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

6 months to
4 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 52
Rank change year-on-year +2 +4 -1
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,231 1,410 1,602
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.32% 4.47% 3.69%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.08% 4.93% 4.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,444 988 1,055
10th Percentile £327 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £484 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.86% -5.56% -5.96%
75th Percentile £575 £594 £613
90th Percentile £663 £715 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £456 £464 £501
% change year-on-year -1.62% -7.44% -2.15%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 30 51
10th Percentile £36.19 £40.26 £50.00
25th Percentile £60.17 £44.95 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +28.57% -8.70% -12.88%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.50 £71.88
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.22 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +22.73% -4.35% -8.00%

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 43,890 28,628 37,028
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.04% 90.75% 85.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,271 18,064 23,618
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.98% -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 2,636 1,406 2,527
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.46 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.75 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% +8.91%

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 4 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 4 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 4 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 +3 1,898 £475 -1.66% 756
UK excluding London +3 1,108 £456 -1.62% 557
London +7 858 £500 - 309
Work from Home -1 632 £475 +2.15% 385
North of England +17 386 £455 +1.11% 136
Midlands +10 238 £450 +8.11% 79
West Midlands +27 222 £450 -8.44% 39
South East -36 199 £465 -7.00% 169
Yorkshire +5 160 £500 - 42
North West +3 152 £475 +12.56% 70
South West +13 111 £450 - 72
East of England +16 87 £475 +3.54% 57
North East +9 84 £425 +6.25% 24
Scotland -28 65 £440 -9.04% 26
Wales -2 34 £475 +20.25% 8
Northern Ireland +21 22 £475 +16.28% 21
East Midlands -42 16 £425 +54.55% 40
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
1 194 (8.70%) Confluence
2 47 (2.11%) SAS
3 46 (2.06%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.06%) Apache Spark
4 19 (0.85%) Apache
5 16 (0.72%) SharePoint
6 12 (0.54%) CMS
7 8 (0.36%) nginx
7 8 (0.36%) Tomcat
8 6 (0.27%) Appian
8 6 (0.27%) Camunda
8 6 (0.27%) WebLogic
9 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
9 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.13%) Kentico
10 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
11 2 (0.090%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.090%) Mendix
11 2 (0.090%) Mule
Applications
1 31 (1.39%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.76%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.40%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.22%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.13%) Simulink
8 1 (0.045%) Mingle
8 1 (0.045%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 22 (0.99%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.72%) Aladdin
3 15 (0.67%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.54%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.49%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.36%) Findur
7 6 (0.27%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.27%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.27%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.27%) 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 (0.090%) iTrent
11 2 (0.090%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 651 (29.18%) Azure
2 637 (28.55%) AWS
3 381 (17.08%) GitHub
4 294 (13.18%) Azure DevOps
5 226 (10.13%) GitHub Actions
6 164 (7.35%) GCP
7 151 (6.77%) Serverless
8 102 (4.57%) AWS Lambda
9 96 (4.30%) Power Platform
10 94 (4.21%) Amazon S3
11 64 (2.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 63 (2.82%) OpenShift
13 57 (2.55%) Amazon ECS
14 50 (2.24%) Amazon EC2
14 50 (2.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 47 (2.11%) dbt
16 41 (1.84%) Amazon EKS
16 41 (1.84%) Azure Data Factory
16 41 (1.84%) Snowflake
17 31 (1.39%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.03%) HTTP
2 20 (0.90%) Firewall
3 16 (0.72%) SAN
4 13 (0.58%) Network Security
5 11 (0.49%) WAN
6 9 (0.40%) MPLS
6 9 (0.40%) VPN
7 8 (0.36%) 5G
8 7 (0.31%) 4G
8 7 (0.31%) BGP
8 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.27%) 2G
9 6 (0.27%) 3G
9 6 (0.27%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.27%) LAN
9 6 (0.27%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.27%) SIGTRAN
9 6 (0.27%) SS7
9 6 (0.27%) TCP/IP
9 6 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 116 (5.20%) MongoDB
1 116 (5.20%) PostgreSQL
2 103 (4.62%) Data Warehouse
3 95 (4.26%) NoSQL
4 83 (3.72%) SQL Server
5 79 (3.54%) Relational Database
6 73 (3.27%) Power BI
7 46 (2.06%) DynamoDB
8 43 (1.93%) Metadata
9 37 (1.66%) Oracle Reports
10 36 (1.61%) Big Data
11 35 (1.57%) Pentaho
12 34 (1.52%) Amazon Athena
13 30 (1.34%) MySQL
14 29 (1.30%) Amazon RDS
15 27 (1.21%) Amazon Redshift
16 26 (1.17%) Data Lake
17 25 (1.12%) Redis
18 21 (0.94%) Oracle Database
18 21 (0.94%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 431 (19.32%) JIRA
2 403 (18.06%) Git
3 365 (16.36%) Jenkins
4 307 (13.76%) GitLab
5 293 (13.13%) Selenium
6 177 (7.93%) Postman
7 156 (6.99%) Cucumber
8 122 (5.47%) REST Assured
9 115 (5.15%) JUnit
10 108 (4.84%) Cypress.io
11 104 (4.66%) JMeter
12 65 (2.91%) Zephyr
13 63 (2.82%) WebDriver
14 56 (2.51%) SonarQube
15 52 (2.33%) Gatling
16 47 (2.11%) Gradle
17 42 (1.88%) Mockito
18 38 (1.70%) Bitbucket
19 37 (1.66%) Maven
20 35 (1.57%) SpecFlow
General
1 594 (26.62%) Social Skills
2 406 (18.20%) Finance
3 297 (13.31%) Public Sector
4 272 (12.19%) Analytical Skills
5 188 (8.43%) Banking
6 56 (2.51%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
8 40 (1.79%) Investment Banking
9 35 (1.57%) Front Office
10 29 (1.30%) Influencing Skills
10 29 (1.30%) Telecoms
11 26 (1.17%) Military
12 24 (1.08%) Financial Institution
13 22 (0.99%) Retail
14 18 (0.81%) Aerospace
15 17 (0.76%) Legal
15 17 (0.76%) Manufacturing
15 17 (0.76%) Organisational Skills
16 15 (0.67%) Back Office
17 14 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 460 (20.62%) Developer
2 351 (15.73%) Senior
3 238 (10.67%) Lead
4 234 (10.49%) Test Engineer
5 230 (10.31%) Tester
6 148 (6.63%) Data Engineer
6 148 (6.63%) Java Developer
7 116 (5.20%) Analyst
8 112 (5.02%) Software Engineer
9 106 (4.75%) DevOps Engineer
10 104 (4.66%) Architect
11 102 (4.57%) Test Automation Engineer
12 92 (4.12%) Senior Developer
13 91 (4.08%) Test Leader
14 88 (3.94%) Automation Tester
15 86 (3.85%) QA Engineer
16 74 (3.32%) Test Analyst
17 62 (2.78%) Full-Stack Developer
18 61 (2.73%) Automation Engineer
19 58 (2.60%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 273 (12.24%) Playwright
2 272 (12.19%) REST
3 200 (8.96%) React
4 178 (7.98%) Spring
5 171 (7.66%) RESTful
6 155 (6.95%) Kafka
7 147 (6.59%) .NET
8 144 (6.45%) Spring Boot
9 114 (5.11%) Node.js
10 91 (4.08%) AngularJS
11 79 (3.54%) HTML
12 70 (3.14%) CSS
13 62 (2.78%) pytest
14 60 (2.69%) OAuth
15 50 (2.24%) Jest
15 50 (2.24%) Swagger
16 45 (2.02%) Gherkin
16 45 (2.02%) JSON
17 41 (1.84%) GraphQL
18 40 (1.79%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 279 (12.51%) Cloud Native
2 162 (7.26%) Product Ownership
3 129 (5.78%) Distributed Systems
4 75 (3.36%) Enterprise Software
5 61 (2.73%) Legacy Systems
6 52 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
7 46 (2.06%) Mobile App
7 46 (2.06%) Onboarding
7 46 (2.06%) Self-Motivation
8 42 (1.88%) Virtual Team
9 32 (1.43%) Distributed Architecture
10 29 (1.30%) Security Posture
11 28 (1.26%) Management Information System
12 26 (1.17%) NHS
13 25 (1.12%) Embedded Systems
14 23 (1.03%) AI Agents
15 22 (0.99%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.94%) Data Centre
17 19 (0.85%) Algorithms
17 19 (0.85%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 130 (5.83%) Linux
2 81 (3.63%) Windows
3 68 (3.05%) Unix
4 42 (1.88%) Android
5 39 (1.75%) Apple iOS
6 24 (1.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (0.85%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.63%) Mac OS X
9 10 (0.45%) Mac OS
9 10 (0.45%) Solaris
10 8 (0.36%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.18%) Embedded Linux
13 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.13%) AIX
15 2 (0.090%) CentOS
15 2 (0.090%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,254 (56.21%) CI/CD
2 1,034 (46.35%) Agile
3 807 (36.17%) DevOps
4 397 (17.79%) Problem-Solving
5 375 (16.81%) Microservices
6 369 (16.54%) Continuous Improvement
7 341 (15.28%) Scrum
8 339 (15.19%) Test Strategy
9 333 (14.93%) Validation
10 322 (14.43%) Software Engineering
11 318 (14.25%) Infrastructure as Code
12 283 (12.68%) Containerisation
13 276 (12.37%) TDD
14 274 (12.28%) AI
15 269 (12.06%) Observability
16 230 (10.31%) End-to-End Testing
17 219 (9.82%) ETL
18 218 (9.77%) User Acceptance Testing
19 214 (9.59%) Software Testing
20 211 (9.46%) API Testing
Programming Languages
1 576 (25.82%) Python
2 563 (25.24%) Java
3 510 (22.86%) SQL
4 293 (13.13%) JavaScript
5 253 (11.34%) TypeScript
6 209 (9.37%) C#
7 77 (3.45%) Bash
8 75 (3.36%) PowerShell
9 52 (2.33%) C++
10 49 (2.20%) Kotlin
11 37 (1.66%) PL/SQL
12 36 (1.61%) Bicep
12 36 (1.61%) Scala
13 34 (1.52%) Apex Code
14 33 (1.48%) C
15 31 (1.39%) Go
16 22 (0.99%) Swift
17 21 (0.94%) Ruby
18 17 (0.76%) Groovy
18 17 (0.76%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 695 (31.15%) Security Cleared
2 580 (26.00%) SC Cleared
3 104 (4.66%) Degree
4 102 (4.57%) BPSS Clearance
5 101 (4.53%) ISTQB
6 74 (3.32%) DV Cleared
7 52 (2.33%) Computer Science Degree
8 26 (1.17%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 22 (0.99%) AWS Certification
10 17 (0.76%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 16 (0.72%) Master's Degree
12 12 (0.54%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.49%) Azure Certification
13 11 (0.49%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.49%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.45%) CCNP
15 9 (0.40%) CISSP
15 9 (0.40%) DBS Check
16 5 (0.22%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
16 5 (0.22%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 497 (22.28%) QA
2 173 (7.75%) Accessibility
3 149 (6.68%) Data Quality
4 74 (3.32%) WCAG
5 39 (1.75%) GDPR
6 16 (0.72%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 15 (0.67%) SLA
8 13 (0.58%) NCSC
9 12 (0.54%) ISO 20022
10 10 (0.45%) Def Stans
11 9 (0.40%) NIST
12 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 6 (0.27%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.22%) FATCA
14 5 (0.22%) SEPA
15 4 (0.18%) GRC
15 4 (0.18%) HL7
15 4 (0.18%) MiFID
15 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 4 (0.18%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 381 (17.08%) Docker
2 31 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.85%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.63%) Firmware
5 13 (0.58%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.27%) 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 (0.090%) SRDF
11 1 (0.045%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.045%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 387 (17.35%) Kubernetes
2 284 (12.73%) Terraform
3 114 (5.11%) Ansible
4 110 (4.93%) Grafana
5 91 (4.08%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.66%) Argo
7 20 (0.90%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.63%) Puppet
9 13 (0.58%) Kibana
10 11 (0.49%) HP Quality Center
10 11 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.45%) Dell DRAC
12 8 (0.36%) Kustomize
12 8 (0.36%) NetBackup
13 6 (0.27%) Forefront Identity Manager
13 6 (0.27%) NetIQ Identity Manager
13 6 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
14 5 (0.22%) Istio
14 5 (0.22%) Progress Chef
15 4 (0.18%) Packer
Vendors
1 193 (8.65%) Microsoft
2 173 (7.75%) Oracle
3 105 (4.71%) Salesforce
4 66 (2.96%) Databricks
5 64 (2.87%) Talend
6 63 (2.82%) Google
7 59 (2.64%) ServiceNow
8 58 (2.60%) Red Hat
8 58 (2.60%) Splunk
9 45 (2.02%) Denodo
10 38 (1.70%) IBM
10 38 (1.70%) SAP
11 36 (1.61%) Informatica
12 34 (1.52%) VMware
13 30 (1.34%) UiPath
14 28 (1.26%) Dynatrace
15 24 (1.08%) MuleSoft
16 23 (1.03%) HP
17 21 (0.94%) Cisco
18 16 (0.72%) Blue Prism