Test Engineer Contract Job Trends

Test Engineer
UK

The median Test Engineer daily rate in the UK is £431, according to job vacancies posted in the 6 months leading up to 9 July 2026.

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

6 months to
9 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 255 334 343
Rank change year-on-year +79 +9 +40
Contract jobs requiring a Test Engineer 494 212 269
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.94% 0.66% 0.62%
As % of the Job Titles category 1.02% 0.71% 0.67%
Number of daily rates quoted 210 127 184
10th Percentile £304 £288 £321
25th Percentile £363 £356 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £431 £420 £450
Median % change year-on-year +2.62% -6.67% -10.00%
75th Percentile £538 £489 £556
90th Percentile £621 £658 £598
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £400 £475
% change year-on-year +6.25% -15.79% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 85 24 25
10th Percentile £27.58 £30.38 £25.75
25th Percentile £31.25 £44.50 £35.00
Median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £41.27
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% +21.17% -21.40%
75th Percentile £61.84 £59.69 £59.00
90th Percentile £72.54 £64.25 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.50 £50.00 £41.27
% change year-on-year +5.00% +21.17% -21.40%

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 48,533 29,683 40,331
% of contract IT jobs with a recognized job title 92.47% 91.90% 92.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 29,422 18,950 25,979
10th Percentile £325 £288 £286
25th Percentile £419 £400 £410
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £523 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.50% -4.76% -2.33%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £494
% change year-on-year +5.26% -3.85% -1.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,255 1,354 2,780
10th Percentile £15.93 £13.75 £12.86
25th Percentile £21.25 £17.33 £16.65
Median hourly rate £43.50 £26.39 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +64.87% -29.64% -12.79%
75th Percentile £67.50 £55.87 £62.50
90th Percentile £80.00 £73.10 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £40.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -37.13% +0.50%

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 9 July 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 9 July 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 9 July 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 +43 420 £431 +1.41% 145
UK excluding London +60 368 £425 +6.25% 152
North of England -10 97 £413 -1.79% 23
London -62 88 £444 +4.41% 12
Work from Home -16 81 £400 +2.30% 27
South East -33 68 £405 +6.86% 50
Midlands -10 67 £525 +20.00% 21
West Midlands -12 65 £525 +16.67% 16
East of England +17 55 £350 -6.67% 25
South West +11 53 £450 -18.18% 22
North West -6 45 £425 -13.27% 11
North East -7 31 £325 -18.75% 3
Scotland +15 29 £525 +10.82% 7
Yorkshire -36 27 £500 +18.34% 9
Wales -12 7 £300 -3.85% 4
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 2
East Midlands -15 2 - - 5

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

For the 6 months to 9 July 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.

1 239 (48.38%) Test Automation
2 154 (31.17%) Security Cleared
3 144 (29.15%) CI/CD
4 115 (23.28%) SC Cleared
5 101 (20.45%) Agile
6 92 (18.62%) DevOps
7 90 (18.22%) Playwright
7 90 (18.22%) Validation
8 87 (17.61%) Java
9 83 (16.80%) API Testing
9 83 (16.80%) Selenium
10 82 (16.60%) Python
11 73 (14.78%) QA
12 72 (14.57%) Software Testing
13 71 (14.37%) Test Strategy
14 70 (14.17%) Azure
15 65 (13.16%) AWS
16 62 (12.55%) BDD
17 57 (11.54%) Test Scripting
18 55 (11.13%) GitHub
19 54 (10.93%) Cucumber
19 54 (10.93%) Performance Testing
20 53 (10.73%) Continuous Improvement
20 53 (10.73%) Jenkins
20 53 (10.73%) JIRA
21 52 (10.53%) REST Assured
22 49 (9.92%) Microservices
22 49 (9.92%) Non-Functional Testing
23 48 (9.72%) JavaScript
23 48 (9.72%) Postman

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 (1.82%) Confluence
2 4 (0.81%) Apache
2 4 (0.81%) Apache Airflow
2 4 (0.81%) Apache Spark
2 4 (0.81%) Jupyter
3 2 (0.40%) SAS
Applications
1 3 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.20%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.20%) Simulink
2 1 (0.20%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 8 (1.62%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.61%) Findur
2 3 (0.61%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.40%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.20%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.20%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 70 (14.17%) Azure
2 65 (13.16%) AWS
3 55 (11.13%) GitHub
4 44 (8.91%) Azure DevOps
5 25 (5.06%) GitHub Actions
6 23 (4.66%) GCP
7 9 (1.82%) BrowserStack
8 8 (1.62%) Power Platform
9 6 (1.21%) Entra ID
10 4 (0.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 4 (0.81%) Amazon EMR
10 4 (0.81%) Microsoft 365
10 4 (0.81%) PowerApps
11 3 (0.61%) AWS Lambda
11 3 (0.61%) Power Automate
11 3 (0.61%) Salesforce Service Cloud
11 3 (0.61%) Serverless
12 2 (0.40%) Amazon EventBridge
12 2 (0.40%) Amazon SQS
12 2 (0.40%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 15 (3.04%) LAN
2 13 (2.63%) DNS
3 12 (2.43%) Firewall
4 10 (2.02%) WAN
5 9 (1.82%) DHCP
5 9 (1.82%) TCP/IP
6 8 (1.62%) VLAN
6 8 (1.62%) VPN
7 7 (1.42%) MPLS
8 5 (1.01%) Broadband
8 5 (1.01%) Network Security
8 5 (1.01%) SD-WAN
9 4 (0.81%) BGP
9 4 (0.81%) Internet
9 4 (0.81%) OSPF
9 4 (0.81%) SSL
9 4 (0.81%) Wireshark
10 3 (0.61%) 4G
10 3 (0.61%) Wi-Fi
11 2 (0.40%) LTE
Database & Business Intelligence
1 22 (4.45%) MongoDB
2 11 (2.23%) Relational Database
3 7 (1.42%) Neo4j
4 6 (1.21%) Big Data
5 5 (1.01%) PostgreSQL
6 4 (0.81%) Amazon Athena
7 3 (0.61%) Power BI
8 2 (0.40%) DynamoDB
8 2 (0.40%) Tableau
9 1 (0.20%) Amazon Redshift
9 1 (0.20%) BigQuery
9 1 (0.20%) Data Lake
9 1 (0.20%) Data Warehouse
9 1 (0.20%) Electronic Patient Records
9 1 (0.20%) Flink
9 1 (0.20%) MySQL
9 1 (0.20%) Oracle Database
9 1 (0.20%) Power Query
9 1 (0.20%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 83 (16.80%) Selenium
2 54 (10.93%) Cucumber
3 53 (10.73%) Jenkins
3 53 (10.73%) JIRA
4 52 (10.53%) REST Assured
5 48 (9.72%) Postman
6 47 (9.51%) GitLab
7 36 (7.29%) JMeter
8 31 (6.28%) Gatling
9 24 (4.86%) Git
10 22 (4.45%) Cypress.io
11 15 (3.04%) LabVIEW
12 14 (2.83%) WebDriver
12 14 (2.83%) Zephyr
13 13 (2.63%) Serenity BDD
14 12 (2.43%) JUnit
15 11 (2.23%) SpecFlow
16 8 (1.62%) MSTest
17 6 (1.21%) Browser DevTools
17 6 (1.21%) TestNG
General
1 57 (11.54%) Social Skills
2 52 (10.53%) Public Sector
3 34 (6.88%) Analytical Skills
4 33 (6.68%) Finance
5 32 (6.48%) Aerospace
6 29 (5.87%) Automotive
7 27 (5.47%) Electronics
8 17 (3.44%) Manufacturing
9 13 (2.63%) Military
10 12 (2.43%) Telecoms
11 9 (1.82%) Banking
12 6 (1.21%) Documentation Skills
13 4 (0.81%) Investment Banking
14 3 (0.61%) Law
14 3 (0.61%) Marketing
15 2 (0.40%) Financial Institution
15 2 (0.40%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 2 (0.40%) Organisational Skills
16 1 (0.20%) Influencing Skills
16 1 (0.20%) Legal Technology
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 90 (18.22%) Playwright
2 40 (8.10%) REST
3 23 (4.66%) Kafka
4 19 (3.85%) Spring Boot
5 18 (3.64%) Spring
6 15 (3.04%) RESTful
7 12 (2.43%) .NET
7 12 (2.43%) pytest
8 11 (2.23%) Node.js
8 11 (2.23%) React
8 11 (2.23%) Spring Cloud
9 8 (1.62%) SOAP
10 7 (1.42%) Gherkin
11 6 (1.21%) HTML
11 6 (1.21%) Model Context Protocol
11 6 (1.21%) OpenTelemetry
12 5 (1.01%) LDAP
12 5 (1.01%) OpenID
12 5 (1.01%) Swagger
13 4 (0.81%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 19 (3.85%) Product Ownership
2 17 (3.44%) Cloud Native
2 17 (3.44%) Enterprise Software
3 13 (2.63%) Distributed Systems
3 13 (2.63%) Self-Motivation
4 8 (1.62%) Infotainment
5 7 (1.42%) AI Agents
6 6 (1.21%) Distributed Architecture
7 5 (1.01%) Embedded Systems
7 5 (1.01%) Legacy Systems
7 5 (1.01%) Linux Command Line
7 5 (1.01%) NHS
8 3 (0.61%) Analogue Electronics
8 3 (0.61%) Mobile App
8 3 (0.61%) SWIFT Messaging Network
8 3 (0.61%) Virtual Team
9 2 (0.40%) Data Centre
9 2 (0.40%) Fibre Optics
9 2 (0.40%) Hedge funds
9 2 (0.40%) Synthetic Data
Operating Systems
1 20 (4.05%) Windows
2 10 (2.02%) Linux
3 6 (1.21%) Mac OS
4 4 (0.81%) Unix
4 4 (0.81%) Windows Server
5 3 (0.61%) Android
6 2 (0.40%) Apple iOS
7 1 (0.20%) Embedded Linux
7 1 (0.20%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 239 (48.38%) Test Automation
2 144 (29.15%) CI/CD
3 101 (20.45%) Agile
4 92 (18.62%) DevOps
5 90 (18.22%) Validation
6 83 (16.80%) API Testing
7 72 (14.57%) Software Testing
8 71 (14.37%) Test Strategy
9 62 (12.55%) BDD
10 57 (11.54%) Test Scripting
11 54 (10.93%) Performance Testing
12 53 (10.73%) Continuous Improvement
13 49 (9.92%) Microservices
13 49 (9.92%) Non-Functional Testing
14 47 (9.51%) Integration Testing
15 45 (9.11%) End-to-End Testing
15 45 (9.11%) Problem-Solving
16 42 (8.50%) Regression Testing
17 41 (8.30%) User Acceptance Testing
18 35 (7.09%) Functional Testing
Programming Languages
1 87 (17.61%) Java
2 82 (16.60%) Python
3 48 (9.72%) JavaScript
4 37 (7.49%) C#
4 37 (7.49%) SQL
5 31 (6.28%) TypeScript
6 13 (2.63%) Bash
7 9 (1.82%) PowerShell
8 7 (1.42%) Apex Code
8 7 (1.42%) C++
9 6 (1.21%) C
9 6 (1.21%) Kotlin
9 6 (1.21%) Ruby
10 4 (0.81%) Cypher
10 4 (0.81%) MATLAB
10 4 (0.81%) Scala
10 4 (0.81%) VBScript
11 2 (0.40%) AppleScript
11 2 (0.40%) Kusto Query Language
11 2 (0.40%) Swift
Qualifications
1 154 (31.17%) Security Cleared
2 115 (23.28%) SC Cleared
3 25 (5.06%) ISTQB
4 18 (3.64%) DV Cleared
5 15 (3.04%) BPSS Clearance
6 13 (2.63%) Degree
7 11 (2.23%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 8 (1.62%) HNC
9 7 (1.42%) HND
10 4 (0.81%) CCNP
10 4 (0.81%) Cisco Certification
11 3 (0.61%) Azure Certification
12 2 (0.40%) CCNA
12 2 (0.40%) Computer Science Degree
13 1 (0.20%) CCIP
13 1 (0.20%) ITIL Certification
13 1 (0.20%) Six Sigma Black Belt
13 1 (0.20%) Six Sigma Green Belt
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (14.78%) QA
2 39 (7.89%) Accessibility
3 12 (2.43%) Data Quality
4 4 (0.81%) HMG Security Policy Framework
4 4 (0.81%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 4 (0.81%) WCAG
5 2 (0.40%) NCSC
5 2 (0.40%) Software Quality Assurance
6 1 (0.20%) GDPR
6 1 (0.20%) ISO 14001
6 1 (0.20%) ISO 20022
6 1 (0.20%) ISO 22301
6 1 (0.20%) ISO 9001
6 1 (0.20%) MIL-STD-1553
6 1 (0.20%) NIST
6 1 (0.20%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 40 (8.10%) Docker
2 7 (1.42%) Virtual Desktop
3 6 (1.21%) VMware Infrastructure
4 5 (1.01%) Active Directory
5 4 (0.81%) Firmware
5 4 (0.81%) vSphere
6 2 (0.40%) Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
6 2 (0.40%) VirtualBox
Systems Management
1 24 (4.86%) Grafana
2 20 (4.05%) Prometheus
3 17 (3.44%) Kubernetes
4 14 (2.83%) Terraform
5 7 (1.42%) Kibana
6 4 (0.81%) HP ALM
6 4 (0.81%) Single Sign-On
7 3 (0.61%) HP Quality Center
8 2 (0.40%) Ansible
8 2 (0.40%) Jamf Pro
9 1 (0.20%) Iperf
9 1 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
Vendors
1 28 (5.67%) Salesforce
2 18 (3.64%) Splunk
3 17 (3.44%) Microsoft
4 8 (1.62%) Conga
4 8 (1.62%) EMC
4 8 (1.62%) GoCardless
4 8 (1.62%) Google
5 7 (1.42%) Cisco
5 7 (1.42%) Citrix
5 7 (1.42%) Dynatrace
6 6 (1.21%) VMware
7 5 (1.01%) HP
7 5 (1.01%) ServiceNow
8 4 (0.81%) Juniper
8 4 (0.81%) Pega
8 4 (0.81%) Zscaler
9 3 (0.61%) Databricks
9 3 (0.61%) Fortinet
9 3 (0.61%) OpenLink
9 3 (0.61%) UiPath