17.38%) Infrastructure as Code
5 67 (15.95%) Containerisation
6 66 (15.71%) Agile
7 57 (13.57%) SIEM
8 52 (12.38%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 50 (11.90%) High Availability
10 49 (11.67%) Disaster Recovery
11 45 (10.71%) Stakeholder Engagement
12 43 (10.24%) Observability
13 41 (9.76%) Continuous Improvement
13 41 (9.76%) Identity Access Management
13 41 (9.76%) Technical Leadership
14 40 (9.52%) Migration
14 40 (9.52%) Privileged Access Management
15 39 (9.29%) Configuration Management
15 39 (9.29%) Root Cause Analysis
16 38 (9.05%) ITSM
Programming Languages
1 226 (53.81%) Python
2 155 (36.90%) PowerShell
3 72 (17.14%) Bash
4 70 (16.67%) SQL
5 63 (15.00%) Java
6 49 (11.67%) Shell Script
7 36 (8.57%) Go
8 26 (6.19%) JavaScript
9 22 (5.24%) TypeScript
10 15 (3.57%) C#
11 12 (2.86%) Kusto Query Language
11 12 (2.86%) VBA
12 11 (2.62%) Perl
13 10 (2.38%) Bicep
14 7 (1.67%) Groovy
15 6 (1.43%) PL/SQL
16 5 (1.19%) Data Analysis Expressions
17 3 (0.71%) PHP
17 3 (0.71%) Ruby
17 3 (0.71%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 148 (35.24%) Security Cleared
2 113 (26.90%) SC Cleared
3 29 (6.90%) Degree
4 27 (6.43%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (3.81%) DV Cleared
6 14 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (2.86%) Azure Certification
8 9 (2.14%) Microsoft Certification
9 8 (1.90%) AWS Certification
9 8 (1.90%) CISSP
10 6 (1.43%) Cisco Certification
11 5 (1.19%) CCNP
11 5 (1.19%) Master's Degree
11 5 (1.19%) OCP
11 5 (1.19%) Oracle Certification
12 4 (0.95%) CFCE
12 4 (0.95%) GCFA
12 4 (0.95%) GCIA
12 4 (0.95%) GCIH
12 4 (0.95%) GIAC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 38 (9.05%) GDPR
2 22 (5.24%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 17 (4.05%) NIST
4 15 (3.57%) Data Quality
5 13 (3.10%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 10 (2.38%) QA
7 6 (1.43%) SLA
8 5 (1.19%) HIPAA
8 5 (1.19%) PCI DSS
9 3 (0.71%) SOC 2
10 2 (0.48%) EU AI Act
11 1 (0.24%) Accessibility
11 1 (0.24%) COBIT
11 1 (0.24%) GMP
11 1 (0.24%) GRC
11 1 (0.24%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 1 (0.24%) ISO/IEC 42001
11 1 (0.24%) PMO
System Software
1 88 (20.95%) Active Directory
2 66 (15.71%) Docker
3 23 (5.48%) VMware Infrastructure
4 11 (2.62%) Oracle RAC
5 6 (1.43%) Virtual Machines
6 5 (1.19%) Tivoli Directory Server
7 4 (0.95%) Hyper-V
8 3 (0.71%) Firmware
8 3 (0.71%) KVM
8 3 (0.71%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.71%) Xen
9 1 (0.24%) Apache ZooKeeper
9 1 (0.24%) HDFS
9 1 (0.24%) Microsoft App-V
9 1 (0.24%) RHEV
9 1 (0.24%) VMware ESXi
9 1 (0.24%) vSphere
9 1 (0.24%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 90 (21.43%) Kubernetes
2 84 (20.00%) Terraform
3 77 (18.33%) Ansible
4 47 (11.19%) Grafana
5 40 (9.52%) Prometheus
6 24 (5.71%) Progress Chef
6 24 (5.71%) Single Sign-On
7 16 (3.81%) Puppet
8 15 (3.57%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 14 (3.33%) SCCM
10 12 (2.86%) Data Guard
10 12 (2.86%) Microsoft Intune
11 11 (2.62%) Oracle RMAN
12 9 (2.14%) yum
13 8 (1.90%) Podman
14 6 (1.43%) CA Single Sign-On
14 6 (1.43%) NetBackup
15 5 (1.19%) CA Wily
15 5 (1.19%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
15 5 (1.19%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 107 (25.48%) Microsoft
2 53 (12.62%) CyberArk
3 46 (10.95%) Oracle
4 42 (10.00%) BeyondTrust
5 34 (8.10%) Centrify
6 33 (7.86%) Google
7 32 (7.62%) Splunk
8 24 (5.71%) VMware
9 17 (4.05%) Okta
9 17 (4.05%) Red Hat
10 15 (3.57%) ServiceNow
11 12 (2.86%) Cisco
11 12 (2.86%) OpenAI
12 8 (1.90%) Databricks
12 8 (1.90%) Palo Alto
12 8 (1.90%) SAP
13 7 (1.67%) Atlassian
13 7 (1.67%) F5
13 7 (1.67%) IBM
14 6 (1.43%) Veritas