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

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 45
Rank change year-on-year +2 -3 +7
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,338 1,480 1,596
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.36% 4.55% 4.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.16% 5.03% 4.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,499 1,018 1,064
10th Percentile £325 £313 £350
25th Percentile £406 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £501
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -0.10% -4.67%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £668 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £455 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 111 37 22
10th Percentile £37.25 £25.57 £42.50
25th Percentile £59.63 £45.00 £50.31
Median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.27% - -21.29%
75th Percentile - £67.00 £69.84
90th Percentile £75.00 £71.10 £83.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £68.22 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +24.03% -2.22% -13.04%

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 45,329 29,411 32,997
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.59% 90.42% 85.45%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,714 18,306 20,733
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.54%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,913 1,754 1,602
10th Percentile £14.07 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.75 £17.30 £18.79
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.89 £47.09 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.25 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.56 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +92.49% -47.37% +14.67%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 +2 1,978 £475 -5.00% 2,325
UK excluding London -4 1,140 £455 -4.21% 1,409
London +5 905 £500 - 1,271
Work from Home -1 635 £488 +2.63% 1,035
North of England +4 402 £463 +0.60% 297
Midlands +10 246 £450 -2.44% 141
West Midlands +25 231 £450 -12.62% 83
South East -21 222 £450 -10.00% 293
Yorkshire -13 159 £475 -5.00% 71
North West -9 147 £492 +16.17% 173
South West -1 114 £475 -2.56% 242
North East +9 103 £450 +1.12% 55
East of England +16 80 £450 +17.65% 156
Scotland -32 76 £470 -6.00% 197
Wales -6 30 £500 +23.08% 26
East Midlands -40 15 £418 +17.61% 58
Northern Ireland +9 11 £488 +323.91% 75
Channel Islands - 3 £450 -

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
1 190 (8.13%) Confluence
2 52 (2.22%) Apache Airflow
3 45 (1.92%) SharePoint
4 43 (1.84%) Apache Spark
5 38 (1.63%) SAS
6 25 (1.07%) Apache
7 14 (0.60%) CMS
8 12 (0.51%) WebLogic
9 11 (0.47%) Camunda
10 6 (0.26%) nginx
10 6 (0.26%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 6 (0.26%) Tomcat
11 5 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
12 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
12 4 (0.17%) ColdFusion
12 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
12 4 (0.17%) OpenStack
12 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
13 3 (0.13%) Kentico
14 2 (0.086%) Mule
Applications
1 23 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 16 (0.68%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.30%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.26%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.17%) Simulink
6 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.13%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.13%) Trello
7 2 (0.086%) Mingle
7 2 (0.086%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 28 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 24 (1.03%) SAP S/4HANA
3 14 (0.60%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.56%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.38%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.34%) Findur
7 7 (0.30%) Salesforce CRM
7 7 (0.30%) SAP GRC
8 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
8 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
9 4 (0.17%) Shopify
10 3 (0.13%) BambooHR
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
10 3 (0.13%) FLEXCUBE
11 2 (0.086%) Finacle
11 2 (0.086%) Infor CloudSuite
11 2 (0.086%) Infor LN
11 2 (0.086%) Infor M3
11 2 (0.086%) Oracle ERP
11 2 (0.086%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 717 (30.67%) AWS
2 697 (29.81%) Azure
3 419 (17.92%) GitHub
4 330 (14.11%) Azure DevOps
5 252 (10.78%) GitHub Actions
6 176 (7.53%) Serverless
7 170 (7.27%) GCP
8 131 (5.60%) AWS Lambda
9 106 (4.53%) Power Platform
10 100 (4.28%) Amazon S3
11 80 (3.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 73 (3.12%) OpenShift
13 71 (3.04%) Amazon ECS
14 68 (2.91%) GitHub Copilot
15 64 (2.74%) AWS CloudFormation
16 62 (2.65%) Amazon EKS
17 59 (2.52%) dbt
17 59 (2.52%) Snowflake
18 48 (2.05%) Amazon EC2
19 43 (1.84%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.11%) HTTP
2 23 (0.98%) Firewall
3 20 (0.86%) DNS
4 19 (0.81%) 4G
5 18 (0.77%) 5G
6 16 (0.68%) 2G
6 16 (0.68%) 3G
6 16 (0.68%) Diameter Protocol
6 16 (0.68%) Network Security
6 16 (0.68%) SIGTRAN
6 16 (0.68%) SS7
6 16 (0.68%) TCP/IP
7 15 (0.64%) WAN
8 13 (0.56%) LAN
8 13 (0.56%) Wi-Fi
9 10 (0.43%) BGP
9 10 (0.43%) SAN
10 9 (0.38%) DHCP
11 8 (0.34%) Ethernet VPN
11 8 (0.34%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 139 (5.95%) PostgreSQL
2 125 (5.35%) Data Warehouse
3 119 (5.09%) MongoDB
4 107 (4.58%) NoSQL
5 99 (4.23%) Relational Database
6 93 (3.98%) SQL Server
7 82 (3.51%) Power BI
8 49 (2.10%) Metadata
9 48 (2.05%) DynamoDB
10 39 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
11 37 (1.58%) MySQL
12 35 (1.50%) Amazon Athena
13 34 (1.45%) Data Lake
14 33 (1.41%) Big Data
15 32 (1.37%) Pentaho
16 31 (1.33%) Amazon Redshift
17 30 (1.28%) Amazon RDS
18 29 (1.24%) Redis
19 28 (1.20%) Elasticsearch
20 25 (1.07%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 483 (20.66%) Git
2 398 (17.02%) JIRA
3 376 (16.08%) Jenkins
4 314 (13.43%) GitLab
5 298 (12.75%) Selenium
6 166 (7.10%) Postman
7 145 (6.20%) Cucumber
8 127 (5.43%) Cypress.io
9 124 (5.30%) JUnit
10 105 (4.49%) REST Assured
11 102 (4.36%) JMeter
12 81 (3.46%) SonarQube
13 66 (2.82%) Zephyr
14 60 (2.57%) Gatling
15 57 (2.44%) Gradle
15 57 (2.44%) Maven
16 54 (2.31%) WebDriver
17 49 (2.10%) Mockito
18 42 (1.80%) Bitbucket
19 27 (1.15%) Appium
General
1 651 (27.84%) Social Skills
2 431 (18.43%) Finance
3 335 (14.33%) Public Sector
4 324 (13.86%) Analytical Skills
5 206 (8.81%) Banking
6 73 (3.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.88%) Telecoms
8 41 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
8 41 (1.75%) Front Office
9 38 (1.63%) Investment Banking
10 34 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
11 31 (1.33%) Retail
12 28 (1.20%) Military
13 24 (1.03%) Financial Institution
14 21 (0.90%) Law
15 19 (0.81%) Back Office
16 18 (0.77%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.77%) Marketing
17 15 (0.64%) Manufacturing
18 14 (0.60%) Legal
Job Titles
1 524 (22.41%) Developer
2 394 (16.85%) Senior
3 238 (10.18%) Lead
4 228 (9.75%) Test Engineer
5 200 (8.55%) Tester
6 169 (7.23%) Java Developer
7 140 (5.99%) Data Engineer
8 128 (5.47%) Software Engineer
9 125 (5.35%) Analyst
10 120 (5.13%) DevOps Engineer
11 115 (4.92%) Senior Developer
12 105 (4.49%) Test Automation Engineer
13 99 (4.23%) Architect
14 96 (4.11%) QA Engineer
15 87 (3.72%) Automation Tester
16 84 (3.59%) Test Analyst
17 83 (3.55%) Test Leader
18 77 (3.29%) Full-Stack Developer
19 68 (2.91%) Automation Engineer
19 68 (2.91%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 379 (16.21%) REST
2 333 (14.24%) Terraform
3 279 (11.93%) Playwright
4 229 (9.79%) RESTful
5 226 (9.67%) Kafka
6 222 (9.50%) Spring
7 217 (9.28%) React
8 191 (8.17%) Spring Boot
9 162 (6.93%) .NET
10 132 (5.65%) HTML
11 127 (5.43%) Node.js
12 114 (4.88%) CSS
13 103 (4.41%) AngularJS
14 81 (3.46%) OAuth
15 72 (3.08%) JSON
16 63 (2.69%) pytest
17 60 (2.57%) OAuth2
18 59 (2.52%) Middleware
18 59 (2.52%) XML
19 54 (2.31%) Jest
Miscellaneous
1 349 (14.93%) Cloud Native
2 193 (8.25%) Product Ownership
3 163 (6.97%) Distributed Systems
4 97 (4.15%) Enterprise Software
5 66 (2.82%) Onboarding
6 58 (2.48%) Legacy Systems
7 56 (2.40%) Data Protection Act
8 49 (2.10%) AI Agents
8 49 (2.10%) Self-Motivation
9 47 (2.01%) Mobile App
10 36 (1.54%) Virtual Team
11 25 (1.07%) Embedded Systems
12 23 (0.98%) Security Posture
13 22 (0.94%) Data Structures
13 22 (0.94%) Management Information System
14 21 (0.90%) Data Centre
14 21 (0.90%) NHS
15 20 (0.86%) Distributed Architecture
15 20 (0.86%) Life Science
16 19 (0.81%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 162 (6.93%) Linux
2 98 (4.19%) Unix
3 90 (3.85%) Windows
4 40 (1.71%) Apple iOS
5 38 (1.63%) Android
6 29 (1.24%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 20 (0.86%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.30%) Solaris
9 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
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%) Mac OS
11 4 (0.17%) Mac OS X
11 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.17%) VMS
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2019
13 2 (0.086%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,386 (59.28%) CI/CD
2 1,100 (47.05%) Agile
3 872 (37.30%) DevOps
4 445 (19.03%) Microservices
5 444 (18.99%) Problem-Solving
6 437 (18.69%) Continuous Improvement
7 421 (18.01%) Software Engineering
8 395 (16.89%) Infrastructure as Code
9 386 (16.51%) Scrum
10 375 (16.04%) Validation
11 355 (15.18%) Test Strategy
12 348 (14.88%) AI
13 326 (13.94%) Containerisation
14 302 (12.92%) TDD
15 300 (12.83%) Observability
16 277 (11.85%) SDLC
17 260 (11.12%) Software Testing
18 249 (10.65%) Stakeholder Management
19 247 (10.56%) End-to-End Testing
20 225 (9.62%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 639 (27.33%) Python
2 638 (27.29%) Java
3 572 (24.47%) SQL
4 345 (14.76%) JavaScript
5 255 (10.91%) TypeScript
6 195 (8.34%) C#
7 103 (4.41%) PowerShell
8 90 (3.85%) Bash
9 53 (2.27%) Bicep
10 51 (2.18%) Kotlin
11 50 (2.14%) C++
12 33 (1.41%) PL/SQL
13 31 (1.33%) C
13 31 (1.33%) Scala
14 29 (1.24%) Go
15 28 (1.20%) Shell Script
16 26 (1.11%) Apex Code
17 24 (1.03%) Ruby
18 19 (0.81%) Perl
19 17 (0.73%) Swift
Qualifications
1 760 (32.51%) Security Cleared
2 644 (27.54%) SC Cleared
3 127 (5.43%) Degree
4 116 (4.96%) BPSS Clearance
5 108 (4.62%) ISTQB
6 78 (3.34%) DV Cleared
7 73 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
8 38 (1.63%) AWS Certification
9 31 (1.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 30 (1.28%) Azure Certification
11 19 (0.81%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 14 (0.60%) Master's Degree
13 13 (0.56%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
14 12 (0.51%) ISEB
15 11 (0.47%) SAFe Agilist
16 10 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
16 10 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
17 9 (0.38%) CISSP
18 8 (0.34%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
18 8 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 599 (25.62%) QA
2 196 (8.38%) Accessibility
3 164 (7.01%) Data Quality
4 92 (3.93%) WCAG
5 41 (1.75%) GDPR
6 20 (0.86%) ISO 20022
7 17 (0.73%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 14 (0.60%) GRC
8 14 (0.60%) NCSC
8 14 (0.60%) SLA
9 11 (0.47%) NIST
10 7 (0.30%) Actionable Recommendations
10 7 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
11 6 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
12 5 (0.21%) Def Stans
12 5 (0.21%) FATCA
12 5 (0.21%) HL7
13 4 (0.17%) MiFID
13 4 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 460 (19.67%) Docker
2 34 (1.45%) VMware Infrastructure
3 31 (1.33%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.51%) Firmware
6 7 (0.30%) VMware ESXi
7 5 (0.21%) Hyper-V
7 5 (0.21%) VMware NSX
8 3 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
8 3 (0.13%) Virtual Desktop
9 1 (0.043%) Embedded Firmware
9 1 (0.043%) KVM
9 1 (0.043%) Virtual Servers
9 1 (0.043%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 446 (19.08%) Kubernetes
2 123 (5.26%) Ansible
3 119 (5.09%) Grafana
4 90 (3.85%) Prometheus
5 41 (1.75%) Argo
6 23 (0.98%) Puppet
7 22 (0.94%) Progress Chef
8 15 (0.64%) HP ALM
8 15 (0.64%) Kibana
9 11 (0.47%) Control-M
10 10 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
11 7 (0.30%) Dell DRAC
11 7 (0.30%) Istio
11 7 (0.30%) Kustomize
11 7 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
12 6 (0.26%) Packer
12 6 (0.26%) SCCM
13 5 (0.21%) HP Fortify
13 5 (0.21%) WMI
14 4 (0.17%) HP Quality Center
Vendors
1 221 (9.45%) Microsoft
2 196 (8.38%) Oracle
3 85 (3.64%) Databricks
3 85 (3.64%) Salesforce
4 69 (2.95%) Google
5 63 (2.69%) Red Hat
6 59 (2.52%) Talend
7 58 (2.48%) IBM
8 54 (2.31%) ServiceNow
9 53 (2.27%) SAP
10 51 (2.18%) Splunk
11 43 (1.84%) Informatica
12 42 (1.80%) Denodo
13 41 (1.75%) VMware
14 37 (1.58%) Dynatrace
15 31 (1.33%) Cisco
16 29 (1.24%) MuleSoft
17 27 (1.15%) UiPath
18 20 (0.86%) HP
19 17 (0.73%) OpenAI