Test Engineer Contract Job Trends

Test Engineer
UK

The median Test Engineer daily rate in the UK is £440, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2026.

The table below compares current contractor rates and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 266 347 343
Rank change year-on-year +81 -4 +17
Contract jobs requiring a Test Engineer 540 216 236
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.99% 0.66% 0.62%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.07% 0.72% 0.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 206 131 150
10th Percentile £300 £270 £325
25th Percentile £350 £313 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £440 £400 £475
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -15.79% +3.54%
75th Percentile £536 £475 £566
90th Percentile £588 £538 £600
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £375 £485
% change year-on-year +13.33% -22.68% +7.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 128 24 16
10th Percentile £28.23 £29.85 £25.00
25th Percentile £33.00 £35.69 £38.40
Median hourly rate £50.00 £50.00 £48.75
Median % change year-on-year - +2.56% -7.14%
75th Percentile £65.71 £57.81 £72.50
90th Percentile £82.50 £62.50 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £50.00 £50.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year - +17.65% -19.05%

All Contract IT Job Roles
UK

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract IT job vacancies. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of contract jobs in our overall sample.

Contract vacancies in the UK with a recognized job title 50,473 30,002 35,564
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.35% 91.08% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,930 18,956 21,934
10th Percentile £328 £278 £300
25th Percentile £425 £400 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -0.94%
75th Percentile £626 £621 £638
90th Percentile £727 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,805 1,570 1,684
10th Percentile £14.59 £13.75 £14.73
25th Percentile £20.31 £17.30 £20.30
Median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +68.99% -41.51% -2.01%
75th Percentile £67.84 £52.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £25.15 £45.00
% change year-on-year +68.99% -44.11% +5.88%

Test Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings featuring 'Test Engineer' in the job title relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Test Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK

Test Engineer
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Test Engineer
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Engineer over the 6 months to 17 September 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Test Engineer in the UK

Test Engineer
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for Test Engineer job vacancies in the UK

Test Engineer
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Engineer over the 6 months to 17 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Engineer in the UK

Test Engineer
Top 17 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 Engineer within the UK over the 6 months to 17 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 +60 466 £435 +8.75% 474
UK excluding London +59 408 £425 +13.33% 419
North of England -10 108 £368 -15.47% 91
London -65 87 £458 +14.38% 79
Work from Home -30 85 £400 - 177
South West +21 73 £550 +4.76% 63
East of England +21 71 £350 -6.67% 76
Midlands -5 65 £440 +9.25% 62
South East -52 61 £430 +45.76% 86
North West -5 51 £475 +7.34% 57
West Midlands -15 50 £488 - 45
North East -10 38 £325 -26.97% 11
Scotland +4 31 £525 +707.69% 37
Yorkshire -42 22 £400 -6.92% 23
East Midlands -1 15 £300 -16.67% 17
Wales -16 5 £300 -6.71% 6
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 7

Test Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities

For the 6 months to 17 September 2026, Test Engineer contract job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads featuring Test Engineer in the job title.

1 232 (42.96%) Test Automation
2 165 (30.56%) Security Cleared
3 146 (27.04%) CI/CD
4 120 (22.22%) SC Cleared
5 114 (21.11%) Validation
6 107 (19.81%) Agile
7 99 (18.33%) QA
8 85 (15.74%) Test Strategy
9 84 (15.56%) DevOps
9 84 (15.56%) Software Testing
10 83 (15.37%) Java
11 80 (14.81%) Playwright
12 78 (14.44%) API Testing
13 77 (14.26%) Python
14 72 (13.33%) Test Scripting
15 71 (13.15%) Selenium
16 69 (12.78%) AWS
17 66 (12.22%) Performance Testing
18 65 (12.04%) Azure
19 61 (11.30%) End-to-End Testing
20 56 (10.37%) Non-Functional Testing
21 55 (10.19%) BDD
21 55 (10.19%) Continuous Improvement
21 55 (10.19%) GitHub
21 55 (10.19%) Problem-Solving
22 54 (10.00%) Jenkins
23 52 (9.63%) Cucumber
24 48 (8.89%) Postman
25 46 (8.52%) GitLab
25 46 (8.52%) Integration Testing

Test Engineer Skill Set
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 9 (1.67%) Confluence
2 6 (1.11%) Apache
2 6 (1.11%) Apache Airflow
2 6 (1.11%) Apache Spark
2 6 (1.11%) Jupyter
3 5 (0.93%) SharePoint
4 4 (0.74%) SAS
5 2 (0.37%) Mule
5 2 (0.37%) Mule ESB
5 2 (0.37%) Oracle SOA Suite
6 1 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 5 (0.93%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.19%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.19%) Simulink
Business Applications
1 8 (1.48%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.56%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.37%) Lorenzo
4 1 (0.19%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.19%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.19%) Findur
4 1 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
4 1 (0.19%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 69 (12.78%) AWS
2 65 (12.04%) Azure
3 55 (10.19%) GitHub
4 33 (6.11%) Azure DevOps
5 30 (5.56%) GCP
6 28 (5.19%) GitHub Actions
7 10 (1.85%) Power Platform
8 8 (1.48%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 7 (1.30%) Amazon EMR
10 6 (1.11%) AWS Lambda
10 6 (1.11%) Serverless
11 5 (0.93%) Amazon S3
11 5 (0.93%) OpenShift
11 5 (0.93%) PowerApps
12 4 (0.74%) Amazon EC2
12 4 (0.74%) Amazon SQS
12 4 (0.74%) BrowserStack
12 4 (0.74%) GitHub Copilot
13 3 (0.56%) Amazon ECR
13 3 (0.56%) Amazon EventBridge
Communications & Networking
1 13 (2.41%) DNS
2 12 (2.22%) Firewall
2 12 (2.22%) LAN
3 9 (1.67%) DHCP
4 8 (1.48%) TCP/IP
5 7 (1.30%) VLAN
5 7 (1.30%) WAN
5 7 (1.30%) Wi-Fi
6 5 (0.93%) HTTP
6 5 (0.93%) SD-WAN
7 4 (0.74%) Wireshark
8 3 (0.56%) 4G
8 3 (0.56%) Broadband
8 3 (0.56%) LTE
8 3 (0.56%) MPLS
8 3 (0.56%) VPN
9 2 (0.37%) 3G
9 2 (0.37%) Internet
9 2 (0.37%) Network Security
9 2 (0.37%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 19 (3.52%) MongoDB
2 9 (1.67%) Big Data
3 6 (1.11%) Amazon Athena
3 6 (1.11%) Data Warehouse
3 6 (1.11%) Relational Database
3 6 (1.11%) Tableau
4 5 (0.93%) MySQL
4 5 (0.93%) Neo4j
4 5 (0.93%) PostgreSQL
4 5 (0.93%) Power BI
5 4 (0.74%) DynamoDB
5 4 (0.74%) Electronic Patient Records
6 3 (0.56%) Data Lake
7 2 (0.37%) NoSQL
7 2 (0.37%) Oracle Database
7 2 (0.37%) Oracle Reports
8 1 (0.19%) BigQuery
8 1 (0.19%) PowerCenter
8 1 (0.19%) Redis
8 1 (0.19%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 71 (13.15%) Selenium
2 54 (10.00%) Jenkins
3 52 (9.63%) Cucumber
4 48 (8.89%) Postman
5 46 (8.52%) GitLab
6 45 (8.33%) JMeter
7 38 (7.04%) JIRA
7 38 (7.04%) REST Assured
8 31 (5.74%) Gatling
9 25 (4.63%) Git
10 22 (4.07%) Cypress.io
11 20 (3.70%) LabVIEW
12 14 (2.59%) LoadRunner
13 12 (2.22%) WebDriver
14 10 (1.85%) JUnit
14 10 (1.85%) Serenity BDD
14 10 (1.85%) SpecFlow
14 10 (1.85%) Zephyr
15 8 (1.48%) Robot Framework
16 7 (1.30%) TestNG
General
1 76 (14.07%) Social Skills
2 54 (10.00%) Public Sector
3 41 (7.59%) Aerospace
3 41 (7.59%) Analytical Skills
3 41 (7.59%) Electronics
4 31 (5.74%) Finance
5 29 (5.37%) Manufacturing
6 26 (4.81%) Automotive
7 19 (3.52%) Banking
8 13 (2.41%) Telecoms
9 12 (2.22%) Military
10 5 (0.93%) Law
11 3 (0.56%) Documentation Skills
11 3 (0.56%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.56%) Investment Banking
11 3 (0.56%) Marketing
12 2 (0.37%) Financial Institution
12 2 (0.37%) German Language
13 1 (0.19%) Legal
13 1 (0.19%) Police
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 80 (14.81%) Playwright
2 38 (7.04%) REST
3 33 (6.11%) Kafka
4 19 (3.52%) Terraform
5 17 (3.15%) RESTful
6 15 (2.78%) Spring Boot
7 14 (2.59%) .NET
7 14 (2.59%) Spring
8 13 (2.41%) pytest
9 12 (2.22%) React
10 11 (2.04%) SOAP
11 10 (1.85%) Node.js
12 7 (1.30%) Gherkin
12 7 (1.30%) Web Services
13 6 (1.11%) ADO
13 6 (1.11%) HTML
13 6 (1.11%) Model Context Protocol
13 6 (1.11%) OpenTelemetry
14 5 (0.93%) Spring Cloud
15 4 (0.74%) WebdriverIO
Miscellaneous
1 20 (3.70%) Product Ownership
2 19 (3.52%) Enterprise Software
3 18 (3.33%) Distributed Systems
4 15 (2.78%) Cloud Native
5 12 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
6 8 (1.48%) AI Agents
7 7 (1.30%) NHS
8 6 (1.11%) Onboarding
8 6 (1.11%) SWIFT Messaging Network
9 5 (0.93%) Distributed Architecture
9 5 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
9 5 (0.93%) Virtual Team
10 4 (0.74%) Analogue Electronics
11 3 (0.56%) Data Centre
11 3 (0.56%) Embedded Systems
11 3 (0.56%) IoT
11 3 (0.56%) Linux Command Line
12 2 (0.37%) Driving Licence
12 2 (0.37%) Fibre Optics
12 2 (0.37%) Private Cloud
Operating Systems
1 17 (3.15%) Linux
2 16 (2.96%) Windows
3 11 (2.04%) Unix
4 4 (0.74%) Windows Server
5 2 (0.37%) Embedded Linux
5 2 (0.37%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.19%) Android
6 1 (0.19%) Apple iOS
6 1 (0.19%) CentOS
6 1 (0.19%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.19%) Ubuntu
6 1 (0.19%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 232 (42.96%) Test Automation
2 146 (27.04%) CI/CD
3 114 (21.11%) Validation
4 107 (19.81%) Agile
5 85 (15.74%) Test Strategy
6 84 (15.56%) DevOps
6 84 (15.56%) Software Testing
7 78 (14.44%) API Testing
8 72 (13.33%) Test Scripting
9 66 (12.22%) Performance Testing
10 61 (11.30%) End-to-End Testing
11 56 (10.37%) Non-Functional Testing
12 55 (10.19%) BDD
12 55 (10.19%) Continuous Improvement
12 55 (10.19%) Problem-Solving
13 46 (8.52%) Integration Testing
14 44 (8.15%) Regression Testing
15 41 (7.59%) User Acceptance Testing
16 40 (7.41%) Microservices
17 39 (7.22%) Defect Management
Programming Languages
1 83 (15.37%) Java
2 77 (14.26%) Python
3 46 (8.52%) JavaScript
4 42 (7.78%) SQL
5 26 (4.81%) TypeScript
6 24 (4.44%) C#
7 7 (1.30%) Apex Code
7 7 (1.30%) Bash
8 6 (1.11%) Kotlin
9 5 (0.93%) Ruby
10 4 (0.74%) C++
10 4 (0.74%) MATLAB
11 3 (0.56%) C
11 3 (0.56%) Perl
11 3 (0.56%) PowerShell
11 3 (0.56%) Scala
12 2 (0.37%) Cypher
12 2 (0.37%) Groovy
12 2 (0.37%) R
13 1 (0.19%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 165 (30.56%) Security Cleared
2 120 (22.22%) SC Cleared
3 26 (4.81%) DV Cleared
4 22 (4.07%) ISTQB
5 16 (2.96%) Degree
6 12 (2.22%) HNC
7 10 (1.85%) BPSS Clearance
8 8 (1.48%) HND
8 8 (1.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 3 (0.56%) Cisco Certification
9 3 (0.56%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (0.56%) ISEB
10 2 (0.37%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.37%) CCNA
10 2 (0.37%) CCNP
11 1 (0.19%) AWS Certification
11 1 (0.19%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.19%) MOS
11 1 (0.19%) Six Sigma Black Belt
11 1 (0.19%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (18.33%) QA
2 31 (5.74%) Accessibility
3 13 (2.41%) Data Quality
4 5 (0.93%) WCAG
5 4 (0.74%) ISO 20022
6 3 (0.56%) Actionable Recommendations
7 2 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.37%) NIST
7 2 (0.37%) SEPA
7 2 (0.37%) Software Quality Assurance
8 1 (0.19%) GDPR
8 1 (0.19%) IEC 62304
8 1 (0.19%) ISO 13485
8 1 (0.19%) ISO 14001
8 1 (0.19%) ISO 15022
8 1 (0.19%) ISO 9001
8 1 (0.19%) MIL-STD-1553
8 1 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 39 (7.22%) Docker
2 9 (1.67%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.74%) Virtual Desktop
3 4 (0.74%) vSphere
4 3 (0.56%) Active Directory
4 3 (0.56%) Firmware
4 3 (0.56%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 35 (6.48%) Kubernetes
2 24 (4.44%) Grafana
3 11 (2.04%) Prometheus
4 8 (1.48%) Ansible
5 7 (1.30%) Kibana
6 3 (0.56%) HP ALM
7 2 (0.37%) Argo
7 2 (0.37%) Control-M
7 2 (0.37%) HP Fortify
7 2 (0.37%) HP Quality Center
7 2 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
8 1 (0.19%) Iperf
Vendors
1 27 (5.00%) Salesforce
2 21 (3.89%) Splunk
3 15 (2.78%) Dynatrace
3 15 (2.78%) Microsoft
4 12 (2.22%) IBM
5 10 (1.85%) EMC
6 9 (1.67%) Google
6 9 (1.67%) Oracle
6 9 (1.67%) VMware
7 8 (1.48%) Conga
7 8 (1.48%) GoCardless
8 6 (1.11%) Cisco
8 6 (1.11%) Databricks
8 6 (1.11%) New Relic
9 4 (0.74%) AppDynamics
9 4 (0.74%) Informatica
10 3 (0.56%) HP
10 3 (0.56%) Juniper
10 3 (0.56%) SAP
11 2 (0.37%) Citrix