Test Automation Contracts

Automated Testing
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Test Automation skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Test Automation over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 46 56 47
Rank change year-on-year +10 -9 -1
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 1,326 1,506 2,822
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 4.54% 3.45% 4.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.99% 4.00% 5.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 915 980 2,056
10th Percentile £328 £363 £385
25th Percentile £400 £425 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £511 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.20% -7.05% +4.17%
75th Percentile £618 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £719 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £525
% change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% +7.36%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 56 46
10th Percentile £33.10 £49.00 £39.68
25th Percentile £44.51 £52.50 £51.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £60.00 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% +13.64%
75th Percentile £64.52 £78.75 £77.00
90th Percentile £71.30 £90.00 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £55.00 £62.50 £58.75
% change year-on-year -12.00% +6.38% +20.51%

All Process and 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 26,551 37,621 53,662
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.82% 86.30% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,137 24,254 37,244
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £521 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.86% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £744 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.80% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,437 1,746
10th Percentile £14.70 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.50 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.50 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.31% -4.83% +49.20%
75th Percentile £62.00 £59.95 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.94 £36.50 £36.00
% change year-on-year -23.45% +1.39% +80.00%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Test Automation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Test Automation.

Daily rate trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Test Automation.

Hourly rate trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Top 17 Contract 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 30 April 2025. 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 +12 1,113 £500 -4.76% 1,299
London +5 612 £503 -8.64% 493
UK excluding London +17 553 £475 -5.00% 902
Work from Home +2 457 £500 - 856
South East +19 175 £513 -6.82% 199
North of England +9 145 £450 -5.26% 242
Scotland +8 75 £440 -7.85% 60
Midlands +46 72 £463 +8.82% 140
North West -3 69 £449 -10.30% 140
Yorkshire +10 60 £488 +8.33% 68
South West +39 46 £500 -9.09% 122
West Midlands +35 44 £501 +17.94% 86
East Midlands +17 28 £444 +5.91% 54
East of England +15 20 £490 -1.51% 88
Wales +3 20 £395 -22.32% 41
North East +11 16 £395 -2.47% 34
Northern Ireland -10 2 £409 -18.30% 23

Test Automation
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 78 (5.88%) Confluence
2 18 (1.36%) Apache Spark
3 11 (0.83%) Apache
4 9 (0.68%) Apache Airflow
5 7 (0.53%) SharePoint
6 3 (0.23%) Anypoint
6 3 (0.23%) CICS
7 2 (0.15%) CMS
7 2 (0.15%) GeoServer
7 2 (0.15%) Jupyter
7 2 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
7 2 (0.15%) nginx
7 2 (0.15%) OpenStack
7 2 (0.15%) WebLogic
7 2 (0.15%) WebSphere
7 2 (0.15%) WordPress
8 1 (0.075%) Drupal
8 1 (0.075%) IIS
8 1 (0.075%) Oracle Coherence
8 1 (0.075%) Umbraco
Applications
1 16 (1.21%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.38%) Microsoft Office
3 4 (0.30%) Chatbot
4 3 (0.23%) MS Visio
5 2 (0.15%) Trello
6 1 (0.075%) CATIA
6 1 (0.075%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.075%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.075%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 10 (0.75%) Dynamics CRM
2 9 (0.68%) SAP S/4HANA
3 4 (0.30%) Oracle ERP
3 4 (0.30%) SAP Hybris
4 3 (0.23%) Infor CloudSuite
4 3 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
4 3 (0.23%) Shopify
5 2 (0.15%) Aladdin
5 2 (0.15%) Finacle
5 2 (0.15%) NEC Housing
5 2 (0.15%) NetSuite
5 2 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.15%) SAP CRM
5 2 (0.15%) SAP MM
5 2 (0.15%) SAP SCM
5 2 (0.15%) SimCorp Dimension
6 1 (0.075%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.075%) SAP FI
6 1 (0.075%) SAP SD
6 1 (0.075%) Unit4 Business World
Cloud Services
1 322 (24.28%) Azure
2 311 (23.45%) AWS
3 149 (11.24%) Azure DevOps
4 110 (8.30%) GitHub
5 102 (7.69%) GCP
6 68 (5.13%) Serverless
7 57 (4.30%) GitHub Actions
8 56 (4.22%) SaaS
9 40 (3.02%) AWS CloudFormation
9 40 (3.02%) AWS Lambda
10 34 (2.56%) PaaS
11 33 (2.49%) Amazon S3
12 32 (2.41%) Azure Cosmos DB
13 30 (2.26%) IaaS
14 26 (1.96%) BrowserStack
15 25 (1.89%) Power Platform
16 24 (1.81%) Dynamics 365
17 23 (1.73%) Azure Service Bus
17 23 (1.73%) Cloud Computing
18 21 (1.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 51 (3.85%) HTTP
2 40 (3.02%) Firewall
3 35 (2.64%) DNS
4 32 (2.41%) TCP/IP
5 27 (2.04%) BGP
6 22 (1.66%) DHCP
7 20 (1.51%) OSPF
8 19 (1.43%) HTTPS
9 12 (0.90%) Wireless
10 11 (0.83%) Network Security
11 10 (0.75%) VLAN
12 8 (0.60%) Wi-Fi
13 7 (0.53%) MPLS
14 6 (0.45%) DOCSIS
14 6 (0.45%) Multicast
14 6 (0.45%) VPN
15 5 (0.38%) SNMP
15 5 (0.38%) SSH
16 4 (0.30%) LAN
16 4 (0.30%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 74 (5.58%) PostgreSQL
2 69 (5.20%) SQL Server
3 60 (4.52%) MongoDB
3 60 (4.52%) NoSQL
4 46 (3.47%) Relational Database
5 34 (2.56%) MySQL
6 25 (1.89%) Data Warehouse
7 20 (1.51%) Apache Cassandra
8 19 (1.43%) Big Data
8 19 (1.43%) Elasticsearch
9 18 (1.36%) Data Lake
10 17 (1.28%) DynamoDB
11 16 (1.21%) Hadoop
12 15 (1.13%) DB2
13 12 (0.90%) Power BI
14 10 (0.75%) Amazon RDS
14 10 (0.75%) Oracle Database
15 7 (0.53%) Azure SQL Database
15 7 (0.53%) InfluxDB
15 7 (0.53%) MS Access
Development Applications
1 235 (17.72%) Selenium
2 226 (17.04%) Git
3 221 (16.67%) Jenkins
4 219 (16.52%) JIRA
5 126 (9.50%) Cucumber
6 118 (8.90%) Cypress.io
7 113 (8.52%) Postman
8 103 (7.77%) GitLab
9 77 (5.81%) REST Assured
10 76 (5.73%) JUnit
11 73 (5.51%) JMeter
12 41 (3.09%) Bitbucket
13 36 (2.71%) Appium
14 31 (2.34%) SonarQube
15 30 (2.26%) SoapUI
15 30 (2.26%) SpecFlow
16 25 (1.89%) Maven
17 23 (1.73%) Jasmine
18 20 (1.51%) WebDriver
19 18 (1.36%) TestRail
General
1 338 (25.49%) Social Skills
2 265 (19.98%) Finance
3 183 (13.80%) Analytical Skills
4 171 (12.90%) Public Sector
5 114 (8.60%) Banking
6 66 (4.98%) Telecoms
7 50 (3.77%) Manufacturing
8 45 (3.39%) Electronics
8 45 (3.39%) Marketing
9 43 (3.24%) Front Office
10 23 (1.73%) Investment Banking
11 21 (1.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 18 (1.36%) Financial Institution
12 18 (1.36%) Presentation Skills
13 13 (0.98%) Documentation Skills
13 13 (0.98%) Law
14 11 (0.83%) Organisational Skills
14 11 (0.83%) Retail
15 9 (0.68%) Legal
16 7 (0.53%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 272 (20.51%) Developer
2 180 (13.57%) Senior
3 173 (13.05%) Tester
4 137 (10.33%) Test Engineer
5 113 (8.52%) Analyst
6 108 (8.14%) Lead
7 88 (6.64%) Software Engineer
8 84 (6.33%) Architect
9 83 (6.26%) Automation Tester
10 73 (5.51%) Test Analyst
11 70 (5.28%) QA Engineer
12 55 (4.15%) DevOps Engineer
12 55 (4.15%) Senior Developer
13 52 (3.92%) Java Developer
14 47 (3.54%) Test Automation Engineer
15 46 (3.47%) Test Manager
16 41 (3.09%) Python Developer
17 38 (2.87%) Python Engineer
18 35 (2.64%) Test Leader
19 34 (2.56%) Full-Stack Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 119 (8.97%) REST
2 118 (8.90%) .NET
3 102 (7.69%) RESTful
4 87 (6.56%) React
5 79 (5.96%) CSS
6 77 (5.81%) Kafka
6 77 (5.81%) Playwright
7 76 (5.73%) HTML
8 68 (5.13%) Node.js
9 55 (4.15%) pytest
10 50 (3.77%) Spring
11 47 (3.54%) Spring Boot
12 37 (2.79%) Swagger
13 36 (2.71%) OpenAPI
14 33 (2.49%) AngularJS
14 33 (2.49%) Web Services
15 31 (2.34%) JSON
15 31 (2.34%) XML
16 27 (2.04%) .NET Framework
17 26 (1.96%) AWS CDK
Miscellaneous
1 62 (4.68%) Product Ownership
2 53 (4.00%) Cloud Native
3 32 (2.41%) Mobile App
4 26 (1.96%) Algorithms
4 26 (1.96%) Onboarding
5 25 (1.89%) Data Structures
6 23 (1.73%) Fixed Income
7 22 (1.66%) Management Information System
8 20 (1.51%) Public Cloud
9 19 (1.43%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
10 18 (1.36%) Equities
11 17 (1.28%) Distributed Systems
11 17 (1.28%) Self-Motivation
12 16 (1.21%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
12 16 (1.21%) Enterprise Software
12 16 (1.21%) Greenfield Project
12 16 (1.21%) Virtual Team
13 15 (1.13%) Data Protection Act
14 14 (1.06%) Legacy Systems
15 12 (0.90%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 148 (11.16%) Linux
2 91 (6.86%) Windows
3 51 (3.85%) Unix
4 35 (2.64%) Android
5 31 (2.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (1.58%) Apple iOS
7 7 (0.53%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.45%) Mac OS
9 3 (0.23%) Mac OS X
9 3 (0.23%) VMS
9 3 (0.23%) Windows Server
10 2 (0.15%) CentOS
10 2 (0.15%) Windows 10
10 2 (0.15%) Windows 7
10 2 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
10 2 (0.15%) zOS
11 1 (0.075%) AIX
11 1 (0.075%) SUSE
11 1 (0.075%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 575 (43.36%) Agile
2 519 (39.14%) CI/CD
3 389 (29.34%) DevOps
4 278 (20.97%) Problem-Solving
5 194 (14.63%) Software Engineering
6 165 (12.44%) Continuous Integration
7 162 (12.22%) Test Strategy
8 161 (12.14%) Microservices
9 157 (11.84%) Test Scripting
10 153 (11.54%) Containerisation
11 147 (11.09%) Software Testing
12 146 (11.01%) TDD
13 145 (10.94%) Scrum
14 138 (10.41%) Manual Testing
15 133 (10.03%) API Testing
16 132 (9.95%) Performance Testing
17 121 (9.13%) Infrastructure as Code
18 117 (8.82%) BDD
19 110 (8.30%) Validation
20 107 (8.07%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 368 (27.75%) Python
2 332 (25.04%) Java
3 264 (19.91%) SQL
4 222 (16.74%) JavaScript
5 160 (12.07%) C#
6 108 (8.14%) TypeScript
7 62 (4.68%) Bash
7 62 (4.68%) PowerShell
8 47 (3.54%) C++
9 32 (2.41%) Go
10 24 (1.81%) Ruby
11 23 (1.73%) Bicep
11 23 (1.73%) Shell Script
12 19 (1.43%) Kotlin
13 16 (1.21%) Groovy
13 16 (1.21%) PHP
14 12 (0.90%) Scala
14 12 (0.90%) Swift
15 11 (0.83%) C
16 9 (0.68%) Objective-C
Qualifications
1 285 (21.49%) Security Cleared
2 217 (16.37%) SC Cleared
3 138 (10.41%) Degree
4 64 (4.83%) DV Cleared
5 63 (4.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 45 (3.39%) ISTQB
7 17 (1.28%) Azure Certification
8 16 (1.21%) Master's Degree
9 14 (1.06%) BPSS Clearance
10 13 (0.98%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 10 (0.75%) AWS Certification
11 10 (0.75%) CEH
12 8 (0.60%) ISEB
13 6 (0.45%) CCNP
13 6 (0.45%) Cisco Certification
13 6 (0.45%) CREST Certified
13 6 (0.45%) GIAC
13 6 (0.45%) OSCP
14 5 (0.38%) CCSAS
14 5 (0.38%) GWAPT
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 296 (22.32%) QA
2 68 (5.13%) Accessibility
3 22 (1.66%) Data Quality
4 18 (1.36%) WCAG
5 13 (0.98%) Sarbanes-Oxley
6 9 (0.68%) GDPR
6 9 (0.68%) Software Quality Assurance
7 5 (0.38%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 4 (0.30%) Cyber Essentials
8 4 (0.30%) ISO 9001
9 3 (0.23%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.15%) GMP
10 2 (0.15%) Government Security Classifications
10 2 (0.15%) GRC
10 2 (0.15%) ITGC
10 2 (0.15%) NCSC
10 2 (0.15%) NIST
10 2 (0.15%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.15%) PMO
10 2 (0.15%) SLA
System Software
1 171 (12.90%) Docker
2 32 (2.41%) Active Directory
3 7 (0.53%) VMware Infrastructure
4 6 (0.45%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.38%) VMware NSX
6 4 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
6 4 (0.30%) vSphere
7 3 (0.23%) Firmware
8 2 (0.15%) FreeRADIUS
8 2 (0.15%) iptables
8 2 (0.15%) Virtual Desktop
8 2 (0.15%) VirtualBox
9 1 (0.075%) Time Sharing Option
9 1 (0.075%) Tivoli Workload Scheduler
Systems Management
1 198 (14.93%) Kubernetes
2 126 (9.50%) Terraform
3 98 (7.39%) Ansible
4 35 (2.64%) Grafana
5 22 (1.66%) Puppet
6 13 (0.98%) Progress Chef
6 13 (0.98%) Prometheus
7 12 (0.90%) Podman
8 9 (0.68%) Docker Swarm
8 9 (0.68%) HP ALM
9 8 (0.60%) Argo
10 6 (0.45%) Kibana
11 4 (0.30%) Proxmox
12 3 (0.23%) CloudHub
12 3 (0.23%) Control-M
12 3 (0.23%) Kustomize
12 3 (0.23%) Packer
12 3 (0.23%) Rancher
12 3 (0.23%) vRealize
12 3 (0.23%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 98 (7.39%) Microsoft
2 81 (6.11%) Oracle
3 77 (5.81%) SAP
4 40 (3.02%) Google
5 34 (2.56%) Cisco
5 34 (2.56%) Databricks
6 33 (2.49%) ServiceNow
7 31 (2.34%) Splunk
8 29 (2.19%) Salesforce
9 23 (1.73%) Fortinet
10 20 (1.51%) CheckPoint
11 19 (1.43%) Palo Alto
12 14 (1.06%) HP
13 13 (0.98%) Informatica
13 13 (0.98%) VMware
14 10 (0.75%) IBM
14 10 (0.75%) MuleSoft
15 9 (0.68%) ION Trading
16 8 (0.60%) Atlassian
16 8 (0.60%) Sybase