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

6 months to
23 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 48 52
Rank change year-on-year +2 +4 -2
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,158 1,339 1,578
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.25% 4.47% 3.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.01% 4.91% 4.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,390 937 1,033
10th Percentile £337 £320 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £513
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -4.39% -6.82%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £625
90th Percentile £664 £725 £719
UK excluding London median daily rate £459 £466 £504
% change year-on-year -1.55% -7.44% -3.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 109 27 52
10th Percentile £36.26 £38.50 £50.13
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £50.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +35.00% -13.04% -12.88%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.51 £72.03
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.31 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £52.50 £57.50
% change year-on-year +28.57% -8.70% -9.36%

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 43,108 27,270 37,060
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.89% 91.01% 84.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,889 17,271 23,587
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £502 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.09% -4.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £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 2,584 1,289 2,614
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.70
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.87 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £55.00 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £72.50 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +76.94% -34.02% +17.29%

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 23 June 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 23 June 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 23 June 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 +5 1,837 £475 -3.06% 508
UK excluding London -1 1,064 £459 -1.55% 418
London +3 835 £500 - 180
Work from Home 0 616 £475 - 236
North of England +13 367 £458 +1.67% 99
Midlands +10 232 £450 +6.51% 59
West Midlands +27 213 £450 -10.00% 31
South East -29 194 £475 -5.00% 136
North West +1 148 £475 +6.26% 47
Yorkshire +3 147 £500 +2.56% 28
South West +14 106 £450 - 44
East of England +19 84 £495 +5.88% 52
North East +7 80 £425 +6.25% 25
Scotland -27 61 £440 -8.33% 21
Wales -2 32 £475 +16.92% 6
Northern Ireland +19 21 £475 +16.28% 15
East Midlands -41 19 £418 +51.82% 28
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
1 183 (8.48%) Confluence
2 48 (2.22%) SAS
3 46 (2.13%) Apache Airflow
4 45 (2.09%) Apache Spark
5 19 (0.88%) Apache
6 14 (0.65%) SharePoint
7 12 (0.56%) CMS
8 8 (0.37%) Appian
8 8 (0.37%) Camunda
8 8 (0.37%) nginx
8 8 (0.37%) Tomcat
9 6 (0.28%) WebLogic
10 4 (0.19%) Anypoint
10 4 (0.19%) Jupyter
11 3 (0.14%) Kentico
11 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.14%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.093%) Apache Pulsar
12 2 (0.093%) Mendix
12 2 (0.093%) Mule
Applications
1 31 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.79%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.56%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.56%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.42%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
6 3 (0.14%) Simulink
7 2 (0.093%) Chatbot
8 1 (0.046%) Mingle
8 1 (0.046%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 20 (0.93%) Dynamics CRM
2 17 (0.79%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.56%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.51%) Payment Gateway
5 9 (0.42%) Oracle EBS
6 8 (0.37%) Findur
7 6 (0.28%) SAP ERP
7 6 (0.28%) Shopify
8 5 (0.23%) BambooHR
8 5 (0.23%) Loan IQ
8 5 (0.23%) SAP MDG
9 4 (0.19%) Infor CloudSuite
9 4 (0.19%) Infor LN
9 4 (0.19%) Infor M3
10 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
10 3 (0.14%) Maximo
10 3 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
10 3 (0.14%) Workday HCM
11 2 (0.093%) Advent Geneva
11 2 (0.093%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 624 (28.92%) Azure
2 620 (28.73%) AWS
3 359 (16.64%) GitHub
4 282 (13.07%) Azure DevOps
5 217 (10.06%) GitHub Actions
6 158 (7.32%) GCP
7 150 (6.95%) Serverless
8 101 (4.68%) AWS Lambda
9 92 (4.26%) Amazon S3
9 92 (4.26%) Power Platform
10 67 (3.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 64 (2.97%) OpenShift
12 57 (2.64%) Amazon ECS
13 50 (2.32%) Amazon EC2
14 46 (2.13%) AWS CloudFormation
15 44 (2.04%) Azure Data Factory
15 44 (2.04%) dbt
16 41 (1.90%) Snowflake
17 40 (1.85%) Amazon EKS
18 31 (1.44%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 25 (1.16%) HTTP
2 22 (1.02%) Firewall
3 16 (0.74%) SAN
4 11 (0.51%) Network Security
4 11 (0.51%) WAN
5 9 (0.42%) MPLS
5 9 (0.42%) VPN
6 8 (0.37%) TCP/IP
7 7 (0.32%) 5G
7 7 (0.32%) BGP
7 7 (0.32%) Wireshark
8 6 (0.28%) 4G
8 6 (0.28%) Ethernet
8 6 (0.28%) LAN
8 6 (0.28%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.28%) Wi-Fi
9 5 (0.23%) 3G
9 5 (0.23%) Diameter Protocol
9 5 (0.23%) Multicast
9 5 (0.23%) SS7
Database & Business Intelligence
1 118 (5.47%) PostgreSQL
2 111 (5.14%) MongoDB
3 100 (4.63%) Data Warehouse
4 94 (4.36%) NoSQL
5 79 (3.66%) Relational Database
6 73 (3.38%) SQL Server
7 69 (3.20%) Power BI
8 47 (2.18%) DynamoDB
9 41 (1.90%) Metadata
10 37 (1.71%) Oracle Reports
11 36 (1.67%) Big Data
11 36 (1.67%) Pentaho
12 33 (1.53%) Amazon Athena
13 30 (1.39%) MySQL
14 29 (1.34%) Amazon RDS
14 29 (1.34%) Redis
15 27 (1.25%) Amazon Redshift
15 27 (1.25%) Data Lake
16 22 (1.02%) BigQuery
16 22 (1.02%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 413 (19.14%) JIRA
2 390 (18.07%) Git
3 352 (16.31%) Jenkins
4 309 (14.32%) GitLab
5 278 (12.88%) Selenium
6 173 (8.02%) Postman
7 153 (7.09%) Cucumber
8 115 (5.33%) REST Assured
9 110 (5.10%) JUnit
10 104 (4.82%) JMeter
11 103 (4.77%) Cypress.io
12 61 (2.83%) WebDriver
13 59 (2.73%) Zephyr
14 58 (2.69%) SonarQube
15 47 (2.18%) Gradle
16 46 (2.13%) Gatling
17 40 (1.85%) Mockito
18 36 (1.67%) Bitbucket
18 36 (1.67%) Maven
19 30 (1.39%) SpecFlow
General
1 573 (26.55%) Social Skills
2 386 (17.89%) Finance
3 299 (13.86%) Public Sector
4 265 (12.28%) Analytical Skills
5 184 (8.53%) Banking
6 54 (2.50%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 40 (1.85%) Documentation Skills
8 39 (1.81%) Investment Banking
9 35 (1.62%) Front Office
10 28 (1.30%) Telecoms
11 27 (1.25%) Influencing Skills
12 26 (1.20%) Military
13 22 (1.02%) Financial Institution
14 20 (0.93%) Retail
15 18 (0.83%) Aerospace
16 17 (0.79%) Legal
16 17 (0.79%) Manufacturing
16 17 (0.79%) Organisational Skills
17 15 (0.70%) Presentation Skills
18 14 (0.65%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 435 (20.16%) Developer
2 342 (15.85%) Senior
3 234 (10.84%) Lead
4 231 (10.70%) Test Engineer
5 229 (10.61%) Tester
6 142 (6.58%) Data Engineer
7 132 (6.12%) Java Developer
8 113 (5.24%) Analyst
9 109 (5.05%) Software Engineer
10 101 (4.68%) Architect
10 101 (4.68%) DevOps Engineer
11 96 (4.45%) Test Automation Engineer
12 91 (4.22%) Automation Tester
13 85 (3.94%) Senior Developer
14 84 (3.89%) Test Leader
15 82 (3.80%) QA Engineer
16 70 (3.24%) Test Analyst
17 59 (2.73%) Full-Stack Developer
18 57 (2.64%) Automation Engineer
19 56 (2.59%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 257 (11.91%) REST
2 250 (11.58%) Playwright
3 198 (9.18%) React
4 166 (7.69%) RESTful
5 165 (7.65%) Spring
6 151 (7.00%) Kafka
7 136 (6.30%) Spring Boot
8 126 (5.84%) .NET
9 114 (5.28%) Node.js
10 89 (4.12%) AngularJS
11 73 (3.38%) HTML
12 63 (2.92%) CSS
12 63 (2.92%) pytest
13 62 (2.87%) OAuth
14 50 (2.32%) Jest
15 46 (2.13%) Swagger
16 44 (2.04%) Gherkin
17 43 (1.99%) JSON
18 40 (1.85%) OAuth2
19 39 (1.81%) Quarkus
Miscellaneous
1 261 (12.09%) Cloud Native
2 165 (7.65%) Product Ownership
3 127 (5.89%) Distributed Systems
4 64 (2.97%) Enterprise Software
5 60 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
6 54 (2.50%) Data Protection Act
7 46 (2.13%) Mobile App
8 43 (1.99%) Self-Motivation
9 42 (1.95%) Virtual Team
10 40 (1.85%) Onboarding
11 32 (1.48%) Distributed Architecture
12 28 (1.30%) Management Information System
13 27 (1.25%) Security Posture
14 26 (1.20%) NHS
15 24 (1.11%) AI Agents
16 23 (1.07%) Embedded Systems
16 23 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
17 21 (0.97%) Algorithms
17 21 (0.97%) Data Centre
18 19 (0.88%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 128 (5.93%) Linux
2 80 (3.71%) Windows
3 62 (2.87%) Unix
4 44 (2.04%) Android
5 42 (1.95%) Apple iOS
6 24 (1.11%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 19 (0.88%) Windows Server
8 12 (0.56%) Mac OS X
9 10 (0.46%) Mac OS
9 10 (0.46%) Solaris
10 8 (0.37%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.28%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.19%) Embedded Linux
13 4 (0.19%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.14%) AIX
15 2 (0.093%) CentOS
15 2 (0.093%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,194 (55.33%) CI/CD
2 1,004 (46.52%) Agile
3 771 (35.73%) DevOps
4 389 (18.03%) Problem-Solving
5 356 (16.50%) Microservices
6 345 (15.99%) Continuous Improvement
7 327 (15.15%) Scrum
8 321 (14.87%) Test Strategy
9 315 (14.60%) Validation
10 310 (14.37%) Software Engineering
11 303 (14.04%) Infrastructure as Code
12 270 (12.51%) Observability
13 268 (12.42%) Containerisation
14 259 (12.00%) AI
15 247 (11.45%) TDD
16 212 (9.82%) End-to-End Testing
16 212 (9.82%) ETL
17 209 (9.68%) User Acceptance Testing
18 204 (9.45%) SDLC
18 204 (9.45%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 555 (25.72%) Python
2 538 (24.93%) Java
3 489 (22.66%) SQL
4 286 (13.25%) JavaScript
5 241 (11.17%) TypeScript
6 196 (9.08%) C#
7 72 (3.34%) Bash
8 67 (3.10%) PowerShell
9 52 (2.41%) C++
10 48 (2.22%) Kotlin
11 37 (1.71%) PL/SQL
12 36 (1.67%) Scala
13 34 (1.58%) Apex Code
14 32 (1.48%) Go
15 31 (1.44%) Bicep
15 31 (1.44%) C
16 22 (1.02%) Swift
17 20 (0.93%) Ruby
18 17 (0.79%) Groovy
19 15 (0.70%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 679 (31.46%) Security Cleared
2 561 (26.00%) SC Cleared
3 102 (4.73%) ISTQB
4 98 (4.54%) BPSS Clearance
5 94 (4.36%) Degree
6 72 (3.34%) DV Cleared
7 46 (2.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 25 (1.16%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 21 (0.97%) AWS Certification
10 17 (0.79%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
11 16 (0.74%) Master's Degree
12 14 (0.65%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
13 12 (0.56%) Cisco Certification
14 11 (0.51%) SAFe Agilist
15 10 (0.46%) CCNP
16 9 (0.42%) CISSP
16 9 (0.42%) DBS Check
17 8 (0.37%) Azure Certification
18 5 (0.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
18 5 (0.23%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 473 (21.92%) QA
2 163 (7.55%) Accessibility
3 145 (6.72%) Data Quality
4 69 (3.20%) WCAG
5 36 (1.67%) GDPR
6 15 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.70%) SLA
7 13 (0.60%) NCSC
8 12 (0.56%) ISO 20022
9 11 (0.51%) NIST
10 10 (0.46%) Def Stans
11 7 (0.32%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.28%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.23%) FATCA
14 4 (0.19%) HL7
14 4 (0.19%) MiFID
14 4 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.19%) SEPA
14 4 (0.19%) Software Quality Assurance
15 3 (0.14%) SOC 2
System Software
1 362 (16.77%) Docker
2 30 (1.39%) VMware Infrastructure
3 17 (0.79%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.65%) Firmware
5 12 (0.56%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.37%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.28%) Oracle RAC
8 4 (0.19%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
8 4 (0.19%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.093%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.093%) SRDF
10 1 (0.046%) Virtual Servers
10 1 (0.046%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 365 (16.91%) Kubernetes
2 267 (12.37%) Terraform
3 105 (4.87%) Ansible
4 104 (4.82%) Grafana
5 93 (4.31%) Prometheus
6 37 (1.71%) Argo
7 19 (0.88%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.65%) Puppet
9 13 (0.60%) Kibana
10 10 (0.46%) Dell DRAC
10 10 (0.46%) HP Quality Center
10 10 (0.46%) Single Sign-On
11 8 (0.37%) Kustomize
11 8 (0.37%) NetBackup
12 6 (0.28%) Forefront Identity Manager
12 6 (0.28%) NetIQ Identity Manager
12 6 (0.28%) Oracle RMAN
13 5 (0.23%) Istio
13 5 (0.23%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.19%) Nmap
Vendors
1 178 (8.25%) Microsoft
2 170 (7.88%) Oracle
3 99 (4.59%) Salesforce
4 66 (3.06%) Databricks
5 65 (3.01%) Talend
6 64 (2.97%) Google
7 60 (2.78%) Red Hat
8 59 (2.73%) ServiceNow
9 56 (2.59%) Splunk
10 46 (2.13%) Denodo
11 37 (1.71%) IBM
12 35 (1.62%) Informatica
12 35 (1.62%) SAP
13 33 (1.53%) VMware
14 29 (1.34%) Dynatrace
14 29 (1.34%) UiPath
15 24 (1.11%) MuleSoft
16 22 (1.02%) HP
17 21 (0.97%) Cisco
18 17 (0.79%) OpenAI