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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 50
Rank change year-on-year +2 +2 +2
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,263 1,449 1,594
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.29% 4.45% 3.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.05% 4.92% 4.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,457 1,007 1,047
10th Percentile £325 £313 £363
25th Percentile £402 £387 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £475 £520
Median % change year-on-year - -8.65% -0.95%
75th Percentile £575 £580 £613
90th Percentile £663 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £453 £463 £509
% change year-on-year -2.05% -9.18% +1.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 31 38
10th Percentile £37.00 £35.00 £46.35
25th Percentile £60.33 £44.51 £51.56
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -11.11% -19.50%
75th Percentile £70.00 £64.76 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.20 £75.00 £75.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year +35.00% -9.09% -14.56%

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 44,806 29,445 35,310
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.99% 90.36% 85.44%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,768 18,486 22,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
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 2,649 1,571 2,189
10th Percentile £14.85 £14.20 £13.06
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.44 £16.86
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £38.12
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -34.02% -10.31%
75th Percentile £68.55 £50.88 £62.50
90th Percentile £83.00 £68.75 £73.55
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.00 £40.00
% change year-on-year +87.50% -40.00% -1.45%

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 21 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 21 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 21 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 1,913 £475 -1.66% 722
UK excluding London +3 1,118 £453 -2.05% 489
London +6 870 £500 - 318
Work from Home +1 636 £475 +4.40% 328
North of England +19 394 £463 +2.78% 132
Midlands +10 245 £447 +8.36% 58
West Midlands +26 228 £450 -4.81% 29
South East -38 192 £450 -10.00% 155
Yorkshire +3 156 £500 +2.56% 39
North West -1 153 £481 +16.75% 76
South West +2 113 £463 +5.71% 66
North East +11 95 £425 +6.25% 19
East of England +18 84 £450 - 49
Scotland -27 71 £440 -10.34% 22
Wales -4 35 £475 +15.15% 13
Northern Ireland +21 21 £475 +16.28% 13
East Midlands -41 17 £425 +30.37% 29
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 (8.62%) Confluence
2 52 (2.30%) Apache Spark
3 46 (2.03%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (2.03%) SAS
4 24 (1.06%) Apache
4 24 (1.06%) SharePoint
5 14 (0.62%) CMS
6 13 (0.57%) WebLogic
7 10 (0.44%) nginx
7 10 (0.44%) Tomcat
8 7 (0.31%) Camunda
9 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
9 4 (0.18%) Appian
9 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
9 4 (0.18%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.18%) Oracle Workflow
10 3 (0.13%) Kentico
11 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.088%) Mendix
11 2 (0.088%) Mule
Applications
1 24 (1.06%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
3 11 (0.49%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 11 (0.49%) Microsoft Project
4 8 (0.35%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
6 2 (0.088%) Trello
7 1 (0.044%) Mingle
7 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 25 (1.10%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.75%) Aladdin
3 16 (0.71%) SAP S/4HANA
4 13 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
5 12 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
6 8 (0.35%) 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
9 4 (0.18%) Infor CloudSuite
9 4 (0.18%) Infor LN
9 4 (0.18%) Infor M3
9 4 (0.18%) Loan IQ
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.088%) Advent Geneva
11 2 (0.088%) Oracle EBS R12
11 2 (0.088%) Oracle ERP
11 2 (0.088%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 662 (29.25%) AWS
1 662 (29.25%) Azure
2 407 (17.98%) GitHub
3 297 (13.12%) Azure DevOps
4 248 (10.96%) GitHub Actions
5 166 (7.34%) GCP
6 156 (6.89%) Serverless
7 107 (4.73%) AWS Lambda
8 98 (4.33%) Amazon S3
9 97 (4.29%) Power Platform
10 67 (2.96%) OpenShift
11 66 (2.92%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 61 (2.70%) Amazon ECS
13 54 (2.39%) AWS CloudFormation
14 52 (2.30%) Amazon EC2
15 48 (2.12%) dbt
16 47 (2.08%) GitHub Copilot
17 45 (1.99%) Amazon EKS
18 44 (1.94%) Snowflake
19 41 (1.81%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.10%) HTTP
2 21 (0.93%) Firewall
3 16 (0.71%) SAN
4 15 (0.66%) Network Security
5 11 (0.49%) 2G
5 11 (0.49%) 3G
5 11 (0.49%) 4G
5 11 (0.49%) 5G
5 11 (0.49%) Diameter Protocol
5 11 (0.49%) SIGTRAN
5 11 (0.49%) SS7
6 10 (0.44%) WAN
7 8 (0.35%) LAN
7 8 (0.35%) TCP/IP
7 8 (0.35%) VPN
7 8 (0.35%) Wi-Fi
8 7 (0.31%) BGP
8 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.27%) DNS
9 6 (0.27%) MPLS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 124 (5.48%) PostgreSQL
2 123 (5.44%) MongoDB
3 114 (5.04%) Data Warehouse
4 99 (4.37%) NoSQL
5 87 (3.84%) SQL Server
6 81 (3.58%) Relational Database
7 75 (3.31%) Power BI
8 47 (2.08%) DynamoDB
9 45 (1.99%) Metadata
10 41 (1.81%) Oracle Reports
11 39 (1.72%) Big Data
12 34 (1.50%) MySQL
13 33 (1.46%) Pentaho
14 32 (1.41%) Amazon Athena
15 30 (1.33%) Amazon RDS
16 26 (1.15%) Amazon Redshift
16 26 (1.15%) Data Lake
16 26 (1.15%) Redis
17 24 (1.06%) Elasticsearch
18 22 (0.97%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 422 (18.65%) JIRA
2 418 (18.47%) Git
3 363 (16.04%) Jenkins
4 299 (13.21%) GitLab
5 287 (12.68%) Selenium
6 163 (7.20%) Postman
7 154 (6.81%) Cucumber
8 116 (5.13%) REST Assured
9 115 (5.08%) Cypress.io
10 114 (5.04%) JUnit
11 100 (4.42%) JMeter
12 69 (3.05%) Zephyr
13 63 (2.78%) WebDriver
14 58 (2.56%) SonarQube
15 53 (2.34%) Gatling
16 48 (2.12%) Gradle
17 43 (1.90%) Mockito
18 40 (1.77%) Bitbucket
18 40 (1.77%) Maven
19 36 (1.59%) SpecFlow
General
1 597 (26.38%) Social Skills
2 410 (18.12%) Finance
3 309 (13.65%) Public Sector
4 281 (12.42%) Analytical Skills
5 191 (8.44%) Banking
6 60 (2.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.94%) Documentation Skills
8 38 (1.68%) Front Office
9 36 (1.59%) Investment Banking
10 33 (1.46%) Telecoms
11 32 (1.41%) Influencing Skills
12 29 (1.28%) Retail
13 28 (1.24%) Military
14 24 (1.06%) Financial Institution
15 21 (0.93%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.80%) Manufacturing
17 16 (0.71%) Back Office
17 16 (0.71%) Legal
17 16 (0.71%) Organisational Skills
18 14 (0.62%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 481 (21.25%) Developer
2 370 (16.35%) Senior
3 245 (10.83%) Lead
4 227 (10.03%) Test Engineer
5 224 (9.90%) Tester
6 158 (6.98%) Java Developer
7 152 (6.72%) Data Engineer
8 122 (5.39%) Analyst
9 117 (5.17%) Software Engineer
10 110 (4.86%) DevOps Engineer
11 106 (4.68%) Architect
12 103 (4.55%) Senior Developer
13 101 (4.46%) Test Automation Engineer
14 91 (4.02%) Automation Tester
15 90 (3.98%) QA Engineer
15 90 (3.98%) Test Leader
16 82 (3.62%) Test Analyst
17 69 (3.05%) Full-Stack Developer
18 58 (2.56%) Automation Engineer
19 54 (2.39%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 286 (12.64%) REST
2 268 (11.84%) Playwright
3 205 (9.06%) React
4 191 (8.44%) RESTful
5 185 (8.17%) Spring
6 168 (7.42%) Kafka
7 155 (6.85%) .NET
8 152 (6.72%) Spring Boot
9 120 (5.30%) Node.js
10 92 (4.07%) AngularJS
11 91 (4.02%) HTML
12 83 (3.67%) CSS
13 62 (2.74%) OAuth
14 56 (2.47%) pytest
15 55 (2.43%) Jest
16 52 (2.30%) JSON
17 50 (2.21%) Swagger
18 48 (2.12%) Gherkin
18 48 (2.12%) HTML5
19 44 (1.94%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 306 (13.52%) Cloud Native
2 163 (7.20%) Product Ownership
3 141 (6.23%) Distributed Systems
4 83 (3.67%) Enterprise Software
5 63 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
6 54 (2.39%) Data Protection Act
6 54 (2.39%) Onboarding
7 49 (2.17%) Self-Motivation
8 41 (1.81%) Mobile App
9 36 (1.59%) Virtual Team
10 33 (1.46%) AI Agents
11 31 (1.37%) Distributed Architecture
12 29 (1.28%) Security Posture
13 27 (1.19%) Embedded Systems
14 26 (1.15%) NHS
15 25 (1.10%) Management Information System
16 23 (1.02%) Algorithms
17 22 (0.97%) Fixed Income
17 22 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
18 19 (0.84%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 135 (5.97%) Linux
2 81 (3.58%) Windows
3 73 (3.23%) Unix
4 42 (1.86%) Android
5 41 (1.81%) Apple iOS
6 25 (1.10%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 20 (0.88%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.62%) Mac OS X
9 11 (0.49%) Solaris
10 10 (0.44%) Mac OS
11 8 (0.35%) Windows Server 2008
12 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
13 6 (0.27%) Embedded Linux
13 6 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
14 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
15 3 (0.13%) AIX
16 2 (0.088%) CentOS
17 1 (0.044%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,306 (57.71%) CI/CD
2 1,058 (46.75%) Agile
3 825 (36.46%) DevOps
4 415 (18.34%) Problem-Solving
5 410 (18.12%) Microservices
6 391 (17.28%) Continuous Improvement
7 365 (16.13%) Scrum
8 350 (15.47%) Software Engineering
9 340 (15.02%) Test Strategy
9 340 (15.02%) Validation
10 337 (14.89%) Infrastructure as Code
11 298 (13.17%) Containerisation
11 298 (13.17%) TDD
12 295 (13.04%) AI
13 289 (12.77%) Observability
14 232 (10.25%) ETL
15 230 (10.16%) End-to-End Testing
16 224 (9.90%) SDLC
17 220 (9.72%) Data Pipeline
18 212 (9.37%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 575 (25.41%) Python
2 574 (25.36%) Java
3 517 (22.85%) SQL
4 291 (12.86%) JavaScript
5 249 (11.00%) TypeScript
6 202 (8.93%) C#
7 83 (3.67%) Bash
8 77 (3.40%) PowerShell
9 54 (2.39%) C++
10 53 (2.34%) Kotlin
11 39 (1.72%) Bicep
12 37 (1.63%) PL/SQL
13 34 (1.50%) C
14 33 (1.46%) Apex Code
15 32 (1.41%) Go
16 30 (1.33%) Scala
17 23 (1.02%) Ruby
17 23 (1.02%) Swift
18 22 (0.97%) Shell Script
19 16 (0.71%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 707 (31.24%) Security Cleared
2 597 (26.38%) SC Cleared
3 110 (4.86%) Degree
4 107 (4.73%) BPSS Clearance
5 100 (4.42%) ISTQB
6 70 (3.09%) DV Cleared
7 54 (2.39%) Computer Science Degree
8 28 (1.24%) AWS Certification
9 27 (1.19%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 19 (0.84%) Azure Certification
11 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 14 (0.62%) Master's Degree
13 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
14 11 (0.49%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 11 (0.49%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.44%) CCNP
16 9 (0.40%) CISSP
16 9 (0.40%) DBS Check
17 8 (0.35%) Microsoft Certification
18 7 (0.31%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 535 (23.64%) QA
2 187 (8.26%) Accessibility
3 156 (6.89%) Data Quality
4 82 (3.62%) WCAG
5 42 (1.86%) GDPR
6 15 (0.66%) SLA
7 14 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 13 (0.57%) NCSC
9 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
9 10 (0.44%) NIST
10 9 (0.40%) ISO 20022
11 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 7 (0.31%) PCI DSS
12 6 (0.27%) GRC
13 5 (0.22%) FATCA
13 5 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
14 4 (0.18%) MiFID
15 3 (0.13%) HL7
15 3 (0.13%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.13%) SEPA
System Software
1 411 (18.16%) Docker
2 31 (1.37%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.84%) Active Directory
4 15 (0.66%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.53%) Firmware
6 8 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
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
1 410 (18.12%) Kubernetes
2 292 (12.90%) Terraform
3 119 (5.26%) Grafana
4 116 (5.13%) Ansible
5 100 (4.42%) Prometheus
6 39 (1.72%) Argo
7 22 (0.97%) HP ALM
8 16 (0.71%) Puppet
9 14 (0.62%) Kibana
10 11 (0.49%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
12 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
12 8 (0.35%) Progress Chef
13 7 (0.31%) HP Quality Center
13 7 (0.31%) Kustomize
14 6 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
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
1 200 (8.84%) Microsoft
2 188 (8.31%) Oracle
3 100 (4.42%) Salesforce
4 75 (3.31%) Databricks
5 65 (2.87%) Google
6 63 (2.78%) Talend
7 61 (2.70%) Red Hat
8 58 (2.56%) Splunk
9 51 (2.25%) ServiceNow
10 45 (1.99%) IBM
11 42 (1.86%) Denodo
12 38 (1.68%) SAP
13 37 (1.63%) Informatica
14 36 (1.59%) VMware
15 31 (1.37%) Dynatrace
16 29 (1.28%) UiPath
17 27 (1.19%) HP
18 26 (1.15%) MuleSoft
19 23 (1.02%) Cisco
20 14 (0.62%) Fortinet