SDET Contracts

Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring SDET skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited SDET over the 6 months leading up to 27 June 2024, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jun 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 512 548 583
Rank change year-on-year +36 +35 -28
Contract jobs citing SDET 74 135 267
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.17% 0.24% 0.30%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.20% 0.27% 0.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 55 101 189
10th Percentile £398 £419 £405
25th Percentile £438 £475 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £535
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% +2.80% +7.00%
75th Percentile £600 £638 £638
90th Percentile £645 £700 £703
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £485
% change year-on-year +5.26% -2.06% +6.30%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

SDET 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 36,956 49,780 79,614
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.22% 89.56% 90.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,553 34,315 55,935
10th Percentile £300 £325 £350
25th Percentile £413 £438 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +1.85% +8.00%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £650
90th Percentile £750 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £495
% change year-on-year - +1.01% +10.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,551 1,689 1,867
10th Percentile £12.74 £11.87 £12.74
25th Percentile £16.06 £16.25 £15.90
Median hourly rate £37.50 £36.00 £26.00
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% +38.46% +13.04%
75th Percentile £61.30 £64.63 £51.59
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £65.87
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.12 £35.00 £21.00
% change year-on-year +8.91% +66.67% +2.44%

SDET
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing SDET as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing SDET.

Daily rate trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SDET over the 6 months to 27 June 2024.

Daily rate histogram for SDET in the UK

SDET
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing SDET.

Hourly rate trend for SDET in the UK

SDET
Top 10 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SDET within the UK over the 6 months to 27 June 2024. 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 +50 65 £500 -9.09% 23
London +52 50 £500 -13.04% 17
Work from Home +106 32 £450 -10.00% 14
UK excluding London +29 21 £500 +5.26% 11
South East +12 8 £450 -20.00% 5
North of England +29 6 £593 +48.13% 2
Yorkshire - 6 £593 - 1
Scotland +18 3 £498 +4.84% 2
Northern Ireland - 3 £550 -
South West +4 1 £463 +42.31% 2

SDET
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 5 (6.76%) Confluence
2 1 (1.35%) Apache
2 1 (1.35%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.35%) nginx
Business Applications
1 3 (4.05%) FLEXCUBE
2 2 (2.70%) Oracle BPM
Cloud Services
1 12 (16.22%) AWS
2 11 (14.86%) Azure
3 8 (10.81%) GitHub
4 5 (6.76%) Azure DevOps
5 2 (2.70%) Amazon EC2
5 2 (2.70%) Amazon S3
5 2 (2.70%) AWS Lambda
5 2 (2.70%) Serverless
6 1 (1.35%) AWS CloudFormation
6 1 (1.35%) BrowserStack
6 1 (1.35%) Entra ID
6 1 (1.35%) GCP
6 1 (1.35%) GitHub Actions
6 1 (1.35%) Power Platform
6 1 (1.35%) Tricentis Tosca
Communications & Networking
1 5 (6.76%) TCP/IP
2 2 (2.70%) 5G
2 2 (2.70%) Wi-Fi
3 1 (1.35%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (4.05%) MariaDB
1 3 (4.05%) MySQL
1 3 (4.05%) NoSQL
1 3 (4.05%) Relational Database
2 2 (2.70%) MongoDB
2 2 (2.70%) PostgreSQL
2 2 (2.70%) SQL Server
3 1 (1.35%) Data Hub
3 1 (1.35%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 38 (51.35%) Selenium
2 27 (36.49%) Cucumber
3 16 (21.62%) Jenkins
4 11 (14.86%) Git
4 11 (14.86%) SpecFlow
5 9 (12.16%) JUnit
6 8 (10.81%) JIRA
6 8 (10.81%) REST Assured
7 7 (9.46%) WebDriver
8 6 (8.11%) Bitbucket
9 5 (6.76%) Cypress.io
9 5 (6.76%) JMeter
9 5 (6.76%) TestNG
10 4 (5.41%) Artifactory
10 4 (5.41%) Maven
11 2 (2.70%) GitLab
11 2 (2.70%) Postman
11 2 (2.70%) SoapUI
12 1 (1.35%) Serenity BDD
12 1 (1.35%) TeamCity
General
1 21 (28.38%) Finance
2 17 (22.97%) Banking
3 12 (16.22%) Social Skills
4 8 (10.81%) Public Sector
5 7 (9.46%) Analytical Skills
6 4 (5.41%) Investment Banking
7 3 (4.05%) Financial Institution
8 2 (2.70%) Back Office
9 1 (1.35%) Aviation
9 1 (1.35%) Electronics
9 1 (1.35%) Front Office
9 1 (1.35%) Manufacturing
9 1 (1.35%) Marketing
9 1 (1.35%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 11 (14.86%) Developer
2 8 (10.81%) Software Developer
2 8 (10.81%) Software Engineer
3 7 (9.46%) Senior
3 7 (9.46%) Test Engineer
4 6 (8.11%) Developer in Test
4 6 (8.11%) Development Engineer
4 6 (8.11%) Software Development Engineer
4 6 (8.11%) Test Development Engineer
4 6 (8.11%) Tester
5 5 (6.76%) Lead
5 5 (6.76%) Test Automation Engineer
6 4 (5.41%) QA Engineer
6 4 (5.41%) QA Leader
7 3 (4.05%) Automation Tester
7 3 (4.05%) Linux Engineer
8 2 (2.70%) JavaScript Developer
8 2 (2.70%) QA Automation Engineer
8 2 (2.70%) Software Manager
8 2 (2.70%) Software Test Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 9 (12.16%) REST
2 8 (10.81%) Playwright
3 7 (9.46%) Gherkin
3 7 (9.46%) RESTful
4 5 (6.76%) .NET
4 5 (6.76%) XML
5 4 (5.41%) SOAP
5 4 (5.41%) Spring Boot
6 3 (4.05%) Middleware
6 3 (4.05%) Software Packaging
7 2 (2.70%) .NET Framework
7 2 (2.70%) SwiftUI
7 2 (2.70%) Web Services
8 1 (1.35%) AngularJS
8 1 (1.35%) CSS
8 1 (1.35%) HTML
8 1 (1.35%) Node.js
8 1 (1.35%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 4 (5.41%) Data Protection Act
2 3 (4.05%) Fixed Income
2 3 (4.05%) Legacy Systems
2 3 (4.05%) SWIFT Messaging Network
3 2 (2.70%) Greenfield Project
4 1 (1.35%) Cloud Native
4 1 (1.35%) Derivative
4 1 (1.35%) Equities
4 1 (1.35%) Machine to Machine
4 1 (1.35%) Mobile App
4 1 (1.35%) Product Ownership
4 1 (1.35%) Self-Motivation
4 1 (1.35%) Team-Oriented Environment
4 1 (1.35%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 8 (10.81%) Linux
1 8 (10.81%) Windows
2 4 (5.41%) Embedded Linux
3 3 (4.05%) Unix
4 1 (1.35%) Android
4 1 (1.35%) Apple iOS
4 1 (1.35%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 61 (82.43%) Test Automation
2 41 (55.41%) Software Testing
3 26 (35.14%) Agile
4 23 (31.08%) CI/CD
5 21 (28.38%) BDD
6 18 (24.32%) Microservices
7 16 (21.62%) Test Scripting
8 15 (20.27%) DevOps
9 14 (18.92%) API Testing
10 11 (14.86%) Continuous Integration
10 11 (14.86%) End-to-End Testing
11 10 (13.51%) Manual Testing
12 9 (12.16%) Performance Testing
13 8 (10.81%) Problem-Solving
13 8 (10.81%) Software Engineering
14 7 (9.46%) Computer Science
14 7 (9.46%) Functional Testing
14 7 (9.46%) Regression Testing
15 6 (8.11%) Migration
16 5 (6.76%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 38 (51.35%) Java
2 15 (20.27%) C#
2 15 (20.27%) JavaScript
3 13 (17.57%) Python
4 10 (13.51%) TypeScript
5 7 (9.46%) SQL
6 4 (5.41%) C++
6 4 (5.41%) Swift
7 2 (2.70%) PowerShell
8 1 (1.35%) ABAP
8 1 (1.35%) Bash
8 1 (1.35%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 8 (10.81%) Degree
2 7 (9.46%) Security Cleared
3 5 (6.76%) ISTQB
4 4 (5.41%) SC Cleared
5 3 (4.05%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (4.05%) DV Cleared
6 2 (2.70%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 20 (27.03%) QA
2 3 (4.05%) Accessibility
2 3 (4.05%) ISO 20022
3 1 (1.35%) Data Quality
3 1 (1.35%) Disclosure Scotland
3 1 (1.35%) WCAG
System Software
1 5 (6.76%) Virtual Machines
2 4 (5.41%) VirtualBox
3 2 (2.70%) Docker
4 1 (1.35%) Active Directory
4 1 (1.35%) iptables
Systems Management
1 4 (5.41%) Kubernetes
2 3 (4.05%) Terraform
3 1 (1.35%) Docker Swarm
Vendors
1 10 (13.51%) Oracle
2 4 (5.41%) Microsoft
3 2 (2.70%) SAP
4 1 (1.35%) Databricks