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

6 months to
13 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 50
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 0
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,280 1,470 1,601
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.33% 4.50% 3.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.08% 4.97% 4.39%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,475 1,023 1,051
10th Percentile £326 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £483 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.66% -5.76% -2.38%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £610
90th Percentile £658 £700 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £452 £464 £504
% change year-on-year -2.64% -7.94% -0.74%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 32 48
10th Percentile £36.26 £35.58 £49.40
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -20.00%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.50 £71.87
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.02 £79.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +28.57% -4.55% -13.30%

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 44,845 29,559 36,499
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.12% 90.45% 85.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,888 18,632 23,279
10th Percentile £325 £300 £304
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £501 £525
Median % change year-on-year +3.81% -4.67% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,665 1,513 2,446
10th Percentile £14.90 £14.20 £12.79
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.61 £16.25
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -4.70%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +82.48% -35.31% +0.51%

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 13 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 13 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 13 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 +4 1,935 £475 -2.06% 752
UK excluding London +5 1,135 £452 -2.64% 591
London +5 872 £500 - 322
Work from Home 0 648 £475 +3.37% 346
North of England +18 393 £460 +2.91% 139
Midlands +6 248 £450 +8.11% 67
West Midlands +29 231 £450 -6.83% 32
South East -38 200 £459 -8.20% 171
Yorkshire +6 159 £490 -2.00% 45
North West 0 155 £478 +19.20% 71
South West +10 116 £450 +2.86% 122
North East +11 89 £425 +6.25% 24
East of England +20 87 £450 -1.91% 43
Scotland -25 68 £440 -9.74% 22
Wales -3 35 £475 +15.15% 14
Northern Ireland +22 22 £475 +16.28% 27
East Midlands -42 17 £425 +40.26% 35
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
1 197 (8.64%) Confluence
2 50 (2.19%) Apache Spark
3 48 (2.11%) SAS
4 45 (1.97%) Apache Airflow
5 22 (0.96%) Apache
6 16 (0.70%) SharePoint
7 13 (0.57%) CMS
8 10 (0.44%) nginx
8 10 (0.44%) Tomcat
8 10 (0.44%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.26%) Camunda
10 5 (0.22%) Appian
11 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
11 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
12 3 (0.13%) Kentico
12 3 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
13 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
13 2 (0.088%) Mendix
13 2 (0.088%) Microsoft Exchange
13 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 8 (0.35%) 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
6 1 (0.044%) Trello
Business Applications
1 23 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.75%) Aladdin
3 16 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.53%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.35%) Findur
6 7 (0.31%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
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%) Oracle ERP
11 2 (0.088%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 667 (29.25%) Azure
2 662 (29.04%) AWS
3 392 (17.19%) GitHub
4 296 (12.98%) Azure DevOps
5 233 (10.22%) GitHub Actions
6 169 (7.41%) GCP
7 156 (6.84%) Serverless
8 106 (4.65%) AWS Lambda
9 100 (4.39%) Power Platform
10 97 (4.25%) Amazon S3
11 67 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 64 (2.81%) OpenShift
13 60 (2.63%) Amazon ECS
14 52 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
15 51 (2.24%) AWS CloudFormation
16 46 (2.02%) dbt
17 44 (1.93%) Amazon EKS
18 41 (1.80%) Azure Data Factory
18 41 (1.80%) Snowflake
19 38 (1.67%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.10%) HTTP
2 19 (0.83%) Firewall
3 16 (0.70%) SAN
4 12 (0.53%) Network Security
5 11 (0.48%) WAN
6 9 (0.39%) 5G
6 9 (0.39%) MPLS
7 8 (0.35%) 4G
7 8 (0.35%) VPN
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
9 6 (0.26%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.26%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
9 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
9 6 (0.26%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 118 (5.18%) PostgreSQL
2 116 (5.09%) MongoDB
3 108 (4.74%) Data Warehouse
4 92 (4.04%) NoSQL
5 83 (3.64%) SQL Server
6 79 (3.46%) Relational Database
7 77 (3.38%) Power BI
8 46 (2.02%) DynamoDB
8 46 (2.02%) Metadata
9 39 (1.71%) Big Data
10 38 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
11 36 (1.58%) Pentaho
12 33 (1.45%) Amazon Athena
13 31 (1.36%) Amazon RDS
14 30 (1.32%) MySQL
15 26 (1.14%) Amazon Redshift
15 26 (1.14%) Redis
16 25 (1.10%) Data Lake
17 23 (1.01%) Elasticsearch
18 22 (0.96%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 434 (19.04%) JIRA
2 417 (18.29%) Git
3 367 (16.10%) Jenkins
4 311 (13.64%) GitLab
5 294 (12.89%) Selenium
6 177 (7.76%) Postman
7 157 (6.89%) Cucumber
8 122 (5.35%) REST Assured
9 117 (5.13%) JUnit
10 113 (4.96%) Cypress.io
11 106 (4.65%) JMeter
12 65 (2.85%) WebDriver
13 64 (2.81%) Zephyr
14 56 (2.46%) SonarQube
15 55 (2.41%) Gatling
16 48 (2.11%) Gradle
17 42 (1.84%) Mockito
18 39 (1.71%) Bitbucket
19 38 (1.67%) Maven
20 36 (1.58%) SpecFlow
General
1 605 (26.54%) Social Skills
2 408 (17.89%) Finance
3 305 (13.38%) Public Sector
4 282 (12.37%) Analytical Skills
5 186 (8.16%) Banking
6 59 (2.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
8 38 (1.67%) Investment Banking
9 36 (1.58%) Front Office
10 30 (1.32%) Telecoms
11 29 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
12 27 (1.18%) Military
13 25 (1.10%) Retail
14 24 (1.05%) Financial Institution
15 20 (0.88%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.79%) Manufacturing
17 17 (0.75%) Legal
17 17 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
18 15 (0.66%) Back Office
19 14 (0.61%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 473 (20.75%) Developer
2 364 (15.96%) Senior
3 249 (10.92%) Lead
4 238 (10.44%) Test Engineer
5 235 (10.31%) Tester
6 155 (6.80%) Java Developer
7 154 (6.75%) Data Engineer
8 118 (5.18%) Analyst
9 113 (4.96%) Software Engineer
10 107 (4.69%) DevOps Engineer
11 105 (4.61%) Architect
11 105 (4.61%) Test Automation Engineer
12 95 (4.17%) Senior Developer
13 92 (4.04%) Test Leader
14 91 (3.99%) QA Engineer
15 90 (3.95%) Automation Tester
16 75 (3.29%) Test Analyst
17 65 (2.85%) Full-Stack Developer
18 61 (2.68%) Automation Engineer
19 58 (2.54%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 280 (12.28%) REST
2 278 (12.19%) Playwright
3 208 (9.12%) React
4 184 (8.07%) RESTful
5 183 (8.03%) Spring
6 158 (6.93%) Kafka
7 152 (6.67%) .NET
8 147 (6.45%) Spring Boot
9 120 (5.26%) Node.js
10 94 (4.12%) AngularJS
11 86 (3.77%) HTML
12 76 (3.33%) CSS
13 65 (2.85%) OAuth
14 60 (2.63%) pytest
15 52 (2.28%) Jest
16 51 (2.24%) Swagger
17 48 (2.11%) JSON
18 46 (2.02%) Gherkin
19 44 (1.93%) OAuth2
20 42 (1.84%) HTML5
Miscellaneous
1 303 (13.29%) Cloud Native
2 163 (7.15%) Product Ownership
3 133 (5.83%) Distributed Systems
4 77 (3.38%) Enterprise Software
5 64 (2.81%) Legacy Systems
6 54 (2.37%) Onboarding
7 51 (2.24%) Data Protection Act
8 47 (2.06%) Self-Motivation
9 46 (2.02%) Mobile App
10 43 (1.89%) Virtual Team
11 32 (1.40%) Distributed Architecture
12 29 (1.27%) Security Posture
13 28 (1.23%) AI Agents
13 28 (1.23%) Management Information System
14 27 (1.18%) Embedded Systems
15 26 (1.14%) NHS
16 23 (1.01%) Greenfield Project
17 20 (0.88%) Data Centre
17 20 (0.88%) Fixed Income
18 19 (0.83%) Algorithms
Operating Systems
1 135 (5.92%) Linux
2 80 (3.51%) Windows
3 69 (3.03%) Unix
4 43 (1.89%) Android
5 41 (1.80%) Apple iOS
6 25 (1.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 18 (0.79%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.61%) Mac OS X
9 11 (0.48%) Solaris
10 10 (0.44%) Mac OS
11 8 (0.35%) Windows Server 2008
12 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
13 6 (0.26%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.13%) AIX
16 2 (0.088%) CentOS
17 1 (0.044%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,299 (56.97%) CI/CD
2 1,056 (46.32%) Agile
3 833 (36.54%) DevOps
4 409 (17.94%) Problem-Solving
5 389 (17.06%) Microservices
6 383 (16.80%) Continuous Improvement
7 355 (15.57%) Scrum
8 347 (15.22%) Test Strategy
9 345 (15.13%) Validation
10 339 (14.87%) Software Engineering
11 333 (14.61%) Infrastructure as Code
12 300 (13.16%) Containerisation
13 285 (12.50%) AI
14 284 (12.46%) TDD
15 280 (12.28%) Observability
16 234 (10.26%) End-to-End Testing
17 231 (10.13%) ETL
18 223 (9.78%) Software Testing
19 221 (9.69%) SDLC
19 221 (9.69%) User Acceptance Testing
Programming Languages
1 589 (25.83%) Python
2 579 (25.39%) Java
3 518 (22.72%) SQL
4 299 (13.11%) JavaScript
5 260 (11.40%) TypeScript
6 210 (9.21%) C#
7 80 (3.51%) Bash
8 75 (3.29%) PowerShell
9 54 (2.37%) C++
10 51 (2.24%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.67%) PL/SQL
12 37 (1.62%) Bicep
12 37 (1.62%) Scala
13 34 (1.49%) Apex Code
13 34 (1.49%) C
14 33 (1.45%) Go
15 23 (1.01%) Ruby
15 23 (1.01%) Swift
16 18 (0.79%) Shell Script
17 16 (0.70%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 713 (31.27%) Security Cleared
2 596 (26.14%) SC Cleared
3 109 (4.78%) BPSS Clearance
4 108 (4.74%) Degree
5 101 (4.43%) ISTQB
6 74 (3.25%) DV Cleared
7 55 (2.41%) Computer Science Degree
8 26 (1.14%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 24 (1.05%) AWS Certification
10 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 16 (0.70%) Master's Degree
12 13 (0.57%) Azure Certification
13 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
14 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.44%) CCNP
16 9 (0.39%) CISSP
16 9 (0.39%) DBS Check
17 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
18 5 (0.22%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 525 (23.03%) QA
2 183 (8.03%) Accessibility
3 156 (6.84%) Data Quality
4 78 (3.42%) WCAG
5 40 (1.75%) GDPR
6 16 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 14 (0.61%) NCSC
7 14 (0.61%) SLA
8 11 (0.48%) ISO 20022
9 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
10 9 (0.39%) NIST
11 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.22%) FATCA
13 5 (0.22%) SEPA
13 5 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
14 4 (0.18%) GRC
14 4 (0.18%) HL7
14 4 (0.18%) MiFID
15 3 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 400 (17.54%) Docker
2 31 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 18 (0.79%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.61%) 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
1 405 (17.76%) Kubernetes
2 290 (12.72%) Terraform
3 116 (5.09%) Ansible
4 113 (4.96%) Grafana
5 94 (4.12%) Prometheus
6 38 (1.67%) Argo
7 23 (1.01%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.61%) Puppet
9 13 (0.57%) Kibana
10 12 (0.53%) HP Quality Center
11 11 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
12 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
13 8 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
14 6 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
14 6 (0.26%) Progress Chef
15 5 (0.22%) Forefront Identity Manager
15 5 (0.22%) Istio
15 5 (0.22%) NetIQ Identity Manager
16 4 (0.18%) Rancher
Vendors
1 197 (8.64%) Microsoft
2 180 (7.89%) Oracle
3 106 (4.65%) Salesforce
4 73 (3.20%) Databricks
5 66 (2.89%) Talend
6 65 (2.85%) Google
7 60 (2.63%) Red Hat
8 58 (2.54%) Splunk
9 55 (2.41%) ServiceNow
10 45 (1.97%) Denodo
11 39 (1.71%) IBM
11 39 (1.71%) SAP
12 37 (1.62%) Informatica
13 34 (1.49%) VMware
14 30 (1.32%) UiPath
15 29 (1.27%) Dynatrace
16 26 (1.14%) HP
17 25 (1.10%) MuleSoft
18 21 (0.92%) Cisco
19 16 (0.70%) Blue Prism