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 28 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
28 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 47 47 55
Rank change year-on-year 0 +8 -6
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,040 1,305 1,503
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.18% 4.55% 3.52%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 4.94% 5.00% 4.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,324 915 997
10th Percentile £350 £325 £363
25th Percentile £400 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £513
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -2.44% -6.82%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £663 £738 £724
UK excluding London median daily rate £468 £468 £500
% change year-on-year +0.05% -6.45% -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 98 22 52
10th Percentile £35.44 £35.58 £51.38
25th Percentile £55.31 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £66.25 £52.50 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.19% -12.50% -12.73%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.52 £73.00
90th Percentile £74.00 £75.45 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £61.25
% change year-on-year +22.73% -10.20% -4.85%

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 41,286 26,078 36,653
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.54% 91.02% 85.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,818 16,706 23,627
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £512 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.19% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £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 2,472 1,084 2,486
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.08 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.28 £27.52 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.64% -23.57% -1.09%
75th Percentile £67.50 £57.84 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.19 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £37.50
% change year-on-year +78.93% -32.93% +7.14%

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 28 May 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 28 May 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 28 May 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 -2 1,745 £475 -5.00% 669
UK excluding London -3 978 £468 +0.05% 476
London -1 821 £500 -2.44% 280
Work from Home -3 584 £475 - 329
North of England +9 355 £466 +3.56% 137
Midlands +9 206 £459 +9.61% 62
West Midlands +31 184 £459 -4.97% 42
South East -37 178 £500 -0.10% 116
North West +14 156 £475 +6.26% 83
Yorkshire -8 149 £493 +3.68% 28
South West +18 98 £469 -3.85% 61
East of England +12 75 £495 +5.88% 47
North East +2 58 £425 +6.25% 26
Scotland -36 43 £440 -5.48% 28
Wales -3 32 £475 +16.92% 18
East Midlands -39 22 £400 +45.45% 20
Northern Ireland +21 20 £475 +16.28% 18
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
1 166 (8.14%) Confluence
2 44 (2.16%) SAS
3 40 (1.96%) Apache Spark
4 39 (1.91%) Apache Airflow
5 15 (0.74%) Apache
6 12 (0.59%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.49%) CMS
8 8 (0.39%) Appian
8 8 (0.39%) Camunda
9 7 (0.34%) nginx
9 7 (0.34%) Tomcat
10 6 (0.29%) Adobe Experience Manager
11 4 (0.20%) Anypoint
11 4 (0.20%) WebLogic
12 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
12 3 (0.15%) Oracle Workflow
13 2 (0.098%) Kentico
13 2 (0.098%) Mendix
14 1 (0.049%) Jupyter
14 1 (0.049%) OpenStack
Applications
1 28 (1.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.69%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 11 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
3 11 (0.54%) MS Visio
4 4 (0.20%) Spreadsheet
5 3 (0.15%) Simulink
6 1 (0.049%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.049%) Mingle
6 1 (0.049%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 21 (1.03%) Aladdin
2 17 (0.83%) Dynamics CRM
3 11 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
4 9 (0.44%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.39%) Findur
5 8 (0.39%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.29%) Shopify
7 5 (0.25%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.25%) Loan IQ
7 5 (0.25%) SAP ERP
7 5 (0.25%) SAP MDG
8 3 (0.15%) Distributed Ledger
8 3 (0.15%) Infor CloudSuite
8 3 (0.15%) Infor LN
8 3 (0.15%) Infor M3
8 3 (0.15%) Maximo
8 3 (0.15%) Workday HCM
9 2 (0.098%) Advent Geneva
9 2 (0.098%) Salesforce CRM
9 2 (0.098%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 585 (28.68%) Azure
2 577 (28.28%) AWS
3 350 (17.16%) GitHub
4 270 (13.24%) Azure DevOps
5 201 (9.85%) GitHub Actions
6 156 (7.65%) GCP
7 134 (6.57%) Serverless
8 86 (4.22%) AWS Lambda
9 83 (4.07%) Power Platform
10 80 (3.92%) Amazon S3
11 58 (2.84%) OpenShift
12 56 (2.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 52 (2.55%) Amazon ECS
14 46 (2.25%) AWS CloudFormation
15 43 (2.11%) Azure Data Factory
16 42 (2.06%) Snowflake
17 39 (1.91%) Amazon EKS
18 38 (1.86%) Amazon EC2
19 31 (1.52%) Dynamics 365
20 28 (1.37%) BrowserStack
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.23%) HTTP
2 23 (1.13%) Firewall
3 15 (0.74%) SAN
4 11 (0.54%) Network Security
4 11 (0.54%) TCP/IP
4 11 (0.54%) VPN
5 9 (0.44%) SSL
6 8 (0.39%) MPLS
6 8 (0.39%) WAN
7 7 (0.34%) Wi-Fi
8 6 (0.29%) Ethernet
8 6 (0.29%) VLAN
8 6 (0.29%) Wireshark
9 5 (0.25%) 5G
9 5 (0.25%) FTP
9 5 (0.25%) Multicast
10 4 (0.20%) BGP
10 4 (0.20%) NAS
10 4 (0.20%) Reverse Proxy
10 4 (0.20%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 108 (5.29%) PostgreSQL
2 107 (5.25%) MongoDB
3 98 (4.80%) NoSQL
4 87 (4.26%) SQL Server
5 83 (4.07%) Data Warehouse
6 71 (3.48%) Relational Database
7 57 (2.79%) Power BI
8 47 (2.30%) DynamoDB
9 41 (2.01%) Metadata
10 34 (1.67%) Big Data
11 33 (1.62%) Pentaho
12 31 (1.52%) MySQL
12 31 (1.52%) Oracle Reports
13 26 (1.27%) Amazon RDS
13 26 (1.27%) Data Lake
13 26 (1.27%) Tableau
14 24 (1.18%) Redis
15 23 (1.13%) BigQuery
16 21 (1.03%) Amazon Athena
16 21 (1.03%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 393 (19.26%) JIRA
2 356 (17.45%) Git
3 342 (16.76%) Jenkins
4 286 (14.02%) GitLab
5 283 (13.87%) Selenium
6 172 (8.43%) Postman
7 153 (7.50%) Cucumber
8 113 (5.54%) REST Assured
9 102 (5.00%) JUnit
10 100 (4.90%) Cypress.io
10 100 (4.90%) JMeter
11 60 (2.94%) WebDriver
12 54 (2.65%) Zephyr
13 49 (2.40%) SonarQube
14 44 (2.16%) Gatling
15 37 (1.81%) Gradle
15 37 (1.81%) Mockito
16 31 (1.52%) Bitbucket
16 31 (1.52%) Maven
16 31 (1.52%) SpecFlow
General
1 537 (26.32%) Social Skills
2 352 (17.25%) Finance
3 277 (13.58%) Public Sector
4 241 (11.81%) Analytical Skills
5 170 (8.33%) Banking
6 42 (2.06%) Documentation Skills
7 40 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 39 (1.91%) Investment Banking
9 36 (1.76%) Front Office
10 25 (1.23%) Influencing Skills
11 21 (1.03%) Telecoms
12 19 (0.93%) Military
13 18 (0.88%) Legal
14 17 (0.83%) Aerospace
14 17 (0.83%) Presentation Skills
14 17 (0.83%) Retail
15 16 (0.78%) Organisational Skills
16 15 (0.74%) Manufacturing
17 13 (0.64%) Back Office
17 13 (0.64%) Financial Institution
Job Titles
1 415 (20.34%) Developer
2 314 (15.39%) Senior
3 232 (11.37%) Test Engineer
4 215 (10.54%) Lead
5 212 (10.39%) Tester
6 121 (5.93%) Data Engineer
7 110 (5.39%) Java Developer
8 108 (5.29%) Analyst
9 100 (4.90%) Software Engineer
9 100 (4.90%) Test Automation Engineer
10 93 (4.56%) Architect
10 93 (4.56%) Automation Tester
11 92 (4.51%) DevOps Engineer
12 84 (4.12%) Test Leader
13 83 (4.07%) QA Engineer
14 80 (3.92%) Senior Developer
15 65 (3.19%) Test Analyst
16 63 (3.09%) Full-Stack Developer
17 59 (2.89%) Test Manager
18 58 (2.84%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 250 (12.25%) Playwright
2 241 (11.81%) REST
3 184 (9.02%) React
4 160 (7.84%) RESTful
5 143 (7.01%) Kafka
5 143 (7.01%) Spring
6 141 (6.91%) .NET
7 124 (6.08%) Node.js
8 120 (5.88%) Spring Boot
9 74 (3.63%) AngularJS
9 74 (3.63%) HTML
10 64 (3.14%) pytest
11 61 (2.99%) CSS
11 61 (2.99%) OAuth
12 52 (2.55%) Jest
13 46 (2.25%) Swagger
14 44 (2.16%) Gherkin
14 44 (2.16%) OpenID
15 43 (2.11%) JSON
16 41 (2.01%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 223 (10.93%) Cloud Native
2 154 (7.55%) Product Ownership
3 107 (5.25%) Distributed Systems
4 54 (2.65%) Data Protection Act
5 47 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
6 46 (2.25%) Mobile App
7 43 (2.11%) Enterprise Software
8 40 (1.96%) Self-Motivation
9 39 (1.91%) Virtual Team
10 36 (1.76%) Onboarding
11 31 (1.52%) NHS
12 26 (1.27%) Distributed Architecture
13 25 (1.23%) Algorithms
14 24 (1.18%) Management Information System
15 23 (1.13%) Data Centre
15 23 (1.13%) Derivative
16 22 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
17 19 (0.93%) Fixed Income
18 18 (0.88%) Data Structures
18 18 (0.88%) Embedded Systems
Operating Systems
1 128 (6.27%) Linux
2 78 (3.82%) Windows
3 58 (2.84%) Unix
4 41 (2.01%) Android
5 35 (1.72%) Apple iOS
6 21 (1.03%) Windows Server
7 20 (0.98%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 12 (0.59%) Mac OS X
9 9 (0.44%) Mac OS
10 8 (0.39%) Solaris
11 7 (0.34%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.34%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.29%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.20%) Embedded Linux
14 3 (0.15%) AIX
14 3 (0.15%) CentOS
15 2 (0.098%) Kali Linux
16 1 (0.049%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,104 (54.12%) CI/CD
2 934 (45.78%) Agile
3 737 (36.13%) DevOps
4 380 (18.63%) Problem-Solving
5 334 (16.37%) Continuous Improvement
6 327 (16.03%) Microservices
7 316 (15.49%) Test Strategy
8 290 (14.22%) Scrum
9 278 (13.63%) Validation
10 272 (13.33%) Software Engineering
11 270 (13.24%) Infrastructure as Code
12 252 (12.35%) Containerisation
13 248 (12.16%) Observability
14 233 (11.42%) TDD
15 223 (10.93%) AI
16 206 (10.10%) API Testing
17 201 (9.85%) ETL
18 198 (9.71%) Test Scripting
19 196 (9.61%) Software Testing
20 195 (9.56%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 535 (26.23%) Python
2 516 (25.29%) Java
3 462 (22.65%) SQL
4 288 (14.12%) JavaScript
5 242 (11.86%) TypeScript
6 201 (9.85%) C#
7 73 (3.58%) PowerShell
8 68 (3.33%) Bash
9 55 (2.70%) C++
10 45 (2.21%) Kotlin
11 40 (1.96%) PL/SQL
12 36 (1.76%) Scala
13 32 (1.57%) C
14 31 (1.52%) Apex Code
15 29 (1.42%) Go
16 26 (1.27%) Bicep
17 21 (1.03%) Ruby
18 19 (0.93%) Swift
19 16 (0.78%) Groovy
20 14 (0.69%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 630 (30.88%) Security Cleared
2 502 (24.61%) SC Cleared
3 93 (4.56%) ISTQB
4 87 (4.26%) Degree
5 85 (4.17%) BPSS Clearance
6 71 (3.48%) DV Cleared
7 43 (2.11%) Computer Science Degree
8 26 (1.27%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 14 (0.69%) Master's Degree
10 12 (0.59%) Cisco Certification
11 11 (0.54%) CCNP
11 11 (0.54%) DBS Check
12 10 (0.49%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 10 (0.49%) SAFe Agilist
13 9 (0.44%) AWS Certification
14 8 (0.39%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
14 8 (0.39%) Azure Certification
15 7 (0.34%) CISSP
16 6 (0.29%) Microsoft Certification
17 5 (0.25%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 436 (21.37%) QA
2 154 (7.55%) Accessibility
3 126 (6.18%) Data Quality
4 68 (3.33%) WCAG
5 36 (1.76%) GDPR
6 15 (0.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.74%) SLA
7 11 (0.54%) ISO 20022
8 10 (0.49%) Def Stans
9 9 (0.44%) NCSC
9 9 (0.44%) NIST
10 7 (0.34%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 6 (0.29%) PCI DSS
11 6 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
12 5 (0.25%) FATCA
13 4 (0.20%) HL7
13 4 (0.20%) MiFID
13 4 (0.20%) SEPA
13 4 (0.20%) Software Quality Assurance
14 3 (0.15%) SOC 2
System Software
1 347 (17.01%) Docker
2 25 (1.23%) VMware Infrastructure
3 20 (0.98%) Active Directory
4 13 (0.64%) Firmware
5 11 (0.54%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.39%) VMware ESXi
7 7 (0.34%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
8 6 (0.29%) Oracle RAC
9 4 (0.20%) Virtual Desktop
10 2 (0.098%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.098%) ISA Server
10 2 (0.098%) SRDF
11 1 (0.049%) KVM
11 1 (0.049%) Squid
11 1 (0.049%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.049%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 336 (16.47%) Kubernetes
2 238 (11.67%) Terraform
3 111 (5.44%) Grafana
4 93 (4.56%) Prometheus
5 92 (4.51%) Ansible
6 28 (1.37%) Argo
7 19 (0.93%) HP ALM
8 16 (0.78%) Puppet
9 13 (0.64%) Kibana
9 13 (0.64%) Single Sign-On
10 10 (0.49%) HP Quality Center
11 9 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
11 9 (0.44%) Forefront Identity Manager
11 9 (0.44%) NetIQ Identity Manager
12 8 (0.39%) Kustomize
12 8 (0.39%) NetBackup
13 6 (0.29%) Oracle RMAN
13 6 (0.29%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.20%) Istio
14 4 (0.20%) Rancher
Vendors
1 167 (8.19%) Microsoft
2 166 (8.14%) Oracle
3 85 (4.17%) Salesforce
4 67 (3.28%) Databricks
5 61 (2.99%) ServiceNow
6 60 (2.94%) Splunk
6 60 (2.94%) Talend
7 59 (2.89%) Google
8 50 (2.45%) Red Hat
9 42 (2.06%) Denodo
10 36 (1.76%) SAP
11 30 (1.47%) VMware
12 28 (1.37%) IBM
13 22 (1.08%) Dynatrace
13 22 (1.08%) HP
13 22 (1.08%) UiPath
14 20 (0.98%) Informatica
14 20 (0.98%) MuleSoft
15 19 (0.93%) Cisco
16 16 (0.78%) Blue Prism