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

6 months to
21 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 44 50 47
Rank change year-on-year +6 -3 +4
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,402 1,503 1,568
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.42% 4.60% 4.08%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.24% 5.08% 4.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,536 1,023 1,054
10th Percentile £322 £313 £344
25th Percentile £404 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -4.76%
75th Percentile £575 £575 £600
90th Percentile £666 £688 £688
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £500
% change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 112 39 18
10th Percentile £40.00 £31.71 £40.88
25th Percentile £58.31 £45.63 £43.75
Median hourly rate £70.00 £55.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +27.27% -4.35% -22.03%
75th Percentile £74.00 £67.00 £73.84
90th Percentile £77.50 £69.80 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.00 £57.50 £57.50
% change year-on-year +20.00% - -16.36%

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 45,811 29,562 32,919
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.30% 90.52% 85.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,773 18,345 20,161
10th Percentile £325 £300 £309
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
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 3,152 1,818 1,440
10th Percentile £13.81 £14.23 £14.84
25th Percentile £17.25 £17.30 £20.00
Median hourly rate £40.00 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +59.05% -41.51% +0.58%
75th Percentile £67.47 £43.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £66.15 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £41.06 £22.32 £43.00
% change year-on-year +84.00% -48.10% +1.18%

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 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 21 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 21 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 +4 2,021 £475 -5.00% 3,414
UK excluding London -4 1,173 £450 -5.26% 2,016
London +6 912 £500 - 1,793
Work from Home -3 650 £475 +0.05% 1,458
North of England 0 405 £450 -5.26% 456
Midlands +10 255 £450 -2.70% 218
West Midlands +19 240 £458 -11.76% 144
South East -12 227 £450 -10.00% 432
Yorkshire -4 169 £461 -7.75% 128
North West -21 135 £492 +15.76% 265
South West -3 112 £463 -14.15% 274
North East +7 108 £425 -7.61% 64
Scotland -23 93 £475 -5.00% 296
East of England +15 89 £425 +24.09% 227
Wales -4 26 £475 +20.63% 38
East Midlands -43 15 £418 +15.97% 73
Northern Ireland +5 7 £513 +345.65% 83
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
1 189 (7.87%) Confluence
2 63 (2.62%) Apache Airflow
3 46 (1.92%) Apache Spark
3 46 (1.92%) SharePoint
4 39 (1.62%) SAS
5 27 (1.12%) Apache
6 17 (0.71%) CMS
7 14 (0.58%) Camunda
8 12 (0.50%) WebLogic
9 7 (0.29%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 6 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
10 6 (0.25%) nginx
10 6 (0.25%) Tomcat
11 5 (0.21%) Jupyter
11 5 (0.21%) OpenStack
12 4 (0.17%) Anypoint
12 4 (0.17%) ColdFusion
12 4 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
12 4 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
13 3 (0.12%) Kentico
Applications
1 23 (0.96%) Microsoft Excel
2 18 (0.75%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.29%) Chatbot
4 6 (0.25%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.17%) MS Visio
6 3 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
6 3 (0.12%) Trello
7 2 (0.083%) Mingle
7 2 (0.083%) Simulink
7 2 (0.083%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 30 (1.25%) Dynamics CRM
2 28 (1.17%) SAP S/4HANA
3 13 (0.54%) Payment Gateway
4 10 (0.42%) Aladdin
4 10 (0.42%) SAP MDG
5 7 (0.29%) Salesforce CRM
5 7 (0.29%) SAP GRC
6 6 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
6 6 (0.25%) SAP ERP
7 4 (0.17%) FLEXCUBE
8 3 (0.12%) Finacle
8 3 (0.12%) Temenos T24
9 2 (0.083%) BambooHR
9 2 (0.083%) Distributed Ledger
9 2 (0.083%) Findur
9 2 (0.083%) Oracle ERP
9 2 (0.083%) SAP HR
9 2 (0.083%) SAP Payroll
9 2 (0.083%) Shopify
10 1 (0.042%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 753 (31.35%) AWS
2 714 (29.73%) Azure
3 413 (17.19%) GitHub
4 328 (13.66%) Azure DevOps
5 248 (10.32%) GitHub Actions
6 178 (7.41%) GCP
7 172 (7.16%) Serverless
8 128 (5.33%) AWS Lambda
9 114 (4.75%) Power Platform
10 98 (4.08%) Amazon S3
11 83 (3.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 79 (3.29%) OpenShift
13 78 (3.25%) GitHub Copilot
14 70 (2.91%) AWS CloudFormation
15 66 (2.75%) Amazon ECS
15 66 (2.75%) Amazon EKS
16 61 (2.54%) dbt
17 60 (2.50%) Snowflake
18 48 (2.00%) Anthropic Claude
19 47 (1.96%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 26 (1.08%) HTTP
2 24 (1.00%) DNS
2 24 (1.00%) Firewall
3 22 (0.92%) 4G
4 21 (0.87%) 5G
5 20 (0.83%) TCP/IP
6 18 (0.75%) Wi-Fi
7 16 (0.67%) Network Security
8 15 (0.62%) 2G
8 15 (0.62%) 3G
8 15 (0.62%) Diameter Protocol
8 15 (0.62%) SIGTRAN
8 15 (0.62%) SS7
9 14 (0.58%) Broadband
9 14 (0.58%) WAN
10 13 (0.54%) LAN
11 12 (0.50%) BGP
12 11 (0.46%) DHCP
12 11 (0.46%) Ethernet VPN
12 11 (0.46%) VXLAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (6.04%) PostgreSQL
2 124 (5.16%) Data Warehouse
3 123 (5.12%) MongoDB
4 113 (4.70%) Relational Database
5 107 (4.45%) NoSQL
6 96 (4.00%) SQL Server
7 84 (3.50%) Power BI
8 51 (2.12%) Metadata
9 41 (1.71%) DynamoDB
10 40 (1.67%) Data Lake
11 39 (1.62%) Oracle Reports
12 36 (1.50%) MySQL
13 34 (1.42%) Big Data
13 34 (1.42%) Pentaho
14 31 (1.29%) Amazon Redshift
14 31 (1.29%) Redis
15 30 (1.25%) Amazon Athena
16 28 (1.17%) Amazon RDS
16 28 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
17 27 (1.12%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 537 (22.36%) Git
2 395 (16.44%) JIRA
3 391 (16.28%) Jenkins
4 327 (13.61%) GitLab
5 302 (12.57%) Selenium
6 169 (7.04%) Postman
7 158 (6.58%) Cucumber
8 136 (5.66%) JUnit
9 124 (5.16%) Cypress.io
10 105 (4.37%) REST Assured
11 93 (3.87%) JMeter
12 88 (3.66%) SonarQube
13 66 (2.75%) Gatling
14 65 (2.71%) Maven
15 64 (2.66%) Zephyr
16 58 (2.41%) Gradle
17 57 (2.37%) Mockito
18 50 (2.08%) WebDriver
19 37 (1.54%) Bitbucket
20 29 (1.21%) SpecFlow
General
1 664 (27.64%) Social Skills
2 440 (18.32%) Finance
3 334 (13.91%) Public Sector
4 329 (13.70%) Analytical Skills
5 217 (9.03%) Banking
6 79 (3.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 52 (2.16%) Telecoms
8 42 (1.75%) Front Office
9 35 (1.46%) Influencing Skills
9 35 (1.46%) Investment Banking
10 33 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
10 33 (1.37%) Retail
11 32 (1.33%) Military
12 22 (0.92%) Financial Institution
13 21 (0.87%) Law
14 20 (0.83%) Marketing
15 19 (0.79%) Aerospace
16 18 (0.75%) Manufacturing
17 14 (0.58%) Automotive
17 14 (0.58%) Back Office
Job Titles
1 548 (22.81%) Developer
2 398 (16.57%) Senior
3 239 (9.95%) Lead
4 231 (9.62%) Test Engineer
5 190 (7.91%) Tester
6 179 (7.45%) Java Developer
7 149 (6.20%) Data Engineer
8 126 (5.25%) Software Engineer
9 122 (5.08%) Analyst
10 119 (4.95%) DevOps Engineer
11 117 (4.87%) Senior Developer
12 106 (4.41%) Architect
13 101 (4.20%) Test Automation Engineer
14 96 (4.00%) QA Engineer
15 83 (3.46%) Automation Tester
16 80 (3.33%) Test Analyst
17 79 (3.29%) Full-Stack Developer
18 75 (3.12%) Test Leader
19 74 (3.08%) Test Manager
20 70 (2.91%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 418 (17.40%) REST
2 347 (14.45%) Terraform
3 284 (11.82%) Playwright
4 247 (10.28%) RESTful
5 239 (9.95%) Spring
6 238 (9.91%) Kafka
7 221 (9.20%) React
8 206 (8.58%) Spring Boot
9 176 (7.33%) .NET
10 146 (6.08%) HTML
11 137 (5.70%) Node.js
12 126 (5.25%) CSS
13 105 (4.37%) AngularJS
14 88 (3.66%) OAuth
15 79 (3.29%) JSON
16 66 (2.75%) Middleware
16 66 (2.75%) pytest
17 61 (2.54%) OAuth2
18 58 (2.41%) Swagger
18 58 (2.41%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 380 (15.82%) Cloud Native
2 206 (8.58%) Product Ownership
3 170 (7.08%) Distributed Systems
4 99 (4.12%) Enterprise Software
5 73 (3.04%) Onboarding
6 65 (2.71%) AI Agents
7 61 (2.54%) Legacy Systems
8 58 (2.41%) Self-Motivation
9 55 (2.29%) Data Protection Act
10 47 (1.96%) Mobile App
11 36 (1.50%) Virtual Team
12 30 (1.25%) Security Posture
13 28 (1.17%) Data Structures
14 27 (1.12%) Management Information System
15 25 (1.04%) Data Centre
15 25 (1.04%) Legacy Applications
16 24 (1.00%) Private Cloud
17 22 (0.92%) Life Science
18 21 (0.87%) Embedded Systems
19 19 (0.79%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 174 (7.24%) Linux
2 103 (4.29%) Windows
3 100 (4.16%) Unix
4 44 (1.83%) Apple iOS
5 42 (1.75%) Android
6 31 (1.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 25 (1.04%) Windows Server
8 7 (0.29%) VMS
9 6 (0.25%) Solaris
10 5 (0.21%) Mac OS X
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%) Embedded Linux
11 4 (0.17%) Mac OS
11 4 (0.17%) Ubuntu
11 4 (0.17%) Windows Server 2008
12 3 (0.12%) Windows Server 2019
12 3 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,470 (61.20%) CI/CD
2 1,169 (48.67%) Agile
3 890 (37.05%) DevOps
4 471 (19.61%) Microservices
5 469 (19.53%) Problem-Solving
6 466 (19.40%) Continuous Improvement
7 450 (18.73%) Software Engineering
8 428 (17.82%) Infrastructure as Code
9 410 (17.07%) Scrum
10 401 (16.69%) Validation
11 398 (16.57%) AI
12 357 (14.86%) Containerisation
13 356 (14.82%) Test Strategy
14 319 (13.28%) Observability
15 313 (13.03%) TDD
16 297 (12.36%) SDLC
17 285 (11.87%) Software Testing
18 275 (11.45%) Stakeholder Management
19 252 (10.49%) End-to-End Testing
20 236 (9.83%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 670 (27.89%) Java
2 664 (27.64%) Python
3 599 (24.94%) SQL
4 361 (15.03%) JavaScript
5 271 (11.28%) TypeScript
6 202 (8.41%) C#
7 98 (4.08%) PowerShell
8 89 (3.71%) Bash
9 51 (2.12%) Bicep
10 46 (1.92%) Kotlin
11 45 (1.87%) C++
12 44 (1.83%) Scala
13 39 (1.62%) Go
14 33 (1.37%) PL/SQL
15 31 (1.29%) Shell Script
16 26 (1.08%) Apex Code
17 24 (1.00%) C
17 24 (1.00%) Perl
18 19 (0.79%) Ruby
19 17 (0.71%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 774 (32.22%) Security Cleared
2 655 (27.27%) SC Cleared
3 134 (5.58%) Degree
4 124 (5.16%) BPSS Clearance
5 104 (4.33%) ISTQB
6 90 (3.75%) DV Cleared
7 75 (3.12%) Computer Science Degree
8 42 (1.75%) AWS Certification
9 35 (1.46%) Azure Certification
10 27 (1.12%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 16 (0.67%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
12 14 (0.58%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 14 (0.58%) Master's Degree
13 13 (0.54%) CISSP
14 12 (0.50%) Cisco Certification
14 12 (0.50%) ISEB
14 12 (0.50%) Microsoft Certification
15 8 (0.33%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
15 8 (0.33%) DBS Check
15 8 (0.33%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 620 (25.81%) QA
2 217 (9.03%) Accessibility
3 170 (7.08%) Data Quality
4 96 (4.00%) WCAG
5 43 (1.79%) GDPR
6 23 (0.96%) ISO 20022
7 14 (0.58%) GRC
8 13 (0.54%) NCSC
8 13 (0.54%) NIST
8 13 (0.54%) SLA
9 12 (0.50%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 7 (0.29%) Actionable Recommendations
11 6 (0.25%) SEPA
11 6 (0.25%) Software Quality Assurance
12 5 (0.21%) FATCA
12 5 (0.21%) HL7
12 5 (0.21%) PCI DSS
13 4 (0.17%) MiFID
13 4 (0.17%) SOC 2
14 3 (0.12%) PSD2
System Software
1 490 (20.40%) Docker
2 40 (1.67%) VMware Infrastructure
3 35 (1.46%) Active Directory
4 19 (0.79%) Virtual Machines
5 13 (0.54%) Firmware
6 10 (0.42%) VMware ESXi
7 7 (0.29%) VMware NSX
8 6 (0.25%) Hyper-V
9 3 (0.12%) Oracle RAC
10 2 (0.083%) Virtual Servers
11 1 (0.042%) Embedded Firmware
11 1 (0.042%) KVM
11 1 (0.042%) Virtual Desktop
11 1 (0.042%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 474 (19.73%) Kubernetes
2 133 (5.54%) Ansible
3 129 (5.37%) Grafana
4 88 (3.66%) Prometheus
5 39 (1.62%) Argo
6 26 (1.08%) Kibana
7 23 (0.96%) Progress Chef
8 22 (0.92%) Puppet
9 15 (0.62%) HP ALM
10 14 (0.58%) Single Sign-On
11 12 (0.50%) Control-M
12 8 (0.33%) Microsoft Intune
13 7 (0.29%) Kustomize
14 6 (0.25%) Dell DRAC
14 6 (0.25%) Istio
14 6 (0.25%) SCCM
15 5 (0.21%) HP Fortify
15 5 (0.21%) Packer
15 5 (0.21%) WMI
16 4 (0.17%) Rancher
Vendors
1 231 (9.62%) Microsoft
2 197 (8.20%) Oracle
3 96 (4.00%) Databricks
4 79 (3.29%) Salesforce
5 74 (3.08%) Google
6 65 (2.71%) IBM
7 64 (2.66%) ServiceNow
8 59 (2.46%) Red Hat
8 59 (2.46%) Talend
9 57 (2.37%) SAP
9 57 (2.37%) Splunk
10 49 (2.04%) VMware
11 45 (1.87%) Denodo
12 44 (1.83%) Informatica
13 41 (1.71%) Dynatrace
14 34 (1.42%) Cisco
14 34 (1.42%) MuleSoft
15 31 (1.29%) UiPath
16 23 (0.96%) OpenAI
17 22 (0.92%) Foundry