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 14 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 49 49
Rank change year-on-year +3 0 +2
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,311 1,505 1,543
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.33% 4.57% 3.96%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.10% 5.05% 4.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,497 1,040 1,028
10th Percentile £325 £313 £350
25th Percentile £405 £393 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £495 £513
Median % change year-on-year -3.94% -3.51% -2.38%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £606
90th Percentile £663 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £459 £475 £502
% change year-on-year -3.37% -5.33% +0.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 105 34 25
10th Percentile £38.35 £36.75 £42.50
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.63 £50.00
Median hourly rate £68.22 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.43% -9.09% -16.35%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.00 £71.88
90th Percentile £74.00 £73.05 £80.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £57.50
% change year-on-year +28.57% -8.70% -8.00%

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 45,278 29,786 33,285
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.80% 90.49% 85.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,840 18,586 21,275
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £423 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,823 1,710 1,832
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.50 £17.31 £18.46
Median hourly rate £42.30 £25.15 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year +68.19% -39.40% -2.35%
75th Percentile £68.00 £48.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £68.00 £74.83
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +13.33%

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 14 August 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 14 August 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 14 August 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 +4 1,974 £475 -5.00% 1,797
UK excluding London -3 1,154 £459 -3.37% 942
London +7 886 £500 -0.74% 1,013
Work from Home -4 631 £475 - 698
North of England +12 393 £465 +1.20% 195
Midlands +5 274 £450 +1.12% 114
West Midlands +24 258 £450 -10.00% 70
South East -35 216 £459 -8.20% 245
Yorkshire -5 160 £475 -5.00% 51
North West -5 141 £492 +16.62% 107
South West -6 114 £475 +11.76% 139
North East +15 100 £438 +0.57% 37
East of England +13 80 £450 -1.91% 110
Scotland -28 69 £440 -12.00% 110
Wales -7 30 £488 +20.00% 22
Northern Ireland +20 17 £488 +60.63% 23
East Midlands -50 16 £425 +25.00% 44
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
1 190 (8.22%) Confluence
2 53 (2.29%) Apache Airflow
2 53 (2.29%) Apache Spark
2 53 (2.29%) SAS
3 36 (1.56%) SharePoint
4 26 (1.13%) Apache
5 14 (0.61%) CMS
6 12 (0.52%) WebLogic
7 6 (0.26%) nginx
7 6 (0.26%) Tomcat
8 5 (0.22%) Camunda
8 5 (0.22%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
9 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.17%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.13%) Kentico
10 3 (0.13%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.087%) ColdFusion
11 2 (0.087%) Mule
Applications
1 19 (0.82%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.52%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.30%) Chatbot
3 7 (0.30%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.26%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.17%) Simulink
7 3 (0.13%) Trello
8 1 (0.043%) Mingle
8 1 (0.043%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (1.13%) Dynamics CRM
2 20 (0.87%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.65%) Aladdin
4 12 (0.52%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.48%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.35%) Findur
7 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.22%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.22%) Shopify
9 4 (0.17%) Infor CloudSuite
9 4 (0.17%) Infor LN
9 4 (0.17%) Infor M3
9 4 (0.17%) SAP GRC
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.087%) Advent Geneva
11 2 (0.087%) Loan IQ
11 2 (0.087%) Oracle ERP
12 1 (0.043%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 697 (30.16%) Azure
2 690 (29.86%) AWS
3 425 (18.39%) GitHub
4 319 (13.80%) Azure DevOps
5 257 (11.12%) GitHub Actions
6 167 (7.23%) GCP
7 166 (7.18%) Serverless
8 118 (5.11%) AWS Lambda
9 101 (4.37%) Power Platform
10 97 (4.20%) Amazon S3
11 76 (3.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 70 (3.03%) Amazon ECS
13 66 (2.86%) OpenShift
14 62 (2.68%) GitHub Copilot
15 61 (2.64%) AWS CloudFormation
16 58 (2.51%) Amazon EKS
17 56 (2.42%) dbt
18 53 (2.29%) Snowflake
19 51 (2.21%) Amazon EC2
20 45 (1.95%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.13%) Firewall
2 20 (0.87%) HTTP
3 17 (0.74%) 4G
3 17 (0.74%) 5G
4 16 (0.69%) DNS
4 16 (0.69%) Network Security
5 15 (0.65%) 2G
5 15 (0.65%) 3G
5 15 (0.65%) Diameter Protocol
5 15 (0.65%) SIGTRAN
5 15 (0.65%) SS7
6 13 (0.56%) TCP/IP
6 13 (0.56%) WAN
7 12 (0.52%) SAN
8 10 (0.43%) LAN
9 9 (0.39%) Wi-Fi
10 8 (0.35%) BGP
11 7 (0.30%) DHCP
11 7 (0.30%) Ethernet VPN
11 7 (0.30%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 143 (6.19%) PostgreSQL
2 132 (5.71%) Data Warehouse
3 117 (5.06%) MongoDB
4 109 (4.72%) NoSQL
5 90 (3.89%) SQL Server
6 84 (3.63%) Relational Database
7 82 (3.55%) Power BI
8 49 (2.12%) Metadata
9 48 (2.08%) DynamoDB
10 46 (1.99%) Oracle Reports
11 43 (1.86%) Pentaho
12 36 (1.56%) Data Lake
13 34 (1.47%) Amazon Athena
13 34 (1.47%) Big Data
13 34 (1.47%) MySQL
14 29 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
15 28 (1.21%) Redis
16 27 (1.17%) Amazon RDS
17 24 (1.04%) Tableau
18 21 (0.91%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 471 (20.38%) Git
2 416 (18.00%) JIRA
3 386 (16.70%) Jenkins
4 310 (13.41%) GitLab
5 293 (12.68%) Selenium
6 174 (7.53%) Postman
7 156 (6.75%) Cucumber
8 123 (5.32%) JUnit
9 116 (5.02%) Cypress.io
10 105 (4.54%) JMeter
11 100 (4.33%) REST Assured
12 76 (3.29%) Zephyr
13 65 (2.81%) SonarQube
14 64 (2.77%) WebDriver
15 53 (2.29%) Gatling
16 52 (2.25%) Gradle
17 49 (2.12%) Maven
18 42 (1.82%) Bitbucket
19 41 (1.77%) Mockito
20 31 (1.34%) SpecFlow
General
1 631 (27.30%) Social Skills
2 417 (18.04%) Finance
3 319 (13.80%) Public Sector
4 311 (13.46%) Analytical Skills
5 191 (8.26%) Banking
6 68 (2.94%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (1.95%) Documentation Skills
8 41 (1.77%) Telecoms
9 35 (1.51%) Front Office
9 35 (1.51%) Investment Banking
10 33 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
11 32 (1.38%) Retail
12 27 (1.17%) Military
13 25 (1.08%) Financial Institution
14 20 (0.87%) Aerospace
15 19 (0.82%) Back Office
16 16 (0.69%) Manufacturing
16 16 (0.69%) Organisational Skills
17 15 (0.65%) Legal
17 15 (0.65%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 483 (20.90%) Developer
2 379 (16.40%) Senior
3 255 (11.03%) Lead
4 223 (9.65%) Test Engineer
5 217 (9.39%) Tester
6 160 (6.92%) Data Engineer
7 159 (6.88%) Java Developer
8 120 (5.19%) Analyst
9 116 (5.02%) Software Engineer
10 111 (4.80%) DevOps Engineer
11 105 (4.54%) Architect
12 104 (4.50%) Senior Developer
13 102 (4.41%) Test Automation Engineer
14 95 (4.11%) QA Engineer
15 90 (3.89%) Automation Tester
16 88 (3.81%) Test Leader
17 80 (3.46%) Test Analyst
18 73 (3.16%) Full-Stack Developer
19 66 (2.86%) Automation Engineer
20 64 (2.77%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 346 (14.97%) REST
2 272 (11.77%) Playwright
3 210 (9.09%) RESTful
4 207 (8.96%) Kafka
5 201 (8.70%) Spring
6 199 (8.61%) React
7 160 (6.92%) Spring Boot
8 155 (6.71%) .NET
9 120 (5.19%) Node.js
10 104 (4.50%) HTML
11 96 (4.15%) AngularJS
12 92 (3.98%) CSS
13 73 (3.16%) OAuth
14 66 (2.86%) JSON
15 60 (2.60%) pytest
16 55 (2.38%) Jest
17 54 (2.34%) OAuth2
18 50 (2.16%) HTML5
19 49 (2.12%) Gherkin
19 49 (2.12%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 338 (14.63%) Cloud Native
2 177 (7.66%) Product Ownership
3 156 (6.75%) Distributed Systems
4 90 (3.89%) Enterprise Software
5 59 (2.55%) Onboarding
6 57 (2.47%) Legacy Systems
7 54 (2.34%) Data Protection Act
8 51 (2.21%) Self-Motivation
9 45 (1.95%) Mobile App
10 40 (1.73%) AI Agents
11 38 (1.64%) Virtual Team
12 29 (1.25%) Distributed Architecture
13 28 (1.21%) Embedded Systems
14 26 (1.13%) Security Posture
15 25 (1.08%) NHS
16 23 (1.00%) Management Information System
17 20 (0.87%) Data Centre
18 19 (0.82%) Derivative
19 18 (0.78%) Fixed Income
20 17 (0.74%) Data Structures
Operating Systems
1 159 (6.88%) Linux
2 93 (4.02%) Unix
3 90 (3.89%) Windows
4 44 (1.90%) Apple iOS
5 42 (1.82%) Android
6 30 (1.30%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 20 (0.87%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.30%) Mac OS X
8 7 (0.30%) Solaris
9 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
10 5 (0.22%) Mac OS
10 5 (0.22%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.22%) Windows 7
10 5 (0.22%) Windows Server 2003
11 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.13%) AIX
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.087%) CentOS
13 2 (0.087%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,352 (58.50%) CI/CD
2 1,071 (46.34%) Agile
3 873 (37.78%) DevOps
4 438 (18.95%) Problem-Solving
5 435 (18.82%) Continuous Improvement
6 423 (18.30%) Microservices
7 378 (16.36%) Software Engineering
8 375 (16.23%) Scrum
9 373 (16.14%) Infrastructure as Code
10 366 (15.84%) Validation
11 353 (15.27%) Test Strategy
12 326 (14.11%) AI
13 312 (13.50%) Containerisation
14 298 (12.89%) Observability
15 295 (12.77%) TDD
16 251 (10.86%) ETL
17 250 (10.82%) SDLC
18 249 (10.77%) End-to-End Testing
19 239 (10.34%) Data Pipeline
20 229 (9.91%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 613 (26.53%) Python
2 592 (25.62%) Java
3 563 (24.36%) SQL
4 312 (13.50%) JavaScript
5 239 (10.34%) TypeScript
6 199 (8.61%) C#
7 101 (4.37%) PowerShell
8 85 (3.68%) Bash
9 53 (2.29%) C++
10 52 (2.25%) Kotlin
11 49 (2.12%) Bicep
12 36 (1.56%) PL/SQL
13 33 (1.43%) C
14 31 (1.34%) Scala
15 28 (1.21%) Apex Code
16 27 (1.17%) Go
17 24 (1.04%) Shell Script
18 23 (1.00%) Ruby
19 20 (0.87%) Swift
20 18 (0.78%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 759 (32.84%) Security Cleared
2 648 (28.04%) SC Cleared
3 113 (4.89%) ISTQB
4 108 (4.67%) Degree
5 100 (4.33%) BPSS Clearance
6 67 (2.90%) DV Cleared
7 58 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
8 33 (1.43%) AWS Certification
9 32 (1.38%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 24 (1.04%) Azure Certification
11 17 (0.74%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 11 (0.48%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.48%) Microsoft Certification
12 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.43%) CISSP
13 10 (0.43%) ISEB
13 10 (0.43%) Master's Degree
14 8 (0.35%) CCNP
14 8 (0.35%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 579 (25.05%) QA
2 188 (8.14%) Accessibility
3 173 (7.49%) Data Quality
4 83 (3.59%) WCAG
5 43 (1.86%) GDPR
6 15 (0.65%) ISO 20022
6 15 (0.65%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.65%) NCSC
6 15 (0.65%) SLA
7 9 (0.39%) NIST
8 8 (0.35%) GRC
9 7 (0.30%) Actionable Recommendations
9 7 (0.30%) Def Stans
9 7 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
9 7 (0.30%) PCI DSS
10 6 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
11 5 (0.22%) FATCA
11 5 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 4 (0.17%) MiFID
13 3 (0.13%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 450 (19.47%) Docker
2 33 (1.43%) VMware Infrastructure
3 30 (1.30%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.61%) Firmware
6 4 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
6 4 (0.17%) VMware ESXi
6 4 (0.17%) VMware NSX
7 3 (0.13%) Hyper-V
7 3 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
8 2 (0.087%) SRDF
9 1 (0.043%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.043%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.043%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 449 (19.43%) Kubernetes
2 324 (14.02%) Terraform
3 125 (5.41%) Grafana
4 124 (5.37%) Ansible
5 100 (4.33%) Prometheus
6 40 (1.73%) Argo
7 25 (1.08%) Puppet
8 22 (0.95%) Progress Chef
9 18 (0.78%) HP ALM
10 14 (0.61%) Kibana
11 11 (0.48%) Control-M
11 11 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
12 10 (0.43%) Dell DRAC
13 7 (0.30%) Kustomize
14 6 (0.26%) Istio
14 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Intune
14 6 (0.26%) Packer
15 5 (0.22%) HP Fortify
15 5 (0.22%) HP Quality Center
15 5 (0.22%) SCCM
Vendors
1 213 (9.22%) Microsoft
2 207 (8.96%) Oracle
3 94 (4.07%) Salesforce
4 89 (3.85%) Databricks
5 70 (3.03%) Talend
6 65 (2.81%) Red Hat
7 64 (2.77%) Google
8 61 (2.64%) Splunk
9 55 (2.38%) IBM
10 54 (2.34%) ServiceNow
11 50 (2.16%) Denodo
12 46 (1.99%) SAP
13 43 (1.86%) Informatica
14 40 (1.73%) VMware
15 37 (1.60%) Dynatrace
16 29 (1.25%) Cisco
16 29 (1.25%) MuleSoft
17 25 (1.08%) HP
17 25 (1.08%) UiPath
18 14 (0.61%) OpenAI