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

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 50 51
Rank change year-on-year +4 +1 +1
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,320 1,498 1,528
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.34% 4.56% 3.94%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.12% 5.04% 4.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,509 1,033 1,013
10th Percentile £325 £313 £350
25th Percentile £405 £393 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £494 £513
Median % change year-on-year -3.85% -3.61% -2.38%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £600
90th Percentile £663 £700 £725
UK excluding London median daily rate £458 £475 £502
% change year-on-year -3.53% -5.33% +0.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 102 33 24
10th Percentile £37.53 £36.17 £42.50
25th Percentile £60.08 £45.00 £49.50
Median hourly rate £69.75 £50.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +39.50% -9.09% -16.67%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.00 £71.87
90th Percentile £74.00 £73.70 £81.85
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £55.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year +25.45% -2.22% -10.00%

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 45,331 29,700 33,127
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.72% 90.46% 85.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,838 18,524 21,130
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% -3.58%
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 2,836 1,729 1,767
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £18.31 £17.33 £18.14
Median hourly rate £41.63 £25.15 £40.94
Median % change year-on-year +65.54% -38.57% -0.24%
75th Percentile £67.99 £49.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £68.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £24.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +83.17% -43.53% +17.65%

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 August 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 August 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 August 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 1,971 £475 -5.00% 913
UK excluding London -4 1,137 £458 -3.53% 680
London +6 904 £500 -1.48% 363
Work from Home -7 626 £475 - 382
North of England +9 392 £464 +3.06% 153
Midlands +4 258 £447 -0.67% 87
West Midlands +20 241 £450 -10.00% 61
South East -28 215 £459 -8.20% 176
Yorkshire -7 161 £475 -5.00% 44
North West -6 137 £492 +15.76% 75
South West 0 113 £475 +8.57% 110
North East +17 102 £450 +3.45% 34
East of England +16 79 £450 -1.91% 84
Scotland -31 71 £450 -10.00% 66
Wales -6 30 £488 +21.88% 8
Northern Ireland +21 17 £488 +60.63% 12
East Midlands -45 17 £425 +23.19% 26
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 (8.19%) Confluence
2 54 (2.33%) Apache Airflow
3 52 (2.24%) Apache Spark
4 43 (1.85%) SharePoint
5 42 (1.81%) SAS
6 24 (1.03%) Apache
7 14 (0.60%) CMS
8 13 (0.56%) WebLogic
9 7 (0.30%) nginx
9 7 (0.30%) Tomcat
10 6 (0.26%) Camunda
10 6 (0.26%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 5 (0.22%) Microsoft Exchange
12 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
12 4 (0.17%) Jupyter
12 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
13 3 (0.13%) Kentico
13 3 (0.13%) OpenStack
14 2 (0.086%) Apache Pulsar
14 2 (0.086%) Mendix
Applications
1 26 (1.12%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
3 10 (0.43%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 7 (0.30%) MS Visio
5 6 (0.26%) Chatbot
6 5 (0.22%) Microsoft Project
7 4 (0.17%) Simulink
8 3 (0.13%) Trello
9 1 (0.043%) Mingle
9 1 (0.043%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 26 (1.12%) Dynamics CRM
2 21 (0.91%) SAP S/4HANA
3 15 (0.65%) Aladdin
4 13 (0.56%) Payment Gateway
5 11 (0.47%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.34%) Findur
7 6 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
7 6 (0.26%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.26%) SAP MDG
8 5 (0.22%) BambooHR
9 4 (0.17%) Infor CloudSuite
9 4 (0.17%) Infor LN
9 4 (0.17%) Infor M3
9 4 (0.17%) SAP GRC
9 4 (0.17%) Shopify
10 3 (0.13%) Distributed Ledger
11 2 (0.086%) Advent Geneva
11 2 (0.086%) Loan IQ
11 2 (0.086%) Oracle ERP
12 1 (0.043%) Maximo
Cloud Services
1 704 (30.34%) Azure
2 699 (30.13%) AWS
3 425 (18.32%) GitHub
4 332 (14.31%) Azure DevOps
5 260 (11.21%) GitHub Actions
6 173 (7.46%) Serverless
7 164 (7.07%) GCP
8 125 (5.39%) AWS Lambda
9 102 (4.40%) Power Platform
10 97 (4.18%) Amazon S3
11 79 (3.41%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 70 (3.02%) Amazon ECS
13 65 (2.80%) OpenShift
14 64 (2.76%) AWS CloudFormation
15 63 (2.72%) GitHub Copilot
16 61 (2.63%) Amazon EKS
17 57 (2.46%) dbt
18 56 (2.41%) Snowflake
19 53 (2.28%) Amazon EC2
20 44 (1.90%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.12%) Firewall
2 21 (0.91%) HTTP
3 17 (0.73%) 4G
3 17 (0.73%) 5G
3 17 (0.73%) DNS
4 16 (0.69%) Network Security
4 16 (0.69%) WAN
5 15 (0.65%) 2G
5 15 (0.65%) 3G
5 15 (0.65%) Diameter Protocol
5 15 (0.65%) SIGTRAN
5 15 (0.65%) SS7
6 13 (0.56%) LAN
6 13 (0.56%) TCP/IP
7 12 (0.52%) SAN
7 12 (0.52%) Wi-Fi
8 9 (0.39%) BGP
9 8 (0.34%) Ethernet VPN
9 8 (0.34%) VXLAN
10 7 (0.30%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 141 (6.08%) PostgreSQL
2 135 (5.82%) Data Warehouse
3 118 (5.09%) MongoDB
4 113 (4.87%) NoSQL
5 95 (4.09%) SQL Server
6 86 (3.71%) Relational Database
7 82 (3.53%) Power BI
8 49 (2.11%) DynamoDB
9 48 (2.07%) Metadata
9 48 (2.07%) Oracle Reports
10 37 (1.59%) Pentaho
11 36 (1.55%) Data Lake
12 35 (1.51%) MySQL
13 34 (1.47%) Amazon Athena
14 32 (1.38%) Big Data
15 30 (1.29%) Amazon RDS
15 30 (1.29%) Amazon Redshift
16 29 (1.25%) Redis
17 27 (1.16%) Elasticsearch
18 24 (1.03%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 464 (20.00%) Git
2 410 (17.67%) JIRA
3 375 (16.16%) Jenkins
4 307 (13.23%) GitLab
5 288 (12.41%) Selenium
6 174 (7.50%) Postman
7 145 (6.25%) Cucumber
8 122 (5.26%) Cypress.io
9 112 (4.83%) JUnit
10 100 (4.31%) REST Assured
11 98 (4.22%) JMeter
12 77 (3.32%) Zephyr
13 65 (2.80%) SonarQube
14 57 (2.46%) WebDriver
15 54 (2.33%) Gatling
16 52 (2.24%) Gradle
17 47 (2.03%) Maven
18 43 (1.85%) Bitbucket
19 41 (1.77%) Mockito
20 29 (1.25%) SpecFlow
General
1 632 (27.24%) Social Skills
2 429 (18.49%) Finance
3 328 (14.14%) Public Sector
4 315 (13.58%) Analytical Skills
5 196 (8.45%) Banking
6 72 (3.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 46 (1.98%) Documentation Skills
8 44 (1.90%) Telecoms
9 38 (1.64%) Front Office
10 35 (1.51%) Investment Banking
11 34 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
12 32 (1.38%) Retail
13 26 (1.12%) Military
14 25 (1.08%) Financial Institution
15 20 (0.86%) Aerospace
16 19 (0.82%) Back Office
17 17 (0.73%) Manufacturing
18 15 (0.65%) Law
18 15 (0.65%) Legal
18 15 (0.65%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 500 (21.55%) Developer
2 380 (16.38%) Senior
3 252 (10.86%) Lead
4 226 (9.74%) Test Engineer
5 214 (9.22%) Tester
6 159 (6.85%) Java Developer
7 152 (6.55%) Data Engineer
8 121 (5.22%) Analyst
9 118 (5.09%) DevOps Engineer
10 112 (4.83%) Software Engineer
11 108 (4.66%) Senior Developer
12 105 (4.53%) Test Automation Engineer
13 103 (4.44%) Architect
14 94 (4.05%) QA Engineer
15 87 (3.75%) Automation Tester
16 84 (3.62%) Test Leader
17 81 (3.49%) Test Analyst
18 75 (3.23%) Full-Stack Developer
19 67 (2.89%) Automation Engineer
19 67 (2.89%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 358 (15.43%) REST
2 333 (14.35%) Terraform
3 279 (12.03%) Playwright
4 218 (9.40%) RESTful
5 209 (9.01%) React
6 208 (8.97%) Kafka
7 198 (8.53%) Spring
8 166 (7.16%) .NET
8 166 (7.16%) Spring Boot
9 123 (5.30%) Node.js
10 114 (4.91%) HTML
11 98 (4.22%) AngularJS
11 98 (4.22%) CSS
12 76 (3.28%) OAuth
13 69 (2.97%) JSON
14 59 (2.54%) pytest
15 57 (2.46%) OAuth2
16 55 (2.37%) Jest
17 53 (2.28%) XML
18 52 (2.24%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 344 (14.83%) Cloud Native
2 180 (7.76%) Product Ownership
3 153 (6.59%) Distributed Systems
4 92 (3.97%) Enterprise Software
5 62 (2.67%) Onboarding
6 59 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
7 54 (2.33%) Data Protection Act
8 50 (2.16%) Self-Motivation
9 47 (2.03%) Mobile App
10 41 (1.77%) AI Agents
11 36 (1.55%) Virtual Team
12 25 (1.08%) Embedded Systems
13 24 (1.03%) NHS
14 23 (0.99%) Data Centre
14 23 (0.99%) Management Information System
15 22 (0.95%) Distributed Architecture
15 22 (0.95%) Security Posture
16 19 (0.82%) Derivative
17 18 (0.78%) Fixed Income
18 17 (0.73%) Life Science
Operating Systems
1 164 (7.07%) Linux
2 98 (4.22%) Windows
3 97 (4.18%) Unix
4 40 (1.72%) Android
4 40 (1.72%) Apple iOS
5 31 (1.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 21 (0.91%) Windows Server
7 8 (0.34%) Solaris
8 6 (0.26%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.26%) Mac OS X
9 5 (0.22%) Windows 10
9 5 (0.22%) Windows 7
9 5 (0.22%) Windows Server 2003
9 5 (0.22%) Windows Server 2008
10 4 (0.17%) AIX
10 4 (0.17%) Mac OS
10 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
10 4 (0.17%) VMS
10 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
11 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,359 (58.58%) CI/CD
2 1,075 (46.34%) Agile
3 886 (38.19%) DevOps
4 443 (19.09%) Problem-Solving
5 434 (18.71%) Continuous Improvement
6 422 (18.19%) Microservices
7 387 (16.68%) Software Engineering
8 384 (16.55%) Infrastructure as Code
9 367 (15.82%) Scrum
10 357 (15.39%) Validation
11 345 (14.87%) Test Strategy
12 334 (14.40%) AI
13 315 (13.58%) Containerisation
14 292 (12.59%) Observability
15 289 (12.46%) TDD
16 252 (10.86%) SDLC
17 248 (10.69%) End-to-End Testing
18 243 (10.47%) ETL
19 238 (10.26%) Software Testing
20 230 (9.91%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 626 (26.98%) Python
2 602 (25.95%) Java
3 581 (25.04%) SQL
4 325 (14.01%) JavaScript
5 248 (10.69%) TypeScript
6 207 (8.92%) C#
7 106 (4.57%) PowerShell
8 88 (3.79%) Bash
9 52 (2.24%) Bicep
10 51 (2.20%) Kotlin
11 50 (2.16%) C++
12 37 (1.59%) PL/SQL
13 33 (1.42%) C
14 30 (1.29%) Scala
15 28 (1.21%) Apex Code
15 28 (1.21%) Go
16 26 (1.12%) Shell Script
17 24 (1.03%) Ruby
18 17 (0.73%) Groovy
19 16 (0.69%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 754 (32.50%) Security Cleared
2 643 (27.72%) SC Cleared
3 117 (5.04%) Degree
3 117 (5.04%) ISTQB
4 104 (4.48%) BPSS Clearance
5 70 (3.02%) DV Cleared
6 63 (2.72%) Computer Science Degree
7 35 (1.51%) AWS Certification
8 33 (1.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 25 (1.08%) Azure Certification
10 17 (0.73%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 13 (0.56%) Cisco Certification
11 13 (0.56%) ISEB
11 13 (0.56%) Master's Degree
12 12 (0.52%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 11 (0.47%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.43%) CISSP
14 10 (0.43%) Microsoft Certification
15 9 (0.39%) CCNP
16 8 (0.34%) DBS Check
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 596 (25.69%) QA
2 190 (8.19%) Accessibility
3 165 (7.11%) Data Quality
4 84 (3.62%) WCAG
5 41 (1.77%) GDPR
6 17 (0.73%) ISO 20022
7 16 (0.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 16 (0.69%) SLA
8 14 (0.60%) NCSC
9 10 (0.43%) NIST
10 8 (0.34%) GRC
11 7 (0.30%) Actionable Recommendations
11 7 (0.30%) Def Stans
11 7 (0.30%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 7 (0.30%) PCI DSS
12 6 (0.26%) Software Quality Assurance
13 5 (0.22%) FATCA
14 4 (0.17%) MiFID
14 4 (0.17%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 3 (0.13%) EU AI Act
System Software
1 455 (19.61%) Docker
2 35 (1.51%) VMware Infrastructure
3 31 (1.34%) Active Directory
4 17 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.60%) Firmware
6 5 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
6 5 (0.22%) VMware NSX
7 4 (0.17%) Oracle RAC
7 4 (0.17%) Virtual Desktop
8 3 (0.13%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.086%) SRDF
10 1 (0.043%) Embedded Firmware
10 1 (0.043%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 442 (19.05%) Kubernetes
2 129 (5.56%) Ansible
3 123 (5.30%) Grafana
4 94 (4.05%) Prometheus
5 41 (1.77%) Argo
6 24 (1.03%) Puppet
7 23 (0.99%) Progress Chef
8 18 (0.78%) HP ALM
9 14 (0.60%) Kibana
10 11 (0.47%) Control-M
10 11 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.43%) Dell DRAC
12 7 (0.30%) Istio
12 7 (0.30%) Kustomize
13 6 (0.26%) Microsoft Intune
13 6 (0.26%) Packer
14 5 (0.22%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.22%) HP Quality Center
14 5 (0.22%) SCCM
15 4 (0.17%) NetIQ Identity Manager
Vendors
1 226 (9.74%) Microsoft
2 208 (8.97%) Oracle
3 93 (4.01%) Salesforce
4 90 (3.88%) Databricks
5 65 (2.80%) Red Hat
6 64 (2.76%) Google
6 64 (2.76%) Talend
7 61 (2.63%) Splunk
8 55 (2.37%) ServiceNow
9 53 (2.28%) IBM
10 49 (2.11%) SAP
11 46 (1.98%) Denodo
12 42 (1.81%) VMware
13 41 (1.77%) Informatica
14 36 (1.55%) Dynatrace
15 32 (1.38%) Cisco
16 30 (1.29%) MuleSoft
17 26 (1.12%) UiPath
18 25 (1.08%) HP
19 14 (0.60%) OpenAI