Test Automation Contract Job Trends

Automated Testing
UK

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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 48 50
Rank change year-on-year +3 +2 +3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,270 1,456 1,619
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.31% 4.48% 3.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.07% 4.95% 4.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,465 1,015 1,063
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £387 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £480 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.04% -6.34% -2.38%
75th Percentile £575 £584 £610
90th Percentile £663 £700 £718
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £463 £507
% change year-on-year -2.70% -8.78% +0.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 31 45
10th Percentile £36.50 £35.00 £48.80
25th Percentile £60.50 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -20.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.76 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.60 £75.00 £73.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -13.30%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Test 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 44,805 29,397 36,049
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.08% 90.38% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,846 18,489 23,062
10th Percentile £325 £300 £303
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,636 1,550 2,325
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.34 £16.30
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.65 £61.60
90th Percentile £82.75 £70.00 £73.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.33 £38.12
% change year-on-year +84.96% -36.18% -4.70%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Test Automation job vacancy trend in the UK

Test Automation
Daily Rate Trend

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

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

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 17 July 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Trend

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

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

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 17 July 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Top 18 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Test Automation within the UK over the 6 months to 17 July 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 +5 1,915 £475 -2.06% 498
UK excluding London +5 1,117 £450 -2.70% 389
London +2 875 £500 - 185
Work from Home +2 646 £475 +4.40% 250
North of England +18 384 £463 +2.78% 100
Midlands +8 244 £450 +9.42% 48
West Midlands +28 227 £450 -6.83% 26
South East -38 194 £459 -8.20% 135
North West +1 154 £478 +19.20% 52
Yorkshire +8 153 £496 -0.75% 29
South West +3 115 £450 +2.86% 48
North East +10 87 £425 +7.59% 19
East of England +19 86 £450 -1.91% 46
Scotland -23 71 £440 -10.34% 10
Wales 0 35 £475 +15.15% 11
Northern Ireland +20 21 £475 +16.28% 6
East Midlands -40 17 £425 +51.79% 22
Channel Islands - 2 - -

Test 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
1 194 (8.55%) Confluence
2 52 (2.29%) Apache Spark
3 46 (2.03%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.03%) SAS
4 24 (1.06%) Apache
5 17 (0.75%) SharePoint
6 14 (0.62%) CMS
7 10 (0.44%) nginx
7 10 (0.44%) Tomcat
7 10 (0.44%) WebLogic
8 7 (0.31%) Camunda
9 5 (0.22%) Appian
10 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
10 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
11 3 (0.13%) Kentico
12 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.088%) Mendix
12 2 (0.088%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.088%) Mule
Applications
1 28 (1.23%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.70%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 11 (0.48%) Microsoft Project
4 8 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.088%) Trello
7 1 (0.044%) Mingle
7 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 24 (1.06%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.75%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.75%) SAP S/4HANA
3 12 (0.53%) Oracle EBS
3 12 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
4 8 (0.35%) Findur
5 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
5 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
5 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
5 6 (0.26%) Shopify
6 5 (0.22%) BambooHR
7 4 (0.18%) Infor CloudSuite
7 4 (0.18%) Infor LN
7 4 (0.18%) Infor M3
7 4 (0.18%) Loan IQ
8 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
8 3 (0.13%) Maximo
9 2 (0.088%) Advent Geneva
9 2 (0.088%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.088%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 671 (29.56%) Azure
2 665 (29.30%) AWS
3 409 (18.02%) GitHub
4 305 (13.44%) Azure DevOps
5 249 (10.97%) GitHub Actions
6 165 (7.27%) GCP
7 157 (6.92%) Serverless
8 109 (4.80%) AWS Lambda
9 100 (4.41%) Amazon S3
10 99 (4.36%) Power Platform
11 68 (3.00%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 65 (2.86%) OpenShift
13 61 (2.69%) Amazon ECS
14 54 (2.38%) Amazon EC2
14 54 (2.38%) AWS CloudFormation
15 48 (2.11%) dbt
16 45 (1.98%) GitHub Copilot
17 44 (1.94%) Amazon EKS
17 44 (1.94%) Snowflake
18 42 (1.85%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.10%) HTTP
2 19 (0.84%) Firewall
3 16 (0.70%) SAN
4 13 (0.57%) Network Security
5 11 (0.48%) WAN
6 10 (0.44%) 5G
7 9 (0.40%) 2G
7 9 (0.40%) 3G
7 9 (0.40%) 4G
7 9 (0.40%) Diameter Protocol
7 9 (0.40%) MPLS
7 9 (0.40%) SIGTRAN
7 9 (0.40%) SS7
8 8 (0.35%) VPN
9 7 (0.31%) BGP
10 6 (0.26%) LAN
10 6 (0.26%) SD-WAN
10 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
10 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
10 6 (0.26%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 123 (5.42%) MongoDB
1 123 (5.42%) PostgreSQL
2 113 (4.98%) Data Warehouse
3 98 (4.32%) NoSQL
4 85 (3.74%) SQL Server
5 81 (3.57%) Relational Database
6 77 (3.39%) Power BI
7 47 (2.07%) DynamoDB
8 45 (1.98%) Metadata
9 40 (1.76%) Oracle Reports
10 39 (1.72%) Big Data
11 33 (1.45%) Amazon Athena
11 33 (1.45%) MySQL
11 33 (1.45%) Pentaho
12 31 (1.37%) Amazon RDS
13 27 (1.19%) Redis
14 26 (1.15%) Amazon Redshift
14 26 (1.15%) Data Lake
15 24 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
16 22 (0.97%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 424 (18.68%) JIRA
2 419 (18.46%) Git
3 365 (16.08%) Jenkins
4 305 (13.44%) GitLab
5 291 (12.82%) Selenium
6 168 (7.40%) Postman
7 152 (6.70%) Cucumber
8 119 (5.24%) REST Assured
9 117 (5.15%) Cypress.io
10 115 (5.07%) JUnit
11 101 (4.45%) JMeter
12 66 (2.91%) Zephyr
13 65 (2.86%) WebDriver
14 56 (2.47%) SonarQube
15 52 (2.29%) Gatling
16 49 (2.16%) Gradle
17 43 (1.89%) Mockito
18 40 (1.76%) Bitbucket
19 39 (1.72%) Maven
20 36 (1.59%) SpecFlow
General
1 599 (26.39%) Social Skills
2 407 (17.93%) Finance
3 307 (13.52%) Public Sector
4 285 (12.56%) Analytical Skills
5 188 (8.28%) Banking
6 60 (2.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.94%) Documentation Skills
8 37 (1.63%) Front Office
8 37 (1.63%) Investment Banking
9 32 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
10 30 (1.32%) Telecoms
11 28 (1.23%) Retail
12 27 (1.19%) Military
13 24 (1.06%) Financial Institution
14 20 (0.88%) Aerospace
15 18 (0.79%) Manufacturing
16 16 (0.70%) Back Office
16 16 (0.70%) Legal
16 16 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
17 14 (0.62%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 478 (21.06%) Developer
2 367 (16.17%) Senior
3 246 (10.84%) Lead
4 232 (10.22%) Test Engineer
4 232 (10.22%) Tester
5 156 (6.87%) Java Developer
6 152 (6.70%) Data Engineer
7 118 (5.20%) Analyst
8 117 (5.15%) Software Engineer
9 108 (4.76%) DevOps Engineer
10 104 (4.58%) Architect
11 102 (4.49%) Senior Developer
11 102 (4.49%) Test Automation Engineer
12 92 (4.05%) Automation Tester
13 91 (4.01%) QA Engineer
14 90 (3.96%) Test Leader
15 77 (3.39%) Test Analyst
16 72 (3.17%) Full-Stack Developer
17 61 (2.69%) Test Manager
18 58 (2.56%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 289 (12.73%) REST
2 268 (11.81%) Playwright
3 211 (9.30%) React
4 190 (8.37%) RESTful
5 186 (8.19%) Spring
6 165 (7.27%) Kafka
7 155 (6.83%) .NET
8 152 (6.70%) Spring Boot
9 122 (5.37%) Node.js
10 92 (4.05%) AngularJS
11 88 (3.88%) HTML
12 80 (3.52%) CSS
13 65 (2.86%) OAuth
14 57 (2.51%) pytest
15 54 (2.38%) Jest
16 51 (2.25%) Swagger
17 49 (2.16%) JSON
18 47 (2.07%) Gherkin
18 47 (2.07%) HTML5
19 44 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 303 (13.35%) Cloud Native
2 166 (7.31%) Product Ownership
3 138 (6.08%) Distributed Systems
4 81 (3.57%) Enterprise Software
5 64 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
6 53 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
6 53 (2.33%) Onboarding
7 48 (2.11%) Self-Motivation
8 44 (1.94%) Mobile App
8 44 (1.94%) Virtual Team
9 31 (1.37%) AI Agents
9 31 (1.37%) Distributed Architecture
10 29 (1.28%) Security Posture
11 27 (1.19%) Embedded Systems
12 26 (1.15%) NHS
13 25 (1.10%) Management Information System
14 22 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.93%) Fixed Income
16 20 (0.88%) Algorithms
17 19 (0.84%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 136 (5.99%) Linux
2 78 (3.44%) Windows
3 74 (3.26%) Unix
4 42 (1.85%) Android
5 41 (1.81%) Apple iOS
6 25 (1.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 18 (0.79%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.62%) Mac OS X
9 11 (0.48%) Solaris
10 10 (0.44%) Mac OS
11 8 (0.35%) Windows Server 2008
12 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
13 6 (0.26%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.13%) AIX
16 2 (0.088%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,310 (57.71%) CI/CD
2 1,060 (46.70%) Agile
3 836 (36.83%) DevOps
4 415 (18.28%) Problem-Solving
5 406 (17.89%) Microservices
6 386 (17.00%) Continuous Improvement
7 356 (15.68%) Scrum
8 347 (15.29%) Software Engineering
9 344 (15.15%) Test Strategy
10 340 (14.98%) Validation
11 337 (14.85%) Infrastructure as Code
12 296 (13.04%) Containerisation
13 293 (12.91%) TDD
14 291 (12.82%) AI
15 282 (12.42%) Observability
16 239 (10.53%) End-to-End Testing
17 229 (10.09%) ETL
18 223 (9.82%) Software Testing
19 222 (9.78%) Data Pipeline
20 220 (9.69%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 580 (25.55%) Python
2 571 (25.15%) Java
3 516 (22.73%) SQL
4 296 (13.04%) JavaScript
5 253 (11.15%) TypeScript
6 205 (9.03%) C#
7 82 (3.61%) Bash
8 76 (3.35%) PowerShell
9 53 (2.33%) C++
9 53 (2.33%) Kotlin
10 38 (1.67%) PL/SQL
11 37 (1.63%) Bicep
12 34 (1.50%) Apex Code
12 34 (1.50%) C
12 34 (1.50%) Go
13 30 (1.32%) Scala
14 23 (1.01%) Ruby
14 23 (1.01%) Swift
15 21 (0.93%) Shell Script
16 16 (0.70%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 706 (31.10%) Security Cleared
2 592 (26.08%) SC Cleared
3 109 (4.80%) Degree
4 107 (4.71%) BPSS Clearance
5 102 (4.49%) ISTQB
6 73 (3.22%) DV Cleared
7 55 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
8 28 (1.23%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.19%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 17 (0.75%) Azure Certification
11 15 (0.66%) Master's Degree
12 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.44%) CCNP
15 9 (0.40%) CISSP
15 9 (0.40%) DBS Check
16 7 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 530 (23.35%) QA
2 186 (8.19%) Accessibility
3 158 (6.96%) Data Quality
4 81 (3.57%) WCAG
5 41 (1.81%) GDPR
6 14 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 13 (0.57%) NCSC
7 13 (0.57%) SLA
8 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
9 9 (0.40%) ISO 20022
9 9 (0.40%) NIST
10 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
12 5 (0.22%) FATCA
12 5 (0.22%) GRC
12 5 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
13 4 (0.18%) MiFID
14 3 (0.13%) EU AI Act
14 3 (0.13%) HL7
14 3 (0.13%) SEPA
System Software
1 410 (18.06%) Docker
2 31 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
3 17 (0.75%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.62%) Firmware
4 14 (0.62%) Virtual Machines
5 8 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
6 6 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
7 4 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.13%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.088%) SRDF
10 1 (0.044%) Virtual Servers
10 1 (0.044%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 406 (17.89%) Kubernetes
2 292 (12.86%) Terraform
3 119 (5.24%) Grafana
4 117 (5.15%) Ansible
5 99 (4.36%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.63%) Argo
7 24 (1.06%) HP ALM
8 16 (0.70%) Puppet
9 14 (0.62%) Kibana
10 11 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
11 10 (0.44%) HP Quality Center
12 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
12 8 (0.35%) Progress Chef
13 7 (0.31%) Kustomize
14 6 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
15 5 (0.22%) Forefront Identity Manager
15 5 (0.22%) Istio
15 5 (0.22%) NetIQ Identity Manager
16 4 (0.18%) Packer
Vendors
1 203 (8.94%) Microsoft
2 183 (8.06%) Oracle
3 105 (4.63%) Salesforce
4 75 (3.30%) Databricks
5 63 (2.78%) Google
5 63 (2.78%) Talend
6 59 (2.60%) Red Hat
7 58 (2.56%) Splunk
8 50 (2.20%) ServiceNow
9 42 (1.85%) Denodo
10 41 (1.81%) IBM
11 37 (1.63%) Informatica
11 37 (1.63%) SAP
12 34 (1.50%) VMware
13 30 (1.32%) UiPath
14 29 (1.28%) Dynatrace
15 27 (1.19%) HP
15 27 (1.19%) MuleSoft
16 21 (0.93%) Cisco
17 14 (0.62%) Fortinet