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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 51
Rank change year-on-year +2 +3 0
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,279 1,449 1,624
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.34% 4.49% 3.74%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.10% 4.95% 4.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,478 1,013 1,067
10th Percentile £327 £313 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £483 £513
Median % change year-on-year -1.66% -5.76% -4.43%
75th Percentile £575 £588 £610
90th Percentile £663 £700 £720
UK excluding London median daily rate £458 £465 £501
% change year-on-year -1.45% -7.19% -1.47%
Number of hourly rates quoted 108 30 50
10th Percentile £36.22 £40.26 £49.80
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.95 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year +28.57% -6.67% -18.18%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.50 £71.87
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.22 £82.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +22.73% -2.22% -11.33%

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 44,694 29,246 37,042
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.15% 90.54% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,812 18,436 23,663
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £415 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £518 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.50% -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 2,657 1,477 2,496
10th Percentile £14.94 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.61 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% -6.25%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.50 £61.30
90th Percentile £82.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £24.66 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.45% -35.31% -3.62%

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 9 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 9 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 9 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 1,939 £475 -1.86% 646
UK excluding London +6 1,134 £458 -1.45% 511
London +2 873 £500 - 258
Work from Home 0 643 £475 +2.15% 301
North of England +15 395 £460 +2.91% 129
Midlands +4 248 £450 +9.09% 60
West Midlands +28 231 £450 -6.83% 27
South East -34 201 £462 -7.60% 150
Yorkshire +12 164 £500 - 40
North West +7 154 £475 +18.16% 68
South West +9 115 £450 +4.35% 69
East of England +20 87 £475 +3.54% 45
North East +11 87 £425 +6.25% 21
Scotland -24 66 £440 -9.74% 26
Wales -5 35 £475 +15.15% 13
Northern Ireland +25 22 £475 +16.28% 26
East Midlands -40 17 £425 +54.55% 33
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
1 197 (8.64%) Confluence
2 48 (2.11%) Apache Spark
2 48 (2.11%) SAS
3 46 (2.02%) Apache Airflow
4 21 (0.92%) Apache
5 16 (0.70%) SharePoint
6 13 (0.57%) CMS
7 9 (0.39%) nginx
7 9 (0.39%) Tomcat
7 9 (0.39%) WebLogic
8 6 (0.26%) Camunda
9 5 (0.22%) Appian
10 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
10 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.13%) Kentico
11 3 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.13%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.088%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.088%) Mendix
12 2 (0.088%) Mule
Applications
1 30 (1.32%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.53%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.53%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.39%) MS Visio
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
5 4 (0.18%) Simulink
5 4 (0.18%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.044%) Mingle
6 1 (0.044%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 23 (1.01%) Dynamics CRM
2 18 (0.79%) Aladdin
3 16 (0.70%) SAP S/4HANA
4 12 (0.53%) Oracle EBS
4 12 (0.53%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.35%) Findur
6 7 (0.31%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
7 6 (0.26%) 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 (0.088%) Advent Geneva
11 2 (0.088%) Summit
Cloud Services
1 672 (29.49%) Azure
2 656 (28.78%) AWS
3 389 (17.07%) GitHub
4 301 (13.21%) Azure DevOps
5 230 (10.09%) GitHub Actions
6 168 (7.37%) GCP
7 156 (6.85%) Serverless
8 106 (4.65%) AWS Lambda
9 100 (4.39%) Power Platform
10 97 (4.26%) Amazon S3
11 65 (2.85%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 63 (2.76%) OpenShift
13 59 (2.59%) Amazon ECS
14 51 (2.24%) Amazon EC2
14 51 (2.24%) AWS CloudFormation
15 47 (2.06%) dbt
16 43 (1.89%) Snowflake
17 42 (1.84%) Amazon EKS
18 41 (1.80%) Azure Data Factory
19 33 (1.45%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.01%) HTTP
2 20 (0.88%) Firewall
3 16 (0.70%) SAN
4 13 (0.57%) Network Security
5 11 (0.48%) WAN
6 9 (0.39%) 5G
6 9 (0.39%) MPLS
6 9 (0.39%) VPN
7 8 (0.35%) 4G
8 7 (0.31%) 2G
8 7 (0.31%) 3G
8 7 (0.31%) BGP
8 7 (0.31%) Diameter Protocol
8 7 (0.31%) SIGTRAN
8 7 (0.31%) SS7
8 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.26%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.26%) LAN
9 6 (0.26%) TCP/IP
9 6 (0.26%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 117 (5.13%) PostgreSQL
2 116 (5.09%) MongoDB
3 105 (4.61%) Data Warehouse
4 96 (4.21%) NoSQL
5 83 (3.64%) SQL Server
6 80 (3.51%) Relational Database
7 77 (3.38%) Power BI
8 46 (2.02%) DynamoDB
8 46 (2.02%) Metadata
9 38 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
10 37 (1.62%) Big Data
11 36 (1.58%) Pentaho
12 34 (1.49%) Amazon Athena
13 31 (1.36%) Amazon RDS
14 30 (1.32%) MySQL
15 27 (1.18%) Amazon Redshift
16 26 (1.14%) Data Lake
17 25 (1.10%) Redis
18 22 (0.97%) Oracle Database
19 21 (0.92%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 440 (19.31%) JIRA
2 409 (17.95%) Git
3 370 (16.24%) Jenkins
4 311 (13.65%) GitLab
5 298 (13.08%) Selenium
6 180 (7.90%) Postman
7 158 (6.93%) Cucumber
8 125 (5.48%) REST Assured
9 117 (5.13%) JUnit
10 114 (5.00%) Cypress.io
11 106 (4.65%) JMeter
12 66 (2.90%) WebDriver
13 65 (2.85%) Zephyr
14 56 (2.46%) SonarQube
15 54 (2.37%) Gatling
16 48 (2.11%) Gradle
17 42 (1.84%) Mockito
18 38 (1.67%) Bitbucket
18 38 (1.67%) Maven
19 36 (1.58%) SpecFlow
General
1 609 (26.72%) Social Skills
2 412 (18.08%) Finance
3 303 (13.30%) Public Sector
4 281 (12.33%) Analytical Skills
5 189 (8.29%) Banking
6 58 (2.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 45 (1.97%) Documentation Skills
8 39 (1.71%) Investment Banking
9 36 (1.58%) Front Office
10 30 (1.32%) Influencing Skills
10 30 (1.32%) Telecoms
11 27 (1.18%) Military
12 24 (1.05%) Financial Institution
13 22 (0.97%) Retail
14 20 (0.88%) Aerospace
15 18 (0.79%) Manufacturing
16 17 (0.75%) Legal
16 17 (0.75%) Organisational Skills
17 15 (0.66%) Back Office
18 14 (0.61%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 472 (20.71%) Developer
2 362 (15.88%) Senior
3 247 (10.84%) Lead
4 239 (10.49%) Test Engineer
5 235 (10.31%) Tester
6 155 (6.80%) Data Engineer
7 153 (6.71%) Java Developer
8 118 (5.18%) Analyst
9 113 (4.96%) Software Engineer
10 107 (4.70%) Architect
10 107 (4.70%) DevOps Engineer
11 105 (4.61%) Test Automation Engineer
12 95 (4.17%) Senior Developer
13 92 (4.04%) Test Leader
14 90 (3.95%) Automation Tester
14 90 (3.95%) QA Engineer
15 76 (3.33%) Test Analyst
16 65 (2.85%) Full-Stack Developer
17 61 (2.68%) Automation Engineer
18 58 (2.54%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 278 (12.20%) Playwright
2 277 (12.15%) REST
3 206 (9.04%) React
4 182 (7.99%) Spring
5 177 (7.77%) RESTful
6 159 (6.98%) Kafka
7 150 (6.58%) .NET
8 148 (6.49%) Spring Boot
9 119 (5.22%) Node.js
10 93 (4.08%) AngularJS
11 86 (3.77%) HTML
12 76 (3.33%) CSS
13 64 (2.81%) OAuth
14 61 (2.68%) pytest
15 55 (2.41%) Jest
16 50 (2.19%) Swagger
17 46 (2.02%) Gherkin
18 45 (1.97%) JSON
19 43 (1.89%) OAuth2
20 42 (1.84%) GraphQL
Miscellaneous
1 292 (12.81%) Cloud Native
2 164 (7.20%) Product Ownership
3 132 (5.79%) Distributed Systems
4 77 (3.38%) Enterprise Software
5 64 (2.81%) Legacy Systems
6 53 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
7 52 (2.28%) Onboarding
8 47 (2.06%) Mobile App
8 47 (2.06%) Self-Motivation
9 44 (1.93%) Virtual Team
10 32 (1.40%) Distributed Architecture
11 29 (1.27%) Security Posture
12 28 (1.23%) Management Information System
13 27 (1.18%) AI Agents
14 26 (1.14%) Embedded Systems
14 26 (1.14%) NHS
15 22 (0.97%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.92%) Data Centre
17 20 (0.88%) Fixed Income
18 19 (0.83%) Derivative
Operating Systems
1 133 (5.84%) Linux
2 81 (3.55%) Windows
3 69 (3.03%) Unix
4 42 (1.84%) Android
5 40 (1.76%) Apple iOS
6 24 (1.05%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (0.83%) Windows Server
8 14 (0.61%) Mac OS X
9 10 (0.44%) Mac OS
9 10 (0.44%) Solaris
10 8 (0.35%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.31%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
12 6 (0.26%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.13%) AIX
15 2 (0.088%) CentOS
15 2 (0.088%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,288 (56.52%) CI/CD
2 1,053 (46.20%) Agile
3 833 (36.55%) DevOps
4 410 (17.99%) Problem-Solving
5 385 (16.89%) Microservices
6 377 (16.54%) Continuous Improvement
7 353 (15.49%) Scrum
8 347 (15.23%) Test Strategy
9 340 (14.92%) Validation
10 330 (14.48%) Software Engineering
11 329 (14.44%) Infrastructure as Code
12 294 (12.90%) Containerisation
13 285 (12.51%) TDD
14 280 (12.29%) AI
15 276 (12.11%) Observability
16 236 (10.36%) End-to-End Testing
17 227 (9.96%) ETL
18 222 (9.74%) Software Testing
19 221 (9.70%) User Acceptance Testing
20 215 (9.43%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 591 (25.93%) Python
2 576 (25.27%) Java
3 518 (22.73%) SQL
4 303 (13.30%) JavaScript
5 258 (11.32%) TypeScript
6 212 (9.30%) C#
7 80 (3.51%) Bash
8 76 (3.33%) PowerShell
9 54 (2.37%) C++
10 49 (2.15%) Kotlin
11 38 (1.67%) PL/SQL
12 37 (1.62%) Scala
13 36 (1.58%) Bicep
14 34 (1.49%) Apex Code
14 34 (1.49%) C
15 33 (1.45%) Go
16 23 (1.01%) Swift
17 22 (0.97%) Ruby
18 18 (0.79%) Shell Script
19 17 (0.75%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 712 (31.24%) Security Cleared
2 592 (25.98%) SC Cleared
3 107 (4.70%) BPSS Clearance
3 107 (4.70%) Degree
4 103 (4.52%) ISTQB
5 77 (3.38%) DV Cleared
6 55 (2.41%) Computer Science Degree
7 26 (1.14%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 23 (1.01%) AWS Certification
9 17 (0.75%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
9 17 (0.75%) Master's Degree
10 12 (0.53%) Azure Certification
10 12 (0.53%) Cisco Certification
11 11 (0.48%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
11 11 (0.48%) SAFe Agilist
12 10 (0.44%) CCNP
13 9 (0.39%) CISSP
13 9 (0.39%) DBS Check
14 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Certification
15 5 (0.22%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 513 (22.51%) QA
2 178 (7.81%) Accessibility
3 154 (6.76%) Data Quality
4 76 (3.33%) WCAG
5 41 (1.80%) GDPR
6 16 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 15 (0.66%) SLA
8 13 (0.57%) NCSC
9 12 (0.53%) ISO 20022
10 10 (0.44%) Def Stans
11 9 (0.39%) NIST
12 7 (0.31%) HMG Security Policy Framework
13 6 (0.26%) PCI DSS
14 5 (0.22%) FATCA
14 5 (0.22%) SEPA
14 5 (0.22%) Software Quality Assurance
15 4 (0.18%) GRC
15 4 (0.18%) HL7
15 4 (0.18%) MiFID
15 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 391 (17.16%) Docker
2 31 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.83%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.61%) Firmware
5 13 (0.57%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.35%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.26%) 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 (0.088%) SRDF
11 1 (0.044%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.044%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 395 (17.33%) Kubernetes
2 287 (12.59%) Terraform
3 115 (5.05%) Ansible
4 114 (5.00%) Grafana
5 94 (4.12%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.62%) Argo
7 22 (0.97%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.61%) Puppet
9 13 (0.57%) Kibana
10 12 (0.53%) HP Quality Center
11 11 (0.48%) Single Sign-On
12 10 (0.44%) Dell DRAC
13 8 (0.35%) Kustomize
13 8 (0.35%) NetBackup
14 6 (0.26%) Forefront Identity Manager
14 6 (0.26%) NetIQ Identity Manager
14 6 (0.26%) Oracle RMAN
15 5 (0.22%) Istio
15 5 (0.22%) Progress Chef
16 4 (0.18%) Rancher
Vendors
1 198 (8.69%) Microsoft
2 178 (7.81%) Oracle
3 106 (4.65%) Salesforce
4 70 (3.07%) Databricks
5 65 (2.85%) Talend
6 64 (2.81%) Google
7 58 (2.54%) Red Hat
7 58 (2.54%) ServiceNow
7 58 (2.54%) Splunk
8 45 (1.97%) Denodo
9 39 (1.71%) SAP
10 38 (1.67%) IBM
10 38 (1.67%) Informatica
11 34 (1.49%) VMware
12 30 (1.32%) UiPath
13 29 (1.27%) Dynatrace
14 25 (1.10%) HP
14 25 (1.10%) MuleSoft
15 21 (0.92%) Cisco
16 16 (0.70%) Blue Prism