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 20 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 44 50 47
Rank change year-on-year +6 -3 +2
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,423 1,515 1,574
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.44% 4.60% 4.09%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.26% 5.09% 4.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,547 1,031 1,053
10th Percentile £324 £313 £350
25th Percentile £405 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £600
90th Percentile £669 £695 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 113 39 18
10th Percentile £40.00 £31.71 £40.88
25th Percentile £56.25 £45.63 £43.75
Median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +27.27% -4.35% -22.03%
75th Percentile £74.00 £67.00 £73.84
90th Percentile £77.50 £69.80 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.61 £57.50 £57.50
% change year-on-year +19.32% - -16.36%

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 46,068 29,787 33,025
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.40% 90.53% 85.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,926 18,499 20,227
10th Percentile £325 £300 £309
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £730 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,164 1,816 1,455
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.23 £14.90
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% -1.91%
75th Percentile £67.48 £44.05 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £67.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.03 £22.50 £43.00
% change year-on-year +77.91% -47.67% +1.18%

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 20 September 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 20 September 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 20 September 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 2,039 £475 -5.00% 2,909
UK excluding London -4 1,178 £450 -5.26% 1,753
London +6 926 £500 - 1,476
Work from Home -2 658 £476 +0.11% 1,215
North of England +2 408 £450 -4.66% 412
Midlands +12 256 £450 -2.70% 190
West Midlands +17 241 £458 -11.76% 125
South East -9 227 £450 -10.00% 390
Yorkshire -8 171 £463 -7.50% 120
North West -19 136 £492 +15.76% 232
South West -5 113 £456 -15.12% 238
North East +10 108 £425 -5.56% 60
Scotland -19 94 £475 -5.00% 226
East of England +14 88 £425 +24.09% 192
Wales -3 26 £475 +20.63% 35
East Midlands -47 15 £418 +15.97% 65
Northern Ireland +5 7 £513 +345.65% 78
Channel Islands - 3 £450 - 1

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
1 191 (7.88%) Confluence
2 63 (2.60%) Apache Airflow
3 47 (1.94%) SharePoint
4 46 (1.90%) Apache Spark
5 40 (1.65%) SAS
6 27 (1.11%) Apache
7 17 (0.70%) CMS
8 14 (0.58%) Camunda
9 12 (0.50%) WebLogic
10 7 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 6 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
11 6 (0.25%) nginx
11 6 (0.25%) Tomcat
12 5 (0.21%) Jupyter
12 5 (0.21%) OpenStack
13 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
13 4 (0.17%) ColdFusion
13 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
13 4 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
14 3 (0.12%) Kentico
Applications
1 23 (0.95%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.74%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.29%) Chatbot
4 6 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.17%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.12%) Trello
7 2 (0.083%) Mingle
7 2 (0.083%) Simulink
7 2 (0.083%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 30 (1.24%) Dynamics CRM
2 28 (1.16%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.54%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.41%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.41%) SAP MDG
5 7 (0.29%) Salesforce CRM
5 7 (0.29%) SAP GRC
6 6 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.25%) SAP ERP
7 4 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
8 3 (0.12%) Distributed Ledger
8 3 (0.12%) Finacle
8 3 (0.12%) Temenos T24
9 2 (0.083%) BambooHR
9 2 (0.083%) Findur
9 2 (0.083%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.083%) SAP HR
9 2 (0.083%) SAP Payroll
9 2 (0.083%) Shopify
10 1 (0.041%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 759 (31.32%) AWS
2 720 (29.72%) Azure
3 420 (17.33%) GitHub
4 332 (13.70%) Azure DevOps
5 253 (10.44%) GitHub Actions
6 180 (7.43%) GCP
7 175 (7.22%) Serverless
8 130 (5.37%) AWS Lambda
9 114 (4.70%) Power Platform
10 100 (4.13%) Amazon S3
11 84 (3.47%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 80 (3.30%) GitHub Copilot
13 79 (3.26%) OpenShift
14 70 (2.89%) AWS CloudFormation
15 68 (2.81%) Amazon ECS
16 66 (2.72%) Amazon EKS
17 61 (2.52%) dbt
18 60 (2.48%) Snowflake
19 49 (2.02%) Anthropic Claude
20 48 (1.98%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 27 (1.11%) HTTP
2 24 (0.99%) DNS
2 24 (0.99%) Firewall
3 22 (0.91%) 4G
4 21 (0.87%) 5G
5 20 (0.83%) TCP/IP
6 18 (0.74%) Wi-Fi
7 16 (0.66%) Network Security
8 15 (0.62%) 2G
8 15 (0.62%) 3G
8 15 (0.62%) Diameter Protocol
8 15 (0.62%) SIGTRAN
8 15 (0.62%) SS7
9 14 (0.58%) WAN
10 13 (0.54%) Broadband
10 13 (0.54%) LAN
11 12 (0.50%) BGP
12 11 (0.45%) DHCP
12 11 (0.45%) Ethernet VPN
12 11 (0.45%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (5.98%) PostgreSQL
2 125 (5.16%) Data Warehouse
2 125 (5.16%) MongoDB
3 115 (4.75%) Relational Database
4 109 (4.50%) NoSQL
5 97 (4.00%) SQL Server
6 84 (3.47%) Power BI
7 52 (2.15%) Metadata
8 44 (1.82%) DynamoDB
9 40 (1.65%) Data Lake
10 39 (1.61%) Oracle Reports
11 36 (1.49%) MySQL
12 35 (1.44%) Big Data
13 34 (1.40%) Pentaho
14 32 (1.32%) Amazon Athena
14 32 (1.32%) Redis
15 31 (1.28%) Amazon Redshift
16 28 (1.16%) Amazon RDS
16 28 (1.16%) Elasticsearch
17 27 (1.11%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 542 (22.37%) Git
2 399 (16.47%) JIRA
3 395 (16.30%) Jenkins
4 330 (13.62%) GitLab
5 304 (12.55%) Selenium
6 169 (6.97%) Postman
7 160 (6.60%) Cucumber
8 138 (5.70%) JUnit
9 126 (5.20%) Cypress.io
10 106 (4.37%) REST Assured
11 93 (3.84%) JMeter
12 88 (3.63%) SonarQube
13 66 (2.72%) Gatling
13 66 (2.72%) Maven
14 64 (2.64%) Zephyr
15 59 (2.43%) Gradle
16 57 (2.35%) Mockito
17 51 (2.10%) WebDriver
18 37 (1.53%) Bitbucket
19 29 (1.20%) SpecFlow
General
1 671 (27.69%) Social Skills
2 449 (18.53%) Finance
3 337 (13.91%) Analytical Skills
4 336 (13.87%) Public Sector
5 221 (9.12%) Banking
6 79 (3.26%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 51 (2.10%) Telecoms
8 44 (1.82%) Front Office
9 36 (1.49%) Investment Banking
10 35 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
11 33 (1.36%) Documentation Skills
11 33 (1.36%) Retail
12 32 (1.32%) Military
13 22 (0.91%) Financial Institution
14 21 (0.87%) Law
15 20 (0.83%) Marketing
16 19 (0.78%) Aerospace
17 18 (0.74%) Manufacturing
18 14 (0.58%) Automotive
18 14 (0.58%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 560 (23.11%) Developer
2 403 (16.63%) Senior
3 240 (9.91%) Lead
4 230 (9.49%) Test Engineer
5 193 (7.97%) Tester
6 182 (7.51%) Java Developer
7 149 (6.15%) Data Engineer
8 128 (5.28%) Software Engineer
9 124 (5.12%) Analyst
10 121 (4.99%) Senior Developer
11 120 (4.95%) DevOps Engineer
12 106 (4.37%) Architect
13 101 (4.17%) Test Automation Engineer
14 97 (4.00%) QA Engineer
15 85 (3.51%) Automation Tester
16 82 (3.38%) Test Analyst
17 80 (3.30%) Full-Stack Developer
18 76 (3.14%) Test Leader
19 74 (3.05%) Test Manager
20 71 (2.93%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 422 (17.42%) REST
2 351 (14.49%) Terraform
3 285 (11.76%) Playwright
4 251 (10.36%) RESTful
5 241 (9.95%) Spring
6 240 (9.91%) Kafka
7 223 (9.20%) React
8 208 (8.58%) Spring Boot
9 179 (7.39%) .NET
10 146 (6.03%) HTML
11 141 (5.82%) Node.js
12 126 (5.20%) CSS
13 105 (4.33%) AngularJS
14 89 (3.67%) OAuth
15 79 (3.26%) JSON
16 67 (2.77%) pytest
17 66 (2.72%) Middleware
18 62 (2.56%) OAuth2
19 58 (2.39%) Swagger
19 58 (2.39%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 383 (15.81%) Cloud Native
2 208 (8.58%) Product Ownership
3 175 (7.22%) Distributed Systems
4 99 (4.09%) Enterprise Software
5 74 (3.05%) Onboarding
6 65 (2.68%) AI Agents
7 62 (2.56%) Legacy Systems
8 58 (2.39%) Self-Motivation
9 55 (2.27%) Data Protection Act
10 47 (1.94%) Mobile App
11 36 (1.49%) Virtual Team
12 30 (1.24%) Security Posture
13 28 (1.16%) Data Structures
14 27 (1.11%) Management Information System
15 25 (1.03%) Data Centre
15 25 (1.03%) Legacy Applications
16 24 (0.99%) Private Cloud
17 22 (0.91%) Life Science
18 21 (0.87%) Embedded Systems
19 20 (0.83%) NHS
Operating Systems
1 175 (7.22%) Linux
2 103 (4.25%) Windows
3 100 (4.13%) Unix
4 44 (1.82%) Apple iOS
5 42 (1.73%) Android
6 31 (1.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 25 (1.03%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.29%) VMS
9 6 (0.25%) Solaris
10 5 (0.21%) Mac OS X
10 5 (0.21%) Windows 10
10 5 (0.21%) Windows 7
10 5 (0.21%) Windows Server 2003
11 4 (0.17%) AIX
11 4 (0.17%) Embedded Linux
11 4 (0.17%) Mac OS
11 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,480 (61.08%) CI/CD
2 1,178 (48.62%) Agile
3 897 (37.02%) DevOps
4 477 (19.69%) Microservices
5 476 (19.65%) Problem-Solving
6 470 (19.40%) Continuous Improvement
7 452 (18.65%) Software Engineering
8 432 (17.83%) Infrastructure as Code
9 412 (17.00%) Scrum
10 403 (16.63%) Validation
11 402 (16.59%) AI
12 365 (15.06%) Containerisation
13 357 (14.73%) Test Strategy
14 322 (13.29%) Observability
15 315 (13.00%) TDD
16 300 (12.38%) SDLC
17 285 (11.76%) Software Testing
18 276 (11.39%) Stakeholder Management
19 256 (10.57%) End-to-End Testing
20 239 (9.86%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 678 (27.98%) Java
2 676 (27.90%) Python
3 604 (24.93%) SQL
4 365 (15.06%) JavaScript
5 274 (11.31%) TypeScript
6 207 (8.54%) C#
7 100 (4.13%) PowerShell
8 91 (3.76%) Bash
9 52 (2.15%) Bicep
10 47 (1.94%) Kotlin
11 46 (1.90%) C++
12 44 (1.82%) Scala
13 39 (1.61%) Go
14 33 (1.36%) PL/SQL
15 31 (1.28%) Shell Script
16 26 (1.07%) Apex Code
17 24 (0.99%) C
17 24 (0.99%) Perl
18 19 (0.78%) Ruby
19 17 (0.70%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 777 (32.07%) Security Cleared
2 658 (27.16%) SC Cleared
3 135 (5.57%) Degree
4 125 (5.16%) BPSS Clearance
5 105 (4.33%) ISTQB
6 90 (3.71%) DV Cleared
7 76 (3.14%) Computer Science Degree
8 42 (1.73%) AWS Certification
9 36 (1.49%) Azure Certification
10 28 (1.16%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 16 (0.66%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 14 (0.58%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 14 (0.58%) Master's Degree
13 13 (0.54%) CISSP
14 12 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
14 12 (0.50%) ISEB
14 12 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
15 8 (0.33%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 8 (0.33%) DBS Check
15 8 (0.33%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 625 (25.79%) QA
2 217 (8.96%) Accessibility
3 172 (7.10%) Data Quality
4 96 (3.96%) WCAG
5 44 (1.82%) GDPR
6 23 (0.95%) ISO 20022
7 14 (0.58%) GRC
8 13 (0.54%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 13 (0.54%) NCSC
8 13 (0.54%) NIST
8 13 (0.54%) SLA
9 7 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
10 6 (0.25%) SEPA
10 6 (0.25%) Software Quality Assurance
11 5 (0.21%) FATCA
11 5 (0.21%) HL7
11 5 (0.21%) PCI DSS
12 4 (0.17%) MiFID
12 4 (0.17%) SOC 2
13 3 (0.12%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 495 (20.43%) Docker
2 40 (1.65%) VMware Infrastructure
3 35 (1.44%) Active Directory
4 19 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (0.54%) Firmware
6 10 (0.41%) VMware ESXi
7 7 (0.29%) VMware NSX
8 6 (0.25%) Hyper-V
9 3 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
10 2 (0.083%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.041%) Embedded Firmware
11 1 (0.041%) KVM
11 1 (0.041%) Virtual Desktop
11 1 (0.041%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 481 (19.85%) Kubernetes
2 134 (5.53%) Ansible
3 133 (5.49%) Grafana
4 91 (3.76%) Prometheus
5 39 (1.61%) Argo
6 26 (1.07%) Kibana
7 24 (0.99%) Progress Chef
8 23 (0.95%) Puppet
9 16 (0.66%) HP ALM
10 14 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
11 13 (0.54%) Control-M
12 8 (0.33%) Microsoft Intune
13 7 (0.29%) Kustomize
14 6 (0.25%) Dell DRAC
14 6 (0.25%) Istio
14 6 (0.25%) SCCM
15 5 (0.21%) HP Fortify
15 5 (0.21%) Packer
15 5 (0.21%) WMI
16 4 (0.17%) Rancher
Vendors
1 232 (9.57%) Microsoft
2 197 (8.13%) Oracle
3 97 (4.00%) Databricks
4 79 (3.26%) Salesforce
5 75 (3.10%) Google
6 66 (2.72%) IBM
7 64 (2.64%) ServiceNow
8 60 (2.48%) Splunk
9 59 (2.43%) Red Hat
9 59 (2.43%) Talend
10 57 (2.35%) SAP
11 49 (2.02%) VMware
12 45 (1.86%) Denodo
13 44 (1.82%) Informatica
14 41 (1.69%) Dynatrace
15 34 (1.40%) Cisco
15 34 (1.40%) MuleSoft
16 31 (1.28%) UiPath
17 23 (0.95%) OpenAI
18 22 (0.91%) HP