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

6 months to
29 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 51 45
Rank change year-on-year +5 -6 +6
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,334 1,503 1,575
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.33% 4.56% 4.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.12% 5.04% 4.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,499 1,040 1,051
10th Percentile £328 £313 £350
25th Percentile £406 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £478 £500 £505
Median % change year-on-year -4.40% -0.99% -3.81%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £669 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £459 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -3.37% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 37 22
10th Percentile £39.18 £25.57 £42.50
25th Percentile £59.81 £45.00 £50.31
Median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.27% - -21.29%
75th Percentile - £65.00 £69.84
90th Percentile £75.00 £71.10 £83.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +25.45% -2.22% -13.04%

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 45,621 29,800 32,930
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.64% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,920 18,562 20,756
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £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 2,892 1,765 1,620
10th Percentile £14.10 £14.21 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.85 £17.30 £18.50
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.03
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.16% +0.31%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.12 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.15 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.11 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +90.48% -47.37% +14.67%

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 29 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 29 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 29 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 1,975 £477 -4.65% 2,253
UK excluding London -7 1,124 £459 -3.37% 1,372
London +6 915 £500 - 1,231
Work from Home -5 635 £488 +2.63% 974
North of England +4 402 £463 +0.54% 286
Midlands +8 241 £450 -2.44% 146
West Midlands +25 226 £450 -12.62% 90
South East -28 216 £459 -8.20% 298
Yorkshire -12 158 £473 -5.59% 74
North West -13 148 £492 +16.17% 162
South West -2 114 £475 -2.56% 233
North East +13 103 £450 +1.12% 51
East of England +13 77 £450 +10.77% 146
Scotland -33 75 £470 -6.00% 186
Wales -6 29 £500 +25.00% 33
East Midlands -40 15 £418 +19.29% 55
Northern Ireland +9 11 £488 +323.91% 61
Channel Islands - 3 £450 -

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
1 187 (8.01%) Confluence
2 52 (2.23%) Apache Airflow
3 44 (1.89%) SharePoint
4 42 (1.80%) Apache Spark
5 39 (1.67%) SAS
6 23 (0.99%) Apache
7 14 (0.60%) CMS
8 12 (0.51%) WebLogic
9 11 (0.47%) Camunda
10 6 (0.26%) nginx
10 6 (0.26%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 6 (0.26%) Tomcat
11 5 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
12 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
12 4 (0.17%) ColdFusion
12 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
12 4 (0.17%) OpenStack
12 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
13 3 (0.13%) Kentico
14 2 (0.086%) Mule
Applications
1 25 (1.07%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
3 8 (0.34%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.26%) Chatbot
5 5 (0.21%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.17%) Microsoft Project
6 4 (0.17%) Simulink
7 3 (0.13%) Trello
8 2 (0.086%) Spreadsheet
9 1 (0.043%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 28 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 24 (1.03%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.56%) Payment Gateway
5 10 (0.43%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.34%) Findur
7 7 (0.30%) SAP GRC
8 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
8 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
8 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
9 5 (0.21%) BambooHR
10 4 (0.17%) Shopify
11 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
11 3 (0.13%) FLEXCUBE
12 2 (0.086%) Advent Geneva
12 2 (0.086%) Finacle
12 2 (0.086%) Infor CloudSuite
12 2 (0.086%) Infor LN
12 2 (0.086%) Infor M3
12 2 (0.086%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 709 (30.38%) AWS
2 706 (30.25%) Azure
3 428 (18.34%) GitHub
4 333 (14.27%) Azure DevOps
5 259 (11.10%) GitHub Actions
6 175 (7.50%) Serverless
7 169 (7.24%) GCP
8 128 (5.48%) AWS Lambda
9 110 (4.71%) Power Platform
10 97 (4.16%) Amazon S3
11 80 (3.43%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 74 (3.17%) OpenShift
13 70 (3.00%) Amazon ECS
14 68 (2.91%) GitHub Copilot
15 63 (2.70%) Amazon EKS
15 63 (2.70%) AWS CloudFormation
16 60 (2.57%) dbt
17 58 (2.49%) Snowflake
18 50 (2.14%) Amazon EC2
19 47 (2.01%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.11%) HTTP
2 24 (1.03%) Firewall
3 20 (0.86%) DNS
4 18 (0.77%) 4G
4 18 (0.77%) 5G
5 16 (0.69%) Network Security
6 15 (0.64%) 2G
6 15 (0.64%) 3G
6 15 (0.64%) Diameter Protocol
6 15 (0.64%) SIGTRAN
6 15 (0.64%) SS7
6 15 (0.64%) TCP/IP
6 15 (0.64%) WAN
7 13 (0.56%) LAN
8 12 (0.51%) Wi-Fi
9 11 (0.47%) SAN
10 10 (0.43%) BGP
11 9 (0.39%) DHCP
12 8 (0.34%) Ethernet VPN
12 8 (0.34%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 135 (5.78%) PostgreSQL
2 125 (5.36%) Data Warehouse
3 122 (5.23%) MongoDB
4 109 (4.67%) NoSQL
5 100 (4.28%) SQL Server
6 91 (3.90%) Relational Database
7 85 (3.64%) Power BI
8 49 (2.10%) Metadata
9 48 (2.06%) DynamoDB
10 39 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
11 35 (1.50%) Amazon Athena
11 35 (1.50%) MySQL
12 33 (1.41%) Amazon Redshift
12 33 (1.41%) Big Data
12 33 (1.41%) Data Lake
12 33 (1.41%) Pentaho
13 30 (1.29%) Amazon RDS
14 29 (1.24%) Redis
15 28 (1.20%) Elasticsearch
16 25 (1.07%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 474 (20.31%) Git
2 393 (16.84%) JIRA
3 376 (16.11%) Jenkins
4 317 (13.58%) GitLab
5 298 (12.77%) Selenium
6 166 (7.11%) Postman
7 146 (6.26%) Cucumber
8 125 (5.36%) Cypress.io
9 121 (5.18%) JUnit
10 104 (4.46%) REST Assured
11 100 (4.28%) JMeter
12 76 (3.26%) SonarQube
13 67 (2.87%) Zephyr
14 59 (2.53%) Gatling
15 58 (2.49%) Gradle
16 54 (2.31%) WebDriver
17 53 (2.27%) Maven
18 45 (1.93%) Mockito
19 42 (1.80%) Bitbucket
20 27 (1.16%) Appium
General
1 648 (27.76%) Social Skills
2 432 (18.51%) Finance
3 340 (14.57%) Public Sector
4 318 (13.62%) Analytical Skills
5 206 (8.83%) Banking
6 74 (3.17%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
7 44 (1.89%) Telecoms
8 39 (1.67%) Front Office
9 35 (1.50%) Investment Banking
10 34 (1.46%) Influencing Skills
11 32 (1.37%) Retail
12 27 (1.16%) Military
13 24 (1.03%) Financial Institution
14 19 (0.81%) Back Office
14 19 (0.81%) Law
15 18 (0.77%) Aerospace
16 17 (0.73%) Marketing
17 16 (0.69%) Legal
18 15 (0.64%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 517 (22.15%) Developer
2 387 (16.58%) Senior
3 238 (10.20%) Lead
4 223 (9.55%) Test Engineer
5 201 (8.61%) Tester
6 165 (7.07%) Java Developer
7 139 (5.96%) Data Engineer
8 126 (5.40%) Software Engineer
9 125 (5.36%) Analyst
10 124 (5.31%) DevOps Engineer
11 111 (4.76%) Senior Developer
12 104 (4.46%) Test Automation Engineer
13 99 (4.24%) Architect
14 96 (4.11%) QA Engineer
15 88 (3.77%) Automation Tester
16 84 (3.60%) Test Leader
17 83 (3.56%) Test Analyst
18 76 (3.26%) Full-Stack Developer
19 68 (2.91%) Automation Engineer
20 67 (2.87%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 367 (15.72%) REST
2 339 (14.52%) Terraform
3 274 (11.74%) Playwright
4 224 (9.60%) RESTful
5 219 (9.38%) Kafka
6 217 (9.30%) Spring
7 214 (9.17%) React
8 186 (7.97%) Spring Boot
9 166 (7.11%) .NET
10 130 (5.57%) HTML
11 124 (5.31%) Node.js
12 111 (4.76%) CSS
13 99 (4.24%) AngularJS
14 77 (3.30%) OAuth
15 71 (3.04%) JSON
16 63 (2.70%) pytest
17 59 (2.53%) Middleware
18 58 (2.49%) XML
19 56 (2.40%) OAuth2
20 55 (2.36%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 347 (14.87%) Cloud Native
2 189 (8.10%) Product Ownership
3 162 (6.94%) Distributed Systems
4 96 (4.11%) Enterprise Software
5 65 (2.78%) Onboarding
6 58 (2.49%) Legacy Systems
7 54 (2.31%) Data Protection Act
8 49 (2.10%) Self-Motivation
9 48 (2.06%) AI Agents
9 48 (2.06%) Mobile App
10 37 (1.59%) Virtual Team
11 25 (1.07%) Embedded Systems
12 23 (0.99%) Management Information System
12 23 (0.99%) NHS
12 23 (0.99%) Security Posture
13 22 (0.94%) Data Centre
14 21 (0.90%) Data Structures
15 20 (0.86%) Distributed Architecture
16 19 (0.81%) Life Science
17 18 (0.77%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 164 (7.03%) Linux
2 99 (4.24%) Unix
3 95 (4.07%) Windows
4 41 (1.76%) Apple iOS
5 39 (1.67%) Android
6 29 (1.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 23 (0.99%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.30%) Solaris
9 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
10 5 (0.21%) Mac OS X
10 5 (0.21%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.21%) Windows 7
10 5 (0.21%) Windows Server 2003
11 4 (0.17%) AIX
11 4 (0.17%) Mac OS
11 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.17%) VMS
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.086%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,376 (58.95%) CI/CD
2 1,089 (46.66%) Agile
3 882 (37.79%) DevOps
4 442 (18.94%) Microservices
5 441 (18.89%) Problem-Solving
6 433 (18.55%) Continuous Improvement
7 412 (17.65%) Software Engineering
8 397 (17.01%) Infrastructure as Code
9 377 (16.15%) Scrum
10 368 (15.77%) Validation
11 354 (15.17%) Test Strategy
12 346 (14.82%) AI
13 320 (13.71%) Containerisation
14 298 (12.77%) Observability
15 297 (12.72%) TDD
16 265 (11.35%) SDLC
17 253 (10.84%) Software Testing
18 243 (10.41%) End-to-End Testing
18 243 (10.41%) Stakeholder Management
19 216 (9.25%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 637 (27.29%) Python
2 631 (27.04%) Java
3 578 (24.76%) SQL
4 340 (14.57%) JavaScript
5 249 (10.67%) TypeScript
6 201 (8.61%) C#
7 113 (4.84%) PowerShell
8 92 (3.94%) Bash
9 55 (2.36%) Bicep
10 50 (2.14%) C++
11 49 (2.10%) Kotlin
12 34 (1.46%) PL/SQL
13 32 (1.37%) C
14 31 (1.33%) Scala
15 28 (1.20%) Go
15 28 (1.20%) Shell Script
16 27 (1.16%) Apex Code
17 25 (1.07%) Ruby
18 17 (0.73%) Groovy
18 17 (0.73%) Swift
Qualifications
1 762 (32.65%) Security Cleared
2 648 (27.76%) SC Cleared
3 127 (5.44%) Degree
4 116 (4.97%) BPSS Clearance
5 107 (4.58%) ISTQB
6 73 (3.13%) DV Cleared
7 70 (3.00%) Computer Science Degree
8 38 (1.63%) AWS Certification
9 31 (1.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 30 (1.29%) Azure Certification
11 19 (0.81%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 13 (0.56%) ISEB
12 13 (0.56%) Master's Degree
13 12 (0.51%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.47%) Cisco Certification
14 11 (0.47%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 9 (0.39%) CISSP
17 8 (0.34%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 8 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 594 (25.45%) QA
2 195 (8.35%) Accessibility
3 167 (7.16%) Data Quality
4 89 (3.81%) WCAG
5 43 (1.84%) GDPR
6 20 (0.86%) ISO 20022
7 17 (0.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 14 (0.60%) NCSC
8 14 (0.60%) SLA
9 13 (0.56%) GRC
10 11 (0.47%) NIST
11 7 (0.30%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
12 6 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
13 5 (0.21%) Def Stans
13 5 (0.21%) FATCA
13 5 (0.21%) HL7
14 4 (0.17%) MiFID
14 4 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 458 (19.62%) Docker
2 35 (1.50%) VMware Infrastructure
3 32 (1.37%) Active Directory
4 18 (0.77%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (0.56%) Firmware
6 7 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
7 5 (0.21%) Hyper-V
7 5 (0.21%) VMware NSX
8 3 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 1 (0.043%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.043%) KVM
9 1 (0.043%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.043%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 448 (19.19%) Kubernetes
2 127 (5.44%) Ansible
3 119 (5.10%) Grafana
4 88 (3.77%) Prometheus
5 42 (1.80%) Argo
6 23 (0.99%) Puppet
7 22 (0.94%) Progress Chef
8 16 (0.69%) HP ALM
9 15 (0.64%) Kibana
10 11 (0.47%) Control-M
11 10 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
12 8 (0.34%) Dell DRAC
13 7 (0.30%) Istio
13 7 (0.30%) Kustomize
13 7 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
14 6 (0.26%) Packer
14 6 (0.26%) SCCM
15 5 (0.21%) HP Fortify
15 5 (0.21%) WMI
16 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 224 (9.60%) Microsoft
2 197 (8.44%) Oracle
3 87 (3.73%) Databricks
4 86 (3.68%) Salesforce
5 67 (2.87%) Google
6 64 (2.74%) Red Hat
7 60 (2.57%) Talend
8 58 (2.49%) IBM
9 54 (2.31%) ServiceNow
9 54 (2.31%) Splunk
10 52 (2.23%) SAP
11 43 (1.84%) Denodo
11 43 (1.84%) Informatica
12 42 (1.80%) VMware
13 38 (1.63%) Dynatrace
14 31 (1.33%) Cisco
15 30 (1.29%) MuleSoft
16 27 (1.16%) UiPath
17 21 (0.90%) HP
18 17 (0.73%) OpenAI