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 16 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 50
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 +1
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,269 1,451 1,606
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.31% 4.47% 3.77%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.07% 4.94% 4.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,463 1,011 1,052
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £390 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £483 £516
Median % change year-on-year -1.66% -6.40% -1.71%
75th Percentile £575 £584 £611
90th Percentile £663 £700 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £453 £463 £506
% change year-on-year -2.05% -8.51% -0.39%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 30 46
10th Percentile £36.19 £34.53 £49.00
25th Percentile £60.17 £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 £64.52 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.40 £75.25 £76.00
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 44,779 29,366 36,386
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.09% 90.39% 85.36%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,858 18,449 23,259
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
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 2,648 1,547 2,431
10th Percentile £15.00 £14.22 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.21 £17.45 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.29%
75th Percentile £68.50 £52.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.65 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £38.12
% change year-on-year +84.88% -36.15% -3.74%

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 16 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 16 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 16 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 1,916 £475 -1.86% 536
UK excluding London +5 1,121 £453 -2.05% 432
London +7 871 £500 - 198
Work from Home 0 644 £475 +4.40% 271
North of England +17 386 £460 +2.91% 104
Midlands +7 245 £450 +9.09% 51
West Midlands +28 228 £450 -6.83% 27
South East -37 194 £459 -8.20% 150
North West 0 155 £475 +18.75% 51
Yorkshire +4 154 £491 -1.75% 36
South West +13 115 £450 +2.86% 54
East of England +20 87 £450 -1.91% 42
North East +9 87 £425 +6.25% 17
Scotland -23 70 £440 -10.93% 15
Wales +1 35 £475 +15.15% 13
Northern Ireland +21 22 £475 +16.28% 16
East Midlands -38 17 £425 +51.79% 24
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 47 (2.07%) SAS
4 46 (2.03%) Apache Airflow
5 24 (1.06%) Apache
6 17 (0.75%) SharePoint
7 14 (0.62%) CMS
8 10 (0.44%) nginx
8 10 (0.44%) Tomcat
8 10 (0.44%) WebLogic
9 7 (0.31%) Camunda
10 5 (0.22%) Appian
11 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
11 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
11 4 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
12 3 (0.13%) Kentico
13 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
13 2 (0.088%) Mendix
13 2 (0.088%) Microsoft Exchange
13 2 (0.088%) Mule
Applications
1 29 (1.28%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.71%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.48%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 11 (0.48%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.40%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.044%) Mingle
6 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
6 1 (0.044%) Trello
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
1 670 (29.53%) Azure
2 663 (29.22%) AWS
3 402 (17.72%) GitHub
4 305 (13.44%) Azure DevOps
5 242 (10.67%) GitHub Actions
6 165 (7.27%) GCP
7 157 (6.92%) Serverless
8 108 (4.76%) AWS Lambda
9 99 (4.36%) Amazon S3
9 99 (4.36%) Power Platform
10 66 (2.91%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 64 (2.82%) OpenShift
12 60 (2.64%) Amazon ECS
13 54 (2.38%) AWS CloudFormation
14 53 (2.34%) Amazon EC2
15 47 (2.07%) dbt
16 43 (1.90%) Amazon EKS
17 42 (1.85%) GitHub Copilot
17 42 (1.85%) Snowflake
18 41 (1.81%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.10%) HTTP
2 19 (0.84%) Firewall
3 16 (0.71%) SAN
4 11 (0.48%) Network Security
4 11 (0.48%) WAN
5 10 (0.44%) 5G
6 9 (0.40%) 4G
6 9 (0.40%) MPLS
7 8 (0.35%) 2G
7 8 (0.35%) 3G
7 8 (0.35%) Diameter Protocol
7 8 (0.35%) SIGTRAN
7 8 (0.35%) SS7
7 8 (0.35%) VPN
8 7 (0.31%) BGP
9 6 (0.26%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.26%) LAN
9 6 (0.26%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
9 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 120 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
2 119 (5.24%) MongoDB
3 112 (4.94%) Data Warehouse
4 95 (4.19%) NoSQL
5 86 (3.79%) SQL Server
6 79 (3.48%) Relational Database
7 77 (3.39%) Power BI
8 46 (2.03%) DynamoDB
9 45 (1.98%) Metadata
10 40 (1.76%) Big Data
10 40 (1.76%) Oracle Reports
11 34 (1.50%) Pentaho
12 33 (1.45%) Amazon Athena
13 31 (1.37%) Amazon RDS
13 31 (1.37%) MySQL
14 26 (1.15%) Amazon Redshift
14 26 (1.15%) Data Lake
14 26 (1.15%) Redis
15 24 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
16 22 (0.97%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 423 (18.64%) JIRA
2 419 (18.47%) Git
3 363 (16.00%) Jenkins
4 306 (13.49%) GitLab
5 293 (12.91%) Selenium
6 170 (7.49%) Postman
7 153 (6.74%) Cucumber
8 120 (5.29%) REST Assured
9 118 (5.20%) Cypress.io
10 117 (5.16%) JUnit
11 101 (4.45%) JMeter
12 65 (2.86%) WebDriver
12 65 (2.86%) Zephyr
13 56 (2.47%) SonarQube
14 52 (2.29%) Gatling
15 50 (2.20%) Gradle
16 42 (1.85%) Mockito
17 39 (1.72%) Bitbucket
17 39 (1.72%) Maven
18 37 (1.63%) SpecFlow
General
1 598 (26.36%) Social Skills
2 408 (17.98%) Finance
3 305 (13.44%) Public Sector
4 284 (12.52%) Analytical Skills
5 188 (8.29%) Banking
6 60 (2.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
8 37 (1.63%) Investment Banking
9 36 (1.59%) Front Office
10 32 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
11 30 (1.32%) Telecoms
12 28 (1.23%) Retail
13 27 (1.19%) Military
14 24 (1.06%) Financial Institution
15 20 (0.88%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.79%) Manufacturing
17 17 (0.75%) Legal
18 16 (0.71%) Back Office
18 16 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
19 14 (0.62%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 475 (20.93%) Developer
2 369 (16.26%) Senior
3 247 (10.89%) Lead
4 234 (10.31%) Test Engineer
5 230 (10.14%) Tester
6 154 (6.79%) Java Developer
7 152 (6.70%) Data Engineer
8 120 (5.29%) Analyst
9 114 (5.02%) Software Engineer
10 108 (4.76%) DevOps Engineer
11 104 (4.58%) Architect
12 103 (4.54%) Test Automation Engineer
13 101 (4.45%) Senior Developer
14 92 (4.05%) QA Engineer
15 91 (4.01%) Automation Tester
15 91 (4.01%) Test Leader
16 77 (3.39%) Test Analyst
17 70 (3.09%) Full-Stack Developer
18 61 (2.69%) Test Manager
19 58 (2.56%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 287 (12.65%) REST
2 270 (11.90%) Playwright
3 213 (9.39%) React
4 185 (8.15%) RESTful
5 184 (8.11%) Spring
6 163 (7.18%) Kafka
7 155 (6.83%) .NET
8 149 (6.57%) Spring Boot
9 120 (5.29%) Node.js
10 94 (4.14%) AngularJS
11 87 (3.83%) HTML
12 79 (3.48%) CSS
13 64 (2.82%) OAuth
14 59 (2.60%) pytest
15 53 (2.34%) Jest
16 52 (2.29%) Swagger
17 49 (2.16%) JSON
18 47 (2.07%) Gherkin
19 44 (1.94%) GraphQL
19 44 (1.94%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 302 (13.31%) Cloud Native
2 164 (7.23%) Product Ownership
3 141 (6.21%) Distributed Systems
4 78 (3.44%) Enterprise Software
5 62 (2.73%) Legacy Systems
6 55 (2.42%) Data Protection Act
6 55 (2.42%) Onboarding
7 48 (2.12%) Self-Motivation
8 46 (2.03%) Mobile App
9 44 (1.94%) Virtual Team
10 32 (1.41%) Distributed Architecture
11 31 (1.37%) AI Agents
12 28 (1.23%) Security Posture
13 27 (1.19%) Embedded Systems
14 26 (1.15%) NHS
15 25 (1.10%) Management Information System
16 21 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
17 20 (0.88%) Algorithms
17 20 (0.88%) Data Centre
17 20 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 136 (5.99%) Linux
2 78 (3.44%) Windows
3 73 (3.22%) Unix
4 44 (1.94%) Android
5 42 (1.85%) 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 1,308 (57.65%) CI/CD
2 1,052 (46.36%) Agile
3 837 (36.89%) DevOps
4 409 (18.03%) Problem-Solving
5 402 (17.72%) Microservices
6 383 (16.88%) Continuous Improvement
7 353 (15.56%) Scrum
8 345 (15.20%) Test Strategy
9 342 (15.07%) Software Engineering
10 338 (14.90%) Validation
11 336 (14.81%) Infrastructure as Code
12 293 (12.91%) Containerisation
13 290 (12.78%) AI
13 290 (12.78%) TDD
14 280 (12.34%) Observability
15 237 (10.45%) End-to-End Testing
16 229 (10.09%) ETL
17 224 (9.87%) Software Testing
18 222 (9.78%) Data Pipeline
19 216 (9.52%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 582 (25.65%) Python
2 571 (25.17%) Java
3 517 (22.79%) SQL
4 296 (13.05%) JavaScript
5 255 (11.24%) TypeScript
6 207 (9.12%) C#
7 82 (3.61%) Bash
8 76 (3.35%) PowerShell
9 53 (2.34%) C++
10 52 (2.29%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.67%) PL/SQL
12 37 (1.63%) Bicep
13 34 (1.50%) Apex Code
13 34 (1.50%) C
14 32 (1.41%) Go
15 31 (1.37%) Scala
16 23 (1.01%) Ruby
16 23 (1.01%) Swift
17 20 (0.88%) Shell Script
18 16 (0.71%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 706 (31.12%) Security Cleared
2 592 (26.09%) SC Cleared
3 109 (4.80%) Degree
4 106 (4.67%) BPSS Clearance
5 103 (4.54%) ISTQB
6 73 (3.22%) DV Cleared
7 55 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
8 27 (1.19%) AWS Certification
8 27 (1.19%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 17 (0.75%) Azure Certification
10 15 (0.66%) Master's Degree
11 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.44%) CCNP
14 9 (0.40%) CISSP
14 9 (0.40%) DBS Check
15 7 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
16 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 529 (23.31%) QA
2 186 (8.20%) Accessibility
3 157 (6.92%) 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%) HL7
13 4 (0.18%) MiFID
14 3 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 3 (0.13%) SEPA
System Software
1 405 (17.85%) Docker
2 31 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
3 18 (0.79%) 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
1 404 (17.81%) Kubernetes
2 292 (12.87%) Terraform
3 117 (5.16%) Ansible
3 117 (5.16%) Grafana
4 96 (4.23%) Prometheus
5 37 (1.63%) Argo
6 24 (1.06%) HP ALM
7 16 (0.71%) Puppet
8 14 (0.62%) Kibana
9 11 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
10 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.44%) HP Quality Center
11 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
11 8 (0.35%) Progress Chef
12 7 (0.31%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
14 5 (0.22%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 5 (0.22%) Istio
14 5 (0.22%) NetIQ Identity Manager
15 4 (0.18%) Rancher
Vendors
1 205 (9.03%) Microsoft
2 181 (7.98%) Oracle
3 105 (4.63%) Salesforce
4 74 (3.26%) Databricks
5 64 (2.82%) Google
5 64 (2.82%) Talend
6 60 (2.64%) Splunk
7 59 (2.60%) Red Hat
8 51 (2.25%) ServiceNow
9 43 (1.90%) Denodo
10 40 (1.76%) IBM
11 39 (1.72%) Informatica
12 37 (1.63%) SAP
13 34 (1.50%) VMware
14 30 (1.32%) UiPath
15 29 (1.28%) Dynatrace
16 27 (1.19%) HP
17 26 (1.15%) MuleSoft
18 21 (0.93%) Cisco
19 14 (0.62%) Fortinet