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

6 months to
3 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 2,342 1,484 1,583
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.37% 4.57% 4.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.16% 5.05% 4.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,507 1,022 1,058
10th Percentile £325 £313 £350
25th Percentile £406 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -0.05% -4.71%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £600
90th Percentile £669 £700 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £456 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -3.95% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 106 37 22
10th Percentile £38.63 £25.57 £42.50
25th Percentile £59.44 £45.00 £50.31
Median hourly rate £69.75 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.82% - -21.29%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £69.84
90th Percentile £75.00 £71.10 £83.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.86 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +23.38% -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 45,377 29,398 32,720
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.44% 85.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,769 18,279 20,543
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% -3.49%
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 2,906 1,760 1,592
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.20 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.73 £17.30 £18.69
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £42.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -40.82% +2.41%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.03 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.58 £22.63 £43.00
% change year-on-year +88.14% -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 3 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 3 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 3 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 +1 1,976 £475 -5.00% 2,257
UK excluding London -5 1,143 £456 -3.95% 1,395
London +7 903 £500 - 1,219
Work from Home 0 634 £482 +1.47% 1,002
North of England +6 401 £463 +0.60% 288
Midlands +9 248 £450 -2.70% 135
West Midlands +21 233 £450 -12.62% 80
South East -19 223 £450 -10.00% 300
Yorkshire -10 158 £473 -5.50% 74
North West -15 146 £492 +16.17% 165
South West -1 111 £475 -2.56% 239
North East +13 104 £438 -1.69% 50
East of England +19 80 £450 +17.65% 156
Scotland -26 80 £475 -5.00% 196
Wales -5 30 £500 +23.08% 23
East Midlands -45 15 £418 +17.61% 55
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
1 192 (8.20%) Confluence
2 51 (2.18%) Apache Airflow
3 44 (1.88%) SharePoint
4 43 (1.84%) Apache Spark
5 38 (1.62%) SAS
6 25 (1.07%) Apache
7 14 (0.60%) CMS
8 12 (0.51%) Camunda
8 12 (0.51%) WebLogic
9 6 (0.26%) nginx
9 6 (0.26%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 6 (0.26%) Tomcat
10 5 (0.21%) Microsoft Exchange
11 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
11 4 (0.17%) ColdFusion
11 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
11 4 (0.17%) OpenStack
11 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
12 3 (0.13%) Kentico
13 2 (0.085%) 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 (0.085%) Mingle
7 2 (0.085%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 28 (1.20%) Dynamics CRM
2 24 (1.02%) 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%) FLEXCUBE
9 4 (0.17%) Shopify
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
10 3 (0.13%) Finacle
10 3 (0.13%) Temenos T24
11 2 (0.085%) BambooHR
11 2 (0.085%) Infor CloudSuite
11 2 (0.085%) Infor LN
11 2 (0.085%) Infor M3
11 2 (0.085%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 725 (30.96%) AWS
2 696 (29.72%) Azure
3 419 (17.89%) GitHub
4 329 (14.05%) Azure DevOps
5 253 (10.80%) GitHub Actions
6 177 (7.56%) Serverless
7 170 (7.26%) GCP
8 133 (5.68%) AWS Lambda
9 105 (4.48%) Power Platform
10 101 (4.31%) Amazon S3
11 81 (3.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 73 (3.12%) OpenShift
13 71 (3.03%) Amazon ECS
14 68 (2.90%) GitHub Copilot
15 64 (2.73%) Amazon EKS
15 64 (2.73%) AWS CloudFormation
16 58 (2.48%) dbt
16 58 (2.48%) Snowflake
17 49 (2.09%) Amazon EC2
18 43 (1.84%) Amazon SQS
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.11%) HTTP
2 23 (0.98%) Firewall
3 21 (0.90%) 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%) DHCP
9 10 (0.43%) SAN
10 8 (0.34%) VXLAN
10 8 (0.34%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 141 (6.02%) PostgreSQL
2 124 (5.29%) Data Warehouse
3 120 (5.12%) MongoDB
4 106 (4.53%) NoSQL
5 102 (4.36%) Relational Database
6 93 (3.97%) SQL Server
7 81 (3.46%) Power BI
8 49 (2.09%) Metadata
9 48 (2.05%) DynamoDB
10 39 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
11 37 (1.58%) MySQL
12 35 (1.49%) Amazon Athena
13 34 (1.45%) Data Lake
14 33 (1.41%) Big Data
15 32 (1.37%) Pentaho
16 31 (1.32%) Amazon RDS
17 30 (1.28%) Amazon Redshift
18 29 (1.24%) Elasticsearch
18 29 (1.24%) Redis
19 25 (1.07%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 487 (20.79%) Git
2 400 (17.08%) JIRA
3 377 (16.10%) Jenkins
4 318 (13.58%) GitLab
5 297 (12.68%) Selenium
6 166 (7.09%) Postman
7 146 (6.23%) Cucumber
8 128 (5.47%) JUnit
9 126 (5.38%) Cypress.io
10 105 (4.48%) REST Assured
11 103 (4.40%) JMeter
12 83 (3.54%) SonarQube
13 65 (2.78%) Zephyr
14 60 (2.56%) Gatling
14 60 (2.56%) Maven
15 58 (2.48%) Gradle
16 55 (2.35%) WebDriver
17 53 (2.26%) Mockito
18 42 (1.79%) Bitbucket
19 28 (1.20%) SpecFlow
General
1 650 (27.75%) Social Skills
2 434 (18.53%) Finance
3 337 (14.39%) Public Sector
4 324 (13.83%) Analytical Skills
5 208 (8.88%) Banking
6 75 (3.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.88%) Telecoms
8 42 (1.79%) Front Office
9 40 (1.71%) Documentation Skills
10 38 (1.62%) Investment Banking
11 34 (1.45%) Influencing Skills
12 31 (1.32%) Retail
13 28 (1.20%) Military
14 24 (1.02%) Financial Institution
15 20 (0.85%) Law
16 19 (0.81%) Back Office
17 18 (0.77%) Marketing
18 17 (0.73%) Aerospace
19 15 (0.64%) Manufacturing
20 13 (0.56%) Automotive
Job Titles
1 529 (22.59%) Developer
2 396 (16.91%) Senior
3 237 (10.12%) Lead
4 227 (9.69%) Test Engineer
5 200 (8.54%) Tester
6 171 (7.30%) Java Developer
7 140 (5.98%) Data Engineer
8 128 (5.47%) Software Engineer
9 125 (5.34%) Analyst
10 122 (5.21%) DevOps Engineer
11 117 (5.00%) Senior Developer
12 104 (4.44%) Test Automation Engineer
13 97 (4.14%) Architect
14 96 (4.10%) QA Engineer
15 88 (3.76%) Automation Tester
16 83 (3.54%) Test Analyst
17 80 (3.42%) Test Leader
18 78 (3.33%) Full-Stack Developer
19 69 (2.95%) Automation Engineer
20 68 (2.90%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 377 (16.10%) REST
2 333 (14.22%) Terraform
3 277 (11.83%) Playwright
4 231 (9.86%) RESTful
5 230 (9.82%) Kafka
6 226 (9.65%) Spring
7 219 (9.35%) React
8 195 (8.33%) Spring Boot
9 163 (6.96%) .NET
10 134 (5.72%) HTML
11 125 (5.34%) Node.js
12 115 (4.91%) CSS
13 104 (4.44%) AngularJS
14 81 (3.46%) OAuth
15 72 (3.07%) JSON
16 64 (2.73%) pytest
17 60 (2.56%) OAuth2
18 59 (2.52%) Middleware
18 59 (2.52%) XML
19 54 (2.31%) Gherkin
Miscellaneous
1 353 (15.07%) Cloud Native
2 199 (8.50%) Product Ownership
3 166 (7.09%) Distributed Systems
4 97 (4.14%) Enterprise Software
5 66 (2.82%) Onboarding
6 59 (2.52%) Legacy Systems
7 55 (2.35%) Data Protection Act
8 51 (2.18%) Mobile App
9 50 (2.13%) Self-Motivation
10 49 (2.09%) AI Agents
11 37 (1.58%) Virtual Team
12 25 (1.07%) Security Posture
13 23 (0.98%) Data Structures
14 22 (0.94%) Management Information System
15 21 (0.90%) Data Centre
15 21 (0.90%) Embedded Systems
15 21 (0.90%) NHS
16 20 (0.85%) Distributed Architecture
16 20 (0.85%) Life Science
17 19 (0.81%) Legacy Applications
Operating Systems
1 160 (6.83%) Linux
2 97 (4.14%) Unix
3 89 (3.80%) Windows
4 44 (1.88%) Apple iOS
5 42 (1.79%) Android
6 30 (1.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 21 (0.90%) 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 (0.085%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,391 (59.39%) CI/CD
2 1,108 (47.31%) Agile
3 874 (37.32%) DevOps
4 449 (19.17%) Microservices
5 445 (19.00%) Problem-Solving
6 442 (18.87%) Continuous Improvement
7 423 (18.06%) Software Engineering
8 400 (17.08%) Infrastructure as Code
9 392 (16.74%) Scrum
10 378 (16.14%) Validation
11 351 (14.99%) AI
11 351 (14.99%) Test Strategy
12 327 (13.96%) Containerisation
13 303 (12.94%) Observability
14 300 (12.81%) TDD
15 278 (11.87%) SDLC
16 261 (11.14%) Software Testing
17 252 (10.76%) Stakeholder Management
18 248 (10.59%) End-to-End Testing
19 226 (9.65%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 642 (27.41%) Python
2 639 (27.28%) Java
3 572 (24.42%) SQL
4 348 (14.86%) JavaScript
5 257 (10.97%) TypeScript
6 198 (8.45%) C#
7 102 (4.36%) PowerShell
8 90 (3.84%) Bash
9 52 (2.22%) Bicep
10 51 (2.18%) Kotlin
11 46 (1.96%) C++
12 33 (1.41%) PL/SQL
12 33 (1.41%) Scala
13 29 (1.24%) Go
14 27 (1.15%) Shell Script
15 26 (1.11%) Apex Code
15 26 (1.11%) C
16 23 (0.98%) Ruby
17 21 (0.90%) Perl
18 17 (0.73%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 762 (32.54%) Security Cleared
2 645 (27.54%) SC Cleared
3 130 (5.55%) Degree
4 117 (5.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 108 (4.61%) ISTQB
6 79 (3.37%) DV Cleared
7 75 (3.20%) Computer Science Degree
8 38 (1.62%) AWS Certification
9 31 (1.32%) Azure Certification
9 31 (1.32%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 19 (0.81%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 14 (0.60%) Master's Degree
12 13 (0.56%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 12 (0.51%) ISEB
14 11 (0.47%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.43%) Cisco Certification
15 10 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
16 9 (0.38%) CISSP
17 8 (0.34%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
17 8 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 597 (25.49%) QA
2 200 (8.54%) Accessibility
3 163 (6.96%) Data Quality
4 94 (4.01%) WCAG
5 41 (1.75%) GDPR
6 21 (0.90%) 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%) FATCA
12 5 (0.21%) HL7
13 4 (0.17%) Def Stans
13 4 (0.17%) MiFID
13 4 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 462 (19.73%) Docker
2 36 (1.54%) VMware Infrastructure
3 32 (1.37%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.51%) Firmware
6 9 (0.38%) VMware ESXi
7 5 (0.21%) Hyper-V
7 5 (0.21%) VMware NSX
8 3 (0.13%) Oracle RAC
9 2 (0.085%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.085%) Virtual Servers
10 1 (0.043%) Embedded Firmware
10 1 (0.043%) KVM
10 1 (0.043%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 452 (19.30%) Kubernetes
2 123 (5.25%) Ansible
2 123 (5.25%) Grafana
3 92 (3.93%) Prometheus
4 41 (1.75%) Argo
5 22 (0.94%) Progress Chef
5 22 (0.94%) Puppet
6 16 (0.68%) Kibana
7 15 (0.64%) HP ALM
8 11 (0.47%) Control-M
9 10 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.30%) Dell DRAC
10 7 (0.30%) Kustomize
10 7 (0.30%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.26%) Istio
11 6 (0.26%) SCCM
12 5 (0.21%) HP Fortify
12 5 (0.21%) HP Quality Center
12 5 (0.21%) Packer
12 5 (0.21%) WMI
Vendors
1 220 (9.39%) Microsoft
2 196 (8.37%) Oracle
3 85 (3.63%) Salesforce
4 84 (3.59%) Databricks
5 69 (2.95%) Google
6 62 (2.65%) Red Hat
7 59 (2.52%) IBM
7 59 (2.52%) Talend
8 55 (2.35%) ServiceNow
9 53 (2.26%) SAP
10 52 (2.22%) Splunk
11 43 (1.84%) Informatica
11 43 (1.84%) VMware
12 42 (1.79%) Denodo
13 38 (1.62%) Dynatrace
14 31 (1.32%) Cisco
15 29 (1.24%) MuleSoft
16 27 (1.15%) UiPath
17 20 (0.85%) HP
18 17 (0.73%) OpenAI