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

6 months to
18 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 45 47 50
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 +3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,286 1,450 1,617
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.32% 4.45% 3.84%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.08% 4.93% 4.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,474 1,011 1,063
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £387 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £480 £520
Median % change year-on-year -1.04% -7.69% -0.95%
75th Percentile £575 £582 £610
90th Percentile £663 £700 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £452 £463 £508
% change year-on-year -2.38% -8.87% +1.30%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 31 45
10th Percentile £36.75 £35.00 £48.80
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% -21.29%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.76 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.40 £75.00 £73.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -14.56%

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 45,026 29,407 35,968
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.11% 90.34% 85.40%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,974 18,494 23,016
10th Percentile £325 £300 £301
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 2,654 1,554 2,302
10th Percentile £14.87 £14.20 £13.00
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.37 £16.71
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.50 £51.55 £62.00
90th Percentile £82.46 £70.00 £73.48
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.33 £38.20
% change year-on-year +84.96% -36.30% -4.51%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 +6 1,931 £475 -1.66% 498
UK excluding London +5 1,126 £452 -2.38% 393
London +6 881 £500 - 182
Work from Home 0 650 £475 +4.40% 239
North of England +13 387 £463 +3.12% 108
Midlands +8 245 £450 +9.09% 50
West Midlands +26 228 £450 -6.83% 26
South East -29 198 £459 -8.20% 137
North West -3 155 £481 +19.65% 56
Yorkshire +2 154 £496 +1.79% 34
South West +5 116 £463 +5.71% 45
North East +11 88 £425 +7.59% 19
East of England +20 86 £450 -1.91% 44
Scotland -23 71 £440 -10.34% 10
Wales -1 35 £475 +16.92% 12
Northern Ireland +20 21 £475 +16.28% 5
East Midlands -40 17 £425 +40.26% 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
1 196 (8.57%) Confluence
2 52 (2.27%) Apache Spark
3 46 (2.01%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.01%) SAS
4 24 (1.05%) Apache
5 20 (0.87%) SharePoint
6 14 (0.61%) 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 (0.17%) Anypoint
10 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
10 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
11 3 (0.13%) Kentico
12 2 (0.087%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.087%) Mendix
12 2 (0.087%) Microsoft Exchange
12 2 (0.087%) Mule
Applications
1 28 (1.22%) 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 (0.17%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
5 4 (0.17%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.087%) Trello
7 1 (0.044%) Mingle
7 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 25 (1.09%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.74%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.74%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.52%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.35%) Findur
6 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
6 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
6 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
6 6 (0.26%) Shopify
7 5 (0.22%) BambooHR
8 4 (0.17%) Infor CloudSuite
8 4 (0.17%) Infor LN
8 4 (0.17%) Infor M3
8 4 (0.17%) Loan IQ
9 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
9 3 (0.13%) Maximo
10 2 (0.087%) Advent Geneva
10 2 (0.087%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.087%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 675 (29.53%) Azure
2 666 (29.13%) AWS
3 410 (17.94%) GitHub
4 307 (13.43%) Azure DevOps
5 249 (10.89%) GitHub Actions
6 166 (7.26%) GCP
7 159 (6.96%) Serverless
8 109 (4.77%) AWS Lambda
9 100 (4.37%) Amazon S3
10 99 (4.33%) Power Platform
11 68 (2.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 65 (2.84%) OpenShift
13 61 (2.67%) Amazon ECS
14 54 (2.36%) Amazon EC2
14 54 (2.36%) AWS CloudFormation
15 48 (2.10%) dbt
16 46 (2.01%) GitHub Copilot
17 44 (1.92%) Amazon EKS
17 44 (1.92%) Snowflake
18 42 (1.84%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.09%) HTTP
2 19 (0.83%) Firewall
3 16 (0.70%) SAN
4 13 (0.57%) Network Security
5 11 (0.48%) 5G
5 11 (0.48%) WAN
6 10 (0.44%) 2G
6 10 (0.44%) 3G
6 10 (0.44%) 4G
6 10 (0.44%) Diameter Protocol
6 10 (0.44%) SIGTRAN
6 10 (0.44%) SS7
7 9 (0.39%) MPLS
8 8 (0.35%) VPN
9 7 (0.31%) BGP
9 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
10 6 (0.26%) LAN
10 6 (0.26%) SD-WAN
10 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
10 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 123 (5.38%) MongoDB
1 123 (5.38%) PostgreSQL
2 113 (4.94%) Data Warehouse
3 98 (4.29%) NoSQL
4 86 (3.76%) SQL Server
5 81 (3.54%) Relational Database
6 77 (3.37%) Power BI
7 47 (2.06%) DynamoDB
8 45 (1.97%) Metadata
9 41 (1.79%) Oracle Reports
10 39 (1.71%) Big Data
11 33 (1.44%) Amazon Athena
11 33 (1.44%) MySQL
11 33 (1.44%) Pentaho
12 31 (1.36%) Amazon RDS
13 27 (1.18%) Redis
14 26 (1.14%) Amazon Redshift
14 26 (1.14%) Data Lake
15 24 (1.05%) Elasticsearch
16 22 (0.96%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 428 (18.72%) JIRA
2 424 (18.55%) Git
3 365 (15.97%) Jenkins
4 305 (13.34%) GitLab
5 292 (12.77%) Selenium
6 169 (7.39%) Postman
7 153 (6.69%) Cucumber
8 119 (5.21%) REST Assured
9 118 (5.16%) Cypress.io
10 116 (5.07%) JUnit
11 101 (4.42%) JMeter
12 68 (2.97%) Zephyr
13 66 (2.89%) WebDriver
14 56 (2.45%) SonarQube
15 52 (2.27%) Gatling
16 49 (2.14%) Gradle
17 43 (1.88%) Mockito
18 40 (1.75%) Bitbucket
19 39 (1.71%) Maven
20 36 (1.57%) SpecFlow
General
1 607 (26.55%) Social Skills
2 411 (17.98%) Finance
3 310 (13.56%) Public Sector
4 287 (12.55%) Analytical Skills
5 191 (8.36%) Banking
6 61 (2.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.92%) Documentation Skills
8 38 (1.66%) Front Office
9 37 (1.62%) Investment Banking
10 32 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
11 30 (1.31%) Telecoms
12 29 (1.27%) Retail
13 27 (1.18%) Military
14 24 (1.05%) Financial Institution
15 21 (0.92%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.79%) Manufacturing
17 16 (0.70%) Back Office
17 16 (0.70%) Legal
17 16 (0.70%) Organisational Skills
18 14 (0.61%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 483 (21.13%) Developer
2 370 (16.19%) Senior
3 248 (10.85%) Lead
4 232 (10.15%) Test Engineer
5 231 (10.10%) Tester
6 158 (6.91%) Java Developer
7 152 (6.65%) Data Engineer
8 122 (5.34%) Analyst
9 118 (5.16%) Software Engineer
10 109 (4.77%) DevOps Engineer
11 104 (4.55%) Architect
12 103 (4.51%) Senior Developer
13 102 (4.46%) Test Automation Engineer
14 92 (4.02%) Automation Tester
15 91 (3.98%) QA Engineer
15 91 (3.98%) Test Leader
16 80 (3.50%) Test Analyst
17 72 (3.15%) Full-Stack Developer
18 61 (2.67%) Test Manager
19 58 (2.54%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 292 (12.77%) REST
2 269 (11.77%) Playwright
3 212 (9.27%) React
4 193 (8.44%) RESTful
5 189 (8.27%) Spring
6 166 (7.26%) Kafka
7 157 (6.87%) .NET
8 155 (6.78%) Spring Boot
9 122 (5.34%) Node.js
10 92 (4.02%) AngularJS
11 89 (3.89%) HTML
12 81 (3.54%) CSS
13 65 (2.84%) OAuth
14 57 (2.49%) pytest
15 54 (2.36%) Jest
16 51 (2.23%) Swagger
17 49 (2.14%) JSON
18 48 (2.10%) Gherkin
19 47 (2.06%) HTML5
20 44 (1.92%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 304 (13.30%) Cloud Native
2 167 (7.31%) Product Ownership
3 142 (6.21%) Distributed Systems
4 81 (3.54%) Enterprise Software
5 64 (2.80%) Legacy Systems
6 54 (2.36%) Data Protection Act
7 53 (2.32%) Onboarding
8 49 (2.14%) Self-Motivation
9 44 (1.92%) Mobile App
9 44 (1.92%) Virtual Team
10 31 (1.36%) AI Agents
10 31 (1.36%) Distributed Architecture
11 29 (1.27%) Security Posture
12 27 (1.18%) Embedded Systems
13 26 (1.14%) Management Information System
13 26 (1.14%) NHS
14 22 (0.96%) Fixed Income
14 22 (0.96%) Greenfield Project
15 20 (0.87%) Algorithms
16 19 (0.83%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 138 (6.04%) Linux
2 78 (3.41%) Windows
3 75 (3.28%) Unix
4 42 (1.84%) Android
5 41 (1.79%) Apple iOS
6 25 (1.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 18 (0.79%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.61%) 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 (0.17%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.13%) AIX
16 2 (0.087%) CentOS
17 1 (0.044%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,318 (57.66%) CI/CD
2 1,068 (46.72%) Agile
3 840 (36.75%) DevOps
4 418 (18.29%) Problem-Solving
5 409 (17.89%) Microservices
6 393 (17.19%) Continuous Improvement
7 360 (15.75%) Scrum
8 351 (15.35%) Software Engineering
9 347 (15.18%) Test Strategy
10 340 (14.87%) Validation
11 338 (14.79%) Infrastructure as Code
12 297 (12.99%) Containerisation
13 295 (12.90%) TDD
14 293 (12.82%) AI
15 284 (12.42%) Observability
16 240 (10.50%) End-to-End Testing
17 231 (10.10%) ETL
18 224 (9.80%) Software Testing
19 223 (9.76%) SDLC
20 222 (9.71%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 581 (25.42%) Python
2 574 (25.11%) Java
3 518 (22.66%) SQL
4 298 (13.04%) JavaScript
5 254 (11.11%) TypeScript
6 208 (9.10%) C#
7 83 (3.63%) Bash
8 77 (3.37%) PowerShell
9 54 (2.36%) C++
10 53 (2.32%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.66%) Bicep
11 38 (1.66%) PL/SQL
12 34 (1.49%) Apex Code
12 34 (1.49%) C
12 34 (1.49%) Go
13 30 (1.31%) Scala
14 23 (1.01%) Ruby
14 23 (1.01%) Swift
15 22 (0.96%) Shell Script
16 16 (0.70%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 709 (31.01%) Security Cleared
2 596 (26.07%) SC Cleared
3 110 (4.81%) Degree
4 107 (4.68%) BPSS Clearance
5 103 (4.51%) ISTQB
6 72 (3.15%) DV Cleared
7 56 (2.45%) Computer Science Degree
8 28 (1.22%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.18%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 18 (0.79%) Azure Certification
11 17 (0.74%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 15 (0.66%) Master's Degree
13 12 (0.52%) Cisco Certification
14 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.44%) CCNP
16 9 (0.39%) CISSP
16 9 (0.39%) DBS Check
17 7 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 7 (0.31%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 537 (23.49%) QA
2 188 (8.22%) Accessibility
3 158 (6.91%) Data Quality
4 82 (3.59%) WCAG
5 42 (1.84%) GDPR
6 14 (0.61%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 14 (0.61%) SLA
7 13 (0.57%) NCSC
8 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
9 9 (0.39%) ISO 20022
9 9 (0.39%) 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 (0.17%) MiFID
14 3 (0.13%) HL7
14 3 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 3 (0.13%) SEPA
System Software
1 412 (18.02%) Docker
2 31 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 17 (0.74%) Active Directory
4 15 (0.66%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.61%) Firmware
6 8 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
8 4 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
9 3 (0.13%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.087%) SRDF
11 1 (0.044%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.044%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 407 (17.80%) Kubernetes
2 293 (12.82%) Terraform
3 119 (5.21%) Grafana
4 117 (5.12%) Ansible
5 99 (4.33%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.62%) Argo
7 24 (1.05%) HP ALM
8 16 (0.70%) Puppet
9 14 (0.61%) 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 (0.17%) Packer
Vendors
1 206 (9.01%) Microsoft
2 185 (8.09%) Oracle
3 105 (4.59%) Salesforce
4 75 (3.28%) Databricks
5 63 (2.76%) Google
5 63 (2.76%) Talend
6 59 (2.58%) Red Hat
7 58 (2.54%) Splunk
8 52 (2.27%) ServiceNow
9 43 (1.88%) IBM
10 42 (1.84%) Denodo
11 37 (1.62%) Informatica
11 37 (1.62%) SAP
12 34 (1.49%) VMware
13 30 (1.31%) UiPath
14 29 (1.27%) Dynatrace
15 27 (1.18%) HP
15 27 (1.18%) MuleSoft
16 21 (0.92%) Cisco
17 14 (0.61%) Fortinet