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

6 months to
8 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 51
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,265 1,430 1,611
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.34% 4.48% 3.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.10% 4.94% 4.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,466 998 1,059
10th Percentile £328 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £480 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.04% -6.34% -4.43%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £611
90th Percentile £663 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £458 £464 £501
% change year-on-year -1.35% -7.44% -1.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 30 50
10th Percentile £36.19 £40.26 £49.80
25th Percentile £60.17 £44.95 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +28.57% -6.67% -16.51%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.50 £71.87
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.22 £82.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +22.73% -2.22% -10.00%

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 44,398 28,953 36,844
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.10% 90.63% 85.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,615 18,257 23,517
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £517 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.28% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,640 1,439 2,494
10th Percentile £14.80 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +1.65%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 +5 1,928 £475 - 646
UK excluding London +3 1,126 £458 -1.35% 489
London +3 870 £500 - 253
Work from Home 0 639 £475 +3.26% 387
North of England +17 392 £460 +2.56% 112
Midlands +8 246 £450 +9.09% 63
West Midlands +31 229 £450 -6.83% 26
South East -41 201 £462 -7.60% 153
Yorkshire +12 164 £496 -0.75% 37
North West +1 152 £475 +15.29% 56
South West +8 112 £450 +4.35% 66
East of England +17 87 £475 +3.54% 43
North East +8 86 £425 +6.25% 19
Scotland -29 66 £440 -8.33% 24
Wales -4 35 £475 +16.92% 8
Northern Ireland +24 22 £475 +16.28% 27
East Midlands -40 17 £425 +54.55% 37
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
1 195 (8.61%) Confluence
2 48 (2.12%) Apache Spark
2 48 (2.12%) SAS
3 46 (2.03%) Apache Airflow
4 20 (0.88%) Apache
5 16 (0.71%) SharePoint
6 13 (0.57%) CMS
7 8 (0.35%) nginx
7 8 (0.35%) Tomcat
8 7 (0.31%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.26%) Appian
9 6 (0.26%) Camunda
10 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
10 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.13%) Kentico
11 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.088%) Mendix
12 2 (0.088%) Mule
Applications
1 30 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.40%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.044%) Mingle
6 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.97%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.79%) Aladdin
3 15 (0.66%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.49%) 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
7 6 (0.26%) Shopify
8 5 (0.22%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.22%) Loan IQ
9 4 (0.18%) Infor CloudSuite
9 4 (0.18%) Infor LN
9 4 (0.18%) Infor M3
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
10 3 (0.13%) Maximo
10 3 (0.13%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.088%) iTrent
11 2 (0.088%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 668 (29.49%) Azure
2 650 (28.70%) AWS
3 385 (17.00%) GitHub
4 298 (13.16%) Azure DevOps
5 227 (10.02%) GitHub Actions
6 168 (7.42%) GCP
7 154 (6.80%) Serverless
8 105 (4.64%) AWS Lambda
9 101 (4.46%) Power Platform
10 96 (4.24%) Amazon S3
11 64 (2.83%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 63 (2.78%) OpenShift
13 58 (2.56%) Amazon ECS
14 51 (2.25%) AWS CloudFormation
15 50 (2.21%) Amazon EC2
16 47 (2.08%) dbt
17 43 (1.90%) Snowflake
18 42 (1.85%) Azure Data Factory
19 41 (1.81%) Amazon EKS
20 33 (1.46%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.02%) HTTP
2 20 (0.88%) Firewall
3 16 (0.71%) SAN
4 13 (0.57%) Network Security
5 11 (0.49%) WAN
6 9 (0.40%) 5G
6 9 (0.40%) MPLS
6 9 (0.40%) VPN
7 8 (0.35%) 4G
8 7 (0.31%) 2G
8 7 (0.31%) 3G
8 7 (0.31%) BGP
8 7 (0.31%) Diameter Protocol
8 7 (0.31%) SIGTRAN
8 7 (0.31%) SS7
8 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.26%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.26%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
9 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (5.17%) PostgreSQL
2 116 (5.12%) MongoDB
3 105 (4.64%) Data Warehouse
4 96 (4.24%) NoSQL
5 83 (3.66%) SQL Server
6 80 (3.53%) Relational Database
7 78 (3.44%) Power BI
8 46 (2.03%) DynamoDB
8 46 (2.03%) Metadata
9 38 (1.68%) Oracle Reports
10 37 (1.63%) Big Data
11 36 (1.59%) Pentaho
12 34 (1.50%) Amazon Athena
13 31 (1.37%) Amazon RDS
14 30 (1.32%) MySQL
15 27 (1.19%) Amazon Redshift
16 26 (1.15%) Data Lake
17 25 (1.10%) Redis
18 22 (0.97%) Oracle Database
19 21 (0.93%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 436 (19.25%) JIRA
2 407 (17.97%) Git
3 368 (16.25%) Jenkins
4 310 (13.69%) GitLab
5 295 (13.02%) Selenium
6 179 (7.90%) Postman
7 157 (6.93%) Cucumber
8 124 (5.47%) REST Assured
9 116 (5.12%) JUnit
10 112 (4.94%) Cypress.io
11 104 (4.59%) JMeter
12 65 (2.87%) Zephyr
13 64 (2.83%) WebDriver
14 56 (2.47%) SonarQube
15 52 (2.30%) Gatling
16 48 (2.12%) Gradle
17 42 (1.85%) Mockito
18 38 (1.68%) Bitbucket
18 38 (1.68%) Maven
19 35 (1.55%) SpecFlow
General
1 602 (26.58%) Social Skills
2 413 (18.23%) Finance
3 300 (13.25%) Public Sector
4 276 (12.19%) Analytical Skills
5 189 (8.34%) Banking
6 57 (2.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
8 39 (1.72%) Investment Banking
9 36 (1.59%) Front Office
10 30 (1.32%) Telecoms
11 29 (1.28%) Influencing Skills
12 27 (1.19%) Military
13 24 (1.06%) Financial Institution
14 22 (0.97%) Retail
15 20 (0.88%) Aerospace
16 17 (0.75%) Legal
16 17 (0.75%) Manufacturing
16 17 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
17 15 (0.66%) Back Office
18 14 (0.62%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 467 (20.62%) Developer
2 359 (15.85%) Senior
3 243 (10.73%) Lead
4 238 (10.51%) Test Engineer
5 233 (10.29%) Tester
6 155 (6.84%) Data Engineer
7 150 (6.62%) Java Developer
8 116 (5.12%) Analyst
9 113 (4.99%) Software Engineer
10 106 (4.68%) Architect
10 106 (4.68%) DevOps Engineer
11 105 (4.64%) Test Automation Engineer
12 94 (4.15%) Senior Developer
13 91 (4.02%) Test Leader
14 90 (3.97%) Automation Tester
15 88 (3.89%) QA Engineer
16 75 (3.31%) Test Analyst
17 64 (2.83%) Full-Stack Developer
18 62 (2.74%) Automation Engineer
19 58 (2.56%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 278 (12.27%) Playwright
2 276 (12.19%) REST
3 206 (9.09%) React
4 180 (7.95%) Spring
5 176 (7.77%) RESTful
6 159 (7.02%) Kafka
7 149 (6.58%) .NET
8 146 (6.45%) Spring Boot
9 119 (5.25%) Node.js
10 93 (4.11%) AngularJS
11 86 (3.80%) HTML
12 76 (3.36%) CSS
13 64 (2.83%) OAuth
14 62 (2.74%) pytest
15 55 (2.43%) Jest
16 50 (2.21%) Swagger
17 45 (1.99%) Gherkin
17 45 (1.99%) JSON
18 43 (1.90%) OAuth2
19 42 (1.85%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 289 (12.76%) Cloud Native
2 163 (7.20%) Product Ownership
3 131 (5.78%) Distributed Systems
4 77 (3.40%) Enterprise Software
5 64 (2.83%) Legacy Systems
6 53 (2.34%) Data Protection Act
7 50 (2.21%) Onboarding
8 47 (2.08%) Mobile App
8 47 (2.08%) Self-Motivation
9 44 (1.94%) Virtual Team
10 32 (1.41%) Distributed Architecture
11 29 (1.28%) Security Posture
12 27 (1.19%) Management Information System
13 26 (1.15%) AI Agents
13 26 (1.15%) Embedded Systems
13 26 (1.15%) NHS
14 22 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
15 21 (0.93%) Data Centre
16 20 (0.88%) Fixed Income
17 19 (0.84%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 133 (5.87%) Linux
2 81 (3.58%) Windows
3 69 (3.05%) Unix
4 42 (1.85%) Android
5 40 (1.77%) Apple iOS
6 24 (1.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (0.84%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.62%) Mac OS X
9 10 (0.44%) Mac OS
9 10 (0.44%) Solaris
10 8 (0.35%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
12 6 (0.26%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.13%) AIX
15 2 (0.088%) CentOS
15 2 (0.088%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,279 (56.47%) CI/CD
2 1,046 (46.18%) Agile
3 825 (36.42%) DevOps
4 403 (17.79%) Problem-Solving
5 381 (16.82%) Microservices
6 375 (16.56%) Continuous Improvement
7 348 (15.36%) Scrum
8 342 (15.10%) Test Strategy
9 340 (15.01%) Validation
10 329 (14.53%) Software Engineering
11 325 (14.35%) Infrastructure as Code
12 292 (12.89%) Containerisation
13 282 (12.45%) TDD
14 279 (12.32%) AI
15 273 (12.05%) Observability
16 233 (10.29%) End-to-End Testing
17 227 (10.02%) ETL
18 221 (9.76%) User Acceptance Testing
19 220 (9.71%) Software Testing
20 214 (9.45%) Data Pipeline
Programming Languages
1 585 (25.83%) Python
2 569 (25.12%) Java
3 518 (22.87%) SQL
4 300 (13.25%) JavaScript
5 259 (11.43%) TypeScript
6 209 (9.23%) C#
7 78 (3.44%) Bash
8 76 (3.36%) PowerShell
9 54 (2.38%) C++
10 49 (2.16%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.68%) Scala
12 37 (1.63%) PL/SQL
13 36 (1.59%) Bicep
14 34 (1.50%) Apex Code
14 34 (1.50%) C
15 33 (1.46%) Go
16 23 (1.02%) Swift
17 21 (0.93%) Ruby
18 18 (0.79%) Shell Script
19 17 (0.75%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 706 (31.17%) Security Cleared
2 588 (25.96%) SC Cleared
3 106 (4.68%) Degree
4 105 (4.64%) BPSS Clearance
5 101 (4.46%) ISTQB
6 75 (3.31%) DV Cleared
7 54 (2.38%) Computer Science Degree
8 26 (1.15%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 22 (0.97%) AWS Certification
10 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 17 (0.75%) Master's Degree
11 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
12 11 (0.49%) Azure Certification
12 11 (0.49%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 11 (0.49%) SAFe Agilist
13 10 (0.44%) CCNP
14 9 (0.40%) CISSP
14 9 (0.40%) DBS Check
15 5 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 5 (0.22%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 505 (22.30%) QA
2 176 (7.77%) Accessibility
3 154 (6.80%) Data Quality
4 75 (3.31%) WCAG
5 40 (1.77%) GDPR
6 16 (0.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 15 (0.66%) SLA
8 13 (0.57%) NCSC
9 12 (0.53%) ISO 20022
10 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
11 9 (0.40%) NIST
12 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.22%) FATCA
14 5 (0.22%) SEPA
14 5 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
15 4 (0.18%) GRC
15 4 (0.18%) HL7
15 4 (0.18%) MiFID
15 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 390 (17.22%) Docker
2 31 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.84%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.62%) Firmware
5 13 (0.57%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.26%) Oracle RAC
8 4 (0.18%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
8 4 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
9 3 (0.13%) Hyper-V
10 2 (0.088%) SRDF
11 1 (0.044%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.044%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 395 (17.44%) Kubernetes
2 286 (12.63%) Terraform
3 115 (5.08%) Ansible
4 113 (4.99%) Grafana
5 94 (4.15%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.63%) Argo
7 22 (0.97%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.62%) Puppet
9 13 (0.57%) Kibana
10 12 (0.53%) HP Quality Center
11 11 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
12 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
13 8 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
14 6 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 6 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
14 6 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
15 5 (0.22%) Istio
15 5 (0.22%) Progress Chef
16 4 (0.18%) Packer
Vendors
1 196 (8.65%) Microsoft
2 176 (7.77%) Oracle
3 105 (4.64%) Salesforce
4 70 (3.09%) Databricks
5 65 (2.87%) Talend
6 64 (2.83%) Google
7 58 (2.56%) Red Hat
7 58 (2.56%) ServiceNow
7 58 (2.56%) Splunk
8 45 (1.99%) Denodo
9 38 (1.68%) IBM
9 38 (1.68%) Informatica
9 38 (1.68%) SAP
10 34 (1.50%) VMware
11 31 (1.37%) UiPath
12 29 (1.28%) Dynatrace
13 25 (1.10%) HP
13 25 (1.10%) MuleSoft
14 21 (0.93%) Cisco
15 16 (0.71%) Blue Prism