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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 46 47 54
Rank change year-on-year +1 +7 -3
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,209 1,371 1,572
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 4.30% 4.48% 3.64%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 5.07% 4.93% 4.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,428 957 1,032
10th Percentile £331 £314 £363
25th Percentile £403 £400 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £490 £513
Median % change year-on-year -3.06% -4.39% -5.96%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £619
90th Percentile £663 £715 £722
UK excluding London median daily rate £458 £466 £502
% change year-on-year -1.72% -7.08% -2.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 107 29 51
10th Percentile £36.19 £39.67 £50.00
25th Percentile £60.00 £44.51 £52.50
Median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +22.73% -4.35% -12.55%
75th Percentile £70.00 £67.00 £71.88
90th Percentile £75.00 £77.25 £85.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +22.73% -4.35% -8.00%

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 43,613 27,816 36,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.98% 90.91% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,139 17,565 23,448
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.18% -4.00% -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 2,612 1,364 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.49 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.00% -34.42% +8.91%

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 30 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 30 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 30 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 +4 1,878 £475 -2.56% 501
UK excluding London +3 1,093 £458 -1.72% 409
London +4 852 £500 - 185
Work from Home 0 626 £475 +2.15% 238
North of England +14 383 £454 +0.89% 93
Midlands +8 236 £450 +7.14% 61
West Midlands +32 219 £450 -10.00% 33
South East -35 194 £475 -5.00% 144
Yorkshire +5 159 £496 +1.79% 30
North West +4 151 £475 +6.26% 41
South West +13 107 £450 - 50
East of England +19 86 £495 +5.88% 44
North East +9 82 £425 +6.25% 22
Scotland -27 64 £440 -8.33% 15
Wales 0 33 £475 +18.75% 7
Northern Ireland +21 22 £475 +16.28% 5
East Midlands -44 17 £425 +54.55% 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
1 189 (8.56%) Confluence
2 47 (2.13%) Apache Airflow
2 47 (2.13%) Apache Spark
2 47 (2.13%) SAS
3 19 (0.86%) Apache
4 15 (0.68%) SharePoint
5 12 (0.54%) CMS
6 8 (0.36%) nginx
6 8 (0.36%) Tomcat
7 7 (0.32%) Appian
7 7 (0.32%) Camunda
8 6 (0.27%) WebLogic
9 4 (0.18%) Anypoint
9 4 (0.18%) Jupyter
10 3 (0.14%) Kentico
10 3 (0.14%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.14%) Oracle Workflow
11 2 (0.091%) Apache Pulsar
11 2 (0.091%) Mendix
11 2 (0.091%) Mule
Applications
1 31 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
2 17 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.54%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 12 (0.54%) Microsoft Project
4 9 (0.41%) MS Visio
5 5 (0.23%) Spreadsheet
6 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.14%) Simulink
8 1 (0.045%) Mingle
8 1 (0.045%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 22 (1.00%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (0.72%) Aladdin
3 12 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
4 11 (0.50%) Oracle EBS
4 11 (0.50%) Payment Gateway
5 8 (0.36%) Findur
6 6 (0.27%) SAP ERP
6 6 (0.27%) Shopify
7 5 (0.23%) BambooHR
7 5 (0.23%) Loan IQ
7 5 (0.23%) SAP MDG
8 4 (0.18%) Infor CloudSuite
8 4 (0.18%) Infor LN
8 4 (0.18%) Infor M3
9 3 (0.14%) Distributed Ledger
9 3 (0.14%) Maximo
9 3 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
9 3 (0.14%) Workday HCM
10 2 (0.091%) Advent Geneva
10 2 (0.091%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 639 (28.93%) Azure
2 637 (28.84%) AWS
3 378 (17.11%) GitHub
4 288 (13.04%) Azure DevOps
5 223 (10.10%) GitHub Actions
6 164 (7.42%) GCP
7 152 (6.88%) Serverless
8 101 (4.57%) AWS Lambda
9 95 (4.30%) Power Platform
10 92 (4.16%) Amazon S3
11 65 (2.94%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 63 (2.85%) OpenShift
13 57 (2.58%) Amazon ECS
14 49 (2.22%) Amazon EC2
15 48 (2.17%) AWS CloudFormation
16 47 (2.13%) dbt
17 41 (1.86%) Amazon EKS
17 41 (1.86%) Azure Data Factory
17 41 (1.86%) Snowflake
18 32 (1.45%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 24 (1.09%) HTTP
2 21 (0.95%) Firewall
3 16 (0.72%) SAN
4 13 (0.59%) Network Security
5 11 (0.50%) WAN
6 9 (0.41%) MPLS
6 9 (0.41%) VPN
7 8 (0.36%) 5G
8 7 (0.32%) 4G
8 7 (0.32%) BGP
8 7 (0.32%) TCP/IP
8 7 (0.32%) Wireshark
9 6 (0.27%) 2G
9 6 (0.27%) 3G
9 6 (0.27%) Ethernet
9 6 (0.27%) LAN
9 6 (0.27%) SD-WAN
9 6 (0.27%) SIGTRAN
9 6 (0.27%) SS7
9 6 (0.27%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 121 (5.48%) PostgreSQL
2 115 (5.21%) MongoDB
3 102 (4.62%) Data Warehouse
4 97 (4.39%) NoSQL
5 83 (3.76%) SQL Server
6 81 (3.67%) Relational Database
7 72 (3.26%) Power BI
8 46 (2.08%) DynamoDB
9 41 (1.86%) Metadata
10 37 (1.67%) Oracle Reports
11 36 (1.63%) Big Data
12 35 (1.58%) Pentaho
13 34 (1.54%) Amazon Athena
14 31 (1.40%) MySQL
15 29 (1.31%) Amazon RDS
16 28 (1.27%) Amazon Redshift
17 27 (1.22%) Redis
18 26 (1.18%) Data Lake
19 22 (1.00%) Tableau
20 21 (0.95%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 424 (19.19%) JIRA
2 401 (18.15%) Git
3 365 (16.52%) Jenkins
4 310 (14.03%) GitLab
5 291 (13.17%) Selenium
6 178 (8.06%) Postman
7 156 (7.06%) Cucumber
8 123 (5.57%) REST Assured
9 117 (5.30%) JUnit
10 108 (4.89%) Cypress.io
11 104 (4.71%) JMeter
12 65 (2.94%) WebDriver
13 64 (2.90%) Zephyr
14 56 (2.54%) SonarQube
15 50 (2.26%) Gatling
16 48 (2.17%) Gradle
17 42 (1.90%) Mockito
18 38 (1.72%) Maven
19 37 (1.67%) Bitbucket
20 29 (1.31%) SpecFlow
General
1 592 (26.80%) Social Skills
2 402 (18.20%) Finance
3 298 (13.49%) Public Sector
4 270 (12.22%) Analytical Skills
5 191 (8.65%) Banking
6 57 (2.58%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 44 (1.99%) Documentation Skills
8 41 (1.86%) Investment Banking
9 35 (1.58%) Front Office
10 29 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 29 (1.31%) Telecoms
11 25 (1.13%) Military
12 24 (1.09%) Financial Institution
13 21 (0.95%) Retail
14 18 (0.81%) Aerospace
15 17 (0.77%) Legal
15 17 (0.77%) Manufacturing
15 17 (0.77%) Organisational Skills
16 14 (0.63%) Back Office
16 14 (0.63%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 456 (20.64%) Developer
2 347 (15.71%) Senior
3 236 (10.68%) Lead
4 232 (10.50%) Test Engineer
5 230 (10.41%) Tester
6 144 (6.52%) Java Developer
7 143 (6.47%) Data Engineer
8 116 (5.25%) Analyst
9 111 (5.02%) Software Engineer
10 103 (4.66%) DevOps Engineer
11 102 (4.62%) Architect
12 98 (4.44%) Test Automation Engineer
13 91 (4.12%) Automation Tester
14 89 (4.03%) Senior Developer
15 88 (3.98%) Test Leader
16 87 (3.94%) QA Engineer
17 74 (3.35%) Test Analyst
18 62 (2.81%) Full-Stack Developer
19 60 (2.72%) Automation Engineer
20 56 (2.54%) Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 265 (12.00%) Playwright
2 264 (11.95%) REST
3 200 (9.05%) React
4 177 (8.01%) Spring
5 166 (7.51%) RESTful
6 156 (7.06%) Kafka
7 144 (6.52%) Spring Boot
8 143 (6.47%) .NET
9 114 (5.16%) Node.js
10 91 (4.12%) AngularJS
11 77 (3.49%) HTML
12 68 (3.08%) CSS
13 63 (2.85%) pytest
14 61 (2.76%) OAuth
15 48 (2.17%) Jest
16 46 (2.08%) Gherkin
17 45 (2.04%) Swagger
18 44 (1.99%) JSON
19 40 (1.81%) GraphQL
19 40 (1.81%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 271 (12.27%) Cloud Native
2 165 (7.47%) Product Ownership
3 130 (5.89%) Distributed Systems
4 73 (3.30%) Enterprise Software
5 60 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
6 52 (2.35%) Data Protection Act
7 46 (2.08%) Self-Motivation
8 45 (2.04%) Mobile App
9 43 (1.95%) Virtual Team
10 42 (1.90%) Onboarding
11 32 (1.45%) Distributed Architecture
12 28 (1.27%) Management Information System
12 28 (1.27%) Security Posture
13 26 (1.18%) NHS
14 24 (1.09%) AI Agents
14 24 (1.09%) Embedded Systems
15 22 (1.00%) Greenfield Project
16 21 (0.95%) Data Centre
17 20 (0.91%) Algorithms
18 19 (0.86%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 130 (5.89%) Linux
2 79 (3.58%) Windows
3 66 (2.99%) Unix
4 43 (1.95%) Android
5 41 (1.86%) Apple iOS
6 24 (1.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 18 (0.81%) Windows Server
8 12 (0.54%) Mac OS X
9 10 (0.45%) Mac OS
9 10 (0.45%) Solaris
10 8 (0.36%) Windows Server 2008
11 7 (0.32%) Windows Server 2019
12 6 (0.27%) Windows Server 2016
13 4 (0.18%) Embedded Linux
13 4 (0.18%) Ubuntu
14 3 (0.14%) AIX
15 2 (0.091%) CentOS
15 2 (0.091%) Kali Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,233 (55.82%) CI/CD
2 1,026 (46.45%) Agile
3 795 (35.99%) DevOps
4 395 (17.88%) Problem-Solving
5 370 (16.75%) Microservices
6 360 (16.30%) Continuous Improvement
7 339 (15.35%) Scrum
8 334 (15.12%) Test Strategy
9 321 (14.53%) Validation
10 318 (14.40%) Software Engineering
11 314 (14.21%) Infrastructure as Code
12 277 (12.54%) Containerisation
13 271 (12.27%) Observability
14 270 (12.22%) TDD
15 269 (12.18%) AI
16 219 (9.91%) End-to-End Testing
17 214 (9.69%) ETL
17 214 (9.69%) User Acceptance Testing
18 212 (9.60%) API Testing
18 212 (9.60%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 568 (25.71%) Python
2 559 (25.31%) Java
3 503 (22.77%) SQL
4 287 (12.99%) JavaScript
5 248 (11.23%) TypeScript
6 205 (9.28%) C#
7 74 (3.35%) Bash
8 72 (3.26%) PowerShell
9 52 (2.35%) C++
10 49 (2.22%) Kotlin
11 37 (1.67%) PL/SQL
11 37 (1.67%) Scala
12 33 (1.49%) Apex Code
12 33 (1.49%) Bicep
13 32 (1.45%) C
13 32 (1.45%) Go
14 22 (1.00%) Ruby
14 22 (1.00%) Swift
15 17 (0.77%) Groovy
16 16 (0.72%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 691 (31.28%) Security Cleared
2 574 (25.98%) SC Cleared
3 103 (4.66%) ISTQB
4 101 (4.57%) BPSS Clearance
4 101 (4.57%) Degree
5 73 (3.30%) DV Cleared
6 50 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
7 26 (1.18%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 21 (0.95%) AWS Certification
9 17 (0.77%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
10 16 (0.72%) Master's Degree
11 13 (0.59%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
12 12 (0.54%) Cisco Certification
13 11 (0.50%) SAFe Agilist
14 10 (0.45%) CCNP
15 9 (0.41%) DBS Check
16 8 (0.36%) Azure Certification
16 8 (0.36%) CISSP
17 5 (0.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
17 5 (0.23%) CCIE
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (22.09%) QA
2 172 (7.79%) Accessibility
3 146 (6.61%) Data Quality
4 72 (3.26%) WCAG
5 39 (1.77%) GDPR
6 15 (0.68%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 15 (0.68%) SLA
7 13 (0.59%) ISO 20022
8 12 (0.54%) NCSC
9 10 (0.45%) Def Stans
10 9 (0.41%) NIST
11 7 (0.32%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 6 (0.27%) PCI DSS
13 5 (0.23%) FATCA
13 5 (0.23%) SEPA
14 4 (0.18%) GRC
14 4 (0.18%) HL7
14 4 (0.18%) MiFID
14 4 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 4 (0.18%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 377 (17.07%) Docker
2 30 (1.36%) VMware Infrastructure
3 19 (0.86%) Active Directory
4 14 (0.63%) Firmware
5 13 (0.59%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.36%) VMware ESXi
7 6 (0.27%) Oracle RAC
8 4 (0.18%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
8 4 (0.18%) Virtual Desktop
9 2 (0.091%) Hyper-V
9 2 (0.091%) SRDF
10 1 (0.045%) Virtual Servers
10 1 (0.045%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 381 (17.25%) Kubernetes
2 278 (12.58%) Terraform
3 111 (5.02%) Ansible
4 107 (4.84%) Grafana
5 91 (4.12%) Prometheus
6 36 (1.63%) Argo
7 20 (0.91%) HP ALM
8 14 (0.63%) Puppet
9 13 (0.59%) Kibana
10 11 (0.50%) HP Quality Center
10 11 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
11 10 (0.45%) Dell DRAC
12 8 (0.36%) Kustomize
12 8 (0.36%) NetBackup
13 6 (0.27%) Forefront Identity Manager
13 6 (0.27%) NetIQ Identity Manager
13 6 (0.27%) Oracle RMAN
14 5 (0.23%) Istio
14 5 (0.23%) Progress Chef
15 4 (0.18%) Rancher
Vendors
1 187 (8.47%) Microsoft
2 172 (7.79%) Oracle
3 99 (4.48%) Salesforce
4 65 (2.94%) Databricks
5 64 (2.90%) Talend
6 63 (2.85%) Google
7 58 (2.63%) Red Hat
8 57 (2.58%) ServiceNow
8 57 (2.58%) Splunk
9 45 (2.04%) Denodo
10 38 (1.72%) IBM
11 36 (1.63%) Informatica
12 35 (1.58%) SAP
13 33 (1.49%) VMware
14 30 (1.36%) UiPath
15 28 (1.27%) Dynatrace
16 23 (1.04%) HP
16 23 (1.04%) MuleSoft
17 21 (0.95%) Cisco
18 16 (0.72%) Blue Prism