Test Automation Job Trends in the North of England

Automated Testing
England > North of England

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the North of England requiring Test Automation skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 27 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 96 107 98
Rank change year-on-year +11 -9 -25
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 343 295 351
As % of all permanent jobs in the North of England 1.62% 3.10% 2.22%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.30% 3.45% 2.82%
Number of salaries quoted 239 131 211
10th Percentile £41,150 £32,000 £36,250
25th Percentile £47,500 £47,000 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £60,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year -4.17% +4.35% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £76,250 £71,991
90th Percentile £83,750 £95,000 £73,750
England median annual salary £65,000 £63,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +3.17% +5.00% -7.69%

All Process & Methodology Skills
North of England

Test Automation falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the North of England.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 14,905 8,553 12,447
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North of England 70.22% 89.83% 78.68%
Number of salaries quoted 11,153 4,277 8,824
10th Percentile £30,000 £25,750 £28,573
25th Percentile £40,000 £32,500 £38,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £50,000 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £71,250 £67,000 £65,000
90th Percentile £90,000 £80,000 £79,600
England median annual salary £60,000 £57,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +5.26% +3.64% -11.29%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend in the North of England

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Test Automation relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the North of England.

Test Automation job vacancy trend in the North of England

Test Automation
Salary Trend in the North of England

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Test Automation.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the North of England citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Salary Histogram in the North of England

Salary distribution for jobs citing Test Automation in the North of England over the 6 months to 27 July 2026.

Salary histogram for Test Automation in the North of England

Test Automation
Job Locations in the North of England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Test Automation within the North of England region over the 6 months to 27 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
North West -4 178 £60,000 -7.69% 78
North East +5 91 £52,500 +16.67% 28
Yorkshire -19 74 £69,310 +41.45% 38
Test Automation
England

Test Automation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North of England 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 14 (4.08%) Apache Spark
2 13 (3.79%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 11 (3.21%) Apache
3 11 (3.21%) Apache Airflow
3 11 (3.21%) Jupyter
4 8 (2.33%) Confluence
5 3 (0.87%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.58%) nginx
7 1 (0.29%) CMS
7 1 (0.29%) Umbraco
7 1 (0.29%) WebLogic
7 1 (0.29%) WordPress
Applications
1 4 (1.17%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.29%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.87%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (0.29%) Oracle SCM
2 1 (0.29%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 154 (44.90%) AWS
2 111 (32.36%) Azure
3 57 (16.62%) Azure DevOps
4 47 (13.70%) Serverless
5 25 (7.29%) Amazon S3
5 25 (7.29%) GitHub
6 19 (5.54%) Azure Data Factory
7 18 (5.25%) AWS Lambda
8 17 (4.96%) SaaS
9 16 (4.66%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 15 (4.37%) Amazon EC2
11 14 (4.08%) Azure Service Bus
11 14 (4.08%) GCP
12 13 (3.79%) AWS CloudFormation
12 13 (3.79%) Azure AKS
12 13 (3.79%) Firebase
13 12 (3.50%) Amazon ECR
14 11 (3.21%) Amazon ECS
14 11 (3.21%) Amazon EMR
14 11 (3.21%) Azure Monitor
Communications & Networking
1 3 (0.87%) HTTP
2 2 (0.58%) SMS
3 1 (0.29%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (9.33%) MongoDB
2 30 (8.75%) PostgreSQL
3 27 (7.87%) NoSQL
4 20 (5.83%) DynamoDB
5 15 (4.37%) MySQL
5 15 (4.37%) Spark SQL
6 14 (4.08%) Data Warehouse
7 11 (3.21%) Amazon Athena
7 11 (3.21%) SQL Server
8 6 (1.75%) Relational Database
9 5 (1.46%) Power BI
10 4 (1.17%) Elasticsearch
10 4 (1.17%) Flink
10 4 (1.17%) Neo4j
11 3 (0.87%) Amazon Redshift
11 3 (0.87%) Big Data
11 3 (0.87%) BigQuery
12 2 (0.58%) Azure SQL Database
12 2 (0.58%) Data Lake
12 2 (0.58%) Redis
Development Applications
1 55 (16.03%) GitLab
2 32 (9.33%) Jenkins
3 28 (8.16%) Git
4 23 (6.71%) JIRA
5 18 (5.25%) fastlane
6 16 (4.66%) Postman
7 15 (4.37%) Cypress.io
8 12 (3.50%) Maven
9 11 (3.21%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 11 (3.21%) Cucumber
10 9 (2.62%) JUnit
10 9 (2.62%) Spock
11 8 (2.33%) Bitbucket
11 8 (2.33%) Storybook
12 7 (2.04%) REST Assured
13 6 (1.75%) JMeter
13 6 (1.75%) LabVIEW
13 6 (1.75%) SonarQube
13 6 (1.75%) Xcode
14 5 (1.46%) Selenium
General
1 83 (24.20%) Public Sector
2 75 (21.87%) Social Skills
3 60 (17.49%) Finance
4 38 (11.08%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 32 (9.33%) Analytical Skills
6 16 (4.66%) Banking
7 12 (3.50%) Marketing
8 9 (2.62%) Electronics
8 9 (2.62%) Investment Banking
8 9 (2.62%) Publishing
9 8 (2.33%) Documentation Skills
9 8 (2.33%) Games
9 8 (2.33%) Legal
10 6 (1.75%) Law
10 6 (1.75%) Organisational Skills
10 6 (1.75%) Retail
11 4 (1.17%) Manufacturing
12 3 (0.87%) Health Technology
12 3 (0.87%) Police
12 3 (0.87%) Tech for Good
Job Titles
1 105 (30.61%) Senior
2 64 (18.66%) Developer
3 61 (17.78%) Test Engineer
4 53 (15.45%) Lead
5 42 (12.24%) Software Engineer
6 33 (9.62%) DevOps Engineer
7 28 (8.16%) Senior Developer
8 25 (7.29%) Data Engineer
8 25 (7.29%) Java Engineer
9 23 (6.71%) Full-Stack Engineer
10 21 (6.12%) Senior DevOps
10 21 (6.12%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 17 (4.96%) Java Developer
12 16 (4.66%) Applications Engineer
13 15 (4.37%) Lead Data Engineer
14 13 (3.79%) Analyst
14 13 (3.79%) Full-Stack Developer
14 13 (3.79%) Platform Engineer
14 13 (3.79%) Senior Test Engineer
15 12 (3.50%) Azure Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 60 (17.49%) Node.js
2 50 (14.58%) AngularJS
3 47 (13.70%) Spring
4 43 (12.54%) REST
5 42 (12.24%) React
6 38 (11.08%) Spring Boot
7 28 (8.16%) PySpark
8 27 (7.87%) RESTful
9 24 (7.00%) Playwright
10 21 (6.12%) .NET
10 21 (6.12%) CSS
11 20 (5.83%) HTML
12 18 (5.25%) Vue
13 15 (4.37%) Next.js
14 12 (3.50%) GraphQL
15 11 (3.21%) OAuth
16 10 (2.92%) Kafka
16 10 (2.92%) OAuth2
17 9 (2.62%) ARM Templates
17 9 (2.62%) React Native
Miscellaneous
1 43 (12.54%) Cloud Native
2 37 (10.79%) Product Ownership
3 32 (9.33%) Mobile App
4 15 (4.37%) Distributed Systems
5 11 (3.21%) Private Cloud
6 10 (2.92%) Data Structures
7 9 (2.62%) Onboarding
8 7 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
8 7 (2.04%) Low-Code
9 6 (1.75%) Virtual Team
10 5 (1.46%) AI Agents
10 5 (1.46%) Marketing Technology
11 4 (1.17%) Greenfield Project
11 4 (1.17%) Online Games
12 3 (0.87%) Analytical Mindset
12 3 (0.87%) Enterprise Software
12 3 (0.87%) NHS
12 3 (0.87%) PKI
13 2 (0.58%) Educational Technology
13 2 (0.58%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 27 (7.87%) Linux
2 22 (6.41%) Windows
3 20 (5.83%) Unix
4 15 (4.37%) Apple iOS
5 8 (2.33%) Android
6 1 (0.29%) VMS
6 1 (0.29%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 222 (64.72%) CI/CD
2 193 (56.27%) Agile
3 148 (43.15%) DevOps
4 126 (36.73%) Mentoring
5 92 (26.82%) Continuous Improvement
6 88 (25.66%) Software Engineering
7 77 (22.45%) Microservices
7 77 (22.45%) Problem-Solving
8 74 (21.57%) Scrum
9 73 (21.28%) Coaching
10 72 (20.99%) Full-Stack Development
11 71 (20.70%) TDD
12 66 (19.24%) Infrastructure as Code
13 55 (16.03%) Continuous Integration
14 50 (14.58%) AI
15 47 (13.70%) Observability
16 40 (11.66%) Design Patterns
16 40 (11.66%) Test Strategy
17 37 (10.79%) Clean Code
18 36 (10.50%) Containerisation
Programming Languages
1 142 (41.40%) Java
2 112 (32.65%) Python
3 88 (25.66%) SQL
4 77 (22.45%) JavaScript
5 54 (15.74%) TypeScript
6 38 (11.08%) C#
7 14 (4.08%) Swift
8 11 (3.21%) Kotlin
9 10 (2.92%) Bash
10 9 (2.62%) Groovy
11 8 (2.33%) Ruby
12 7 (2.04%) C++
12 7 (2.04%) Go
13 5 (1.46%) C
13 5 (1.46%) PHP
13 5 (1.46%) VB
14 4 (1.17%) PowerShell
15 3 (0.87%) VB.NET
16 1 (0.29%) Perl
16 1 (0.29%) VBA
Qualifications
1 34 (9.91%) Security Cleared
2 29 (8.45%) Degree
3 27 (7.87%) SC Cleared
4 16 (4.66%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (1.75%) DBS Check
5 6 (1.75%) HNC
6 5 (1.46%) AWS Certification
6 5 (1.46%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
6 5 (1.46%) Master's Degree
7 4 (1.17%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (0.87%) ISTQB
8 3 (0.87%) NVQ Level 3
9 2 (0.58%) Microsoft Certification
10 1 (0.29%) CISM
10 1 (0.29%) CISSP
10 1 (0.29%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
10 1 (0.29%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 61 (17.78%) QA
2 37 (10.79%) Accessibility
3 22 (6.41%) WCAG
4 16 (4.66%) Data Quality
5 13 (3.79%) GDPR
6 1 (0.29%) ISO 22301
6 1 (0.29%) NIST
System Software
1 51 (14.87%) Docker
Systems Management
1 61 (17.78%) Terraform
2 32 (9.33%) Kubernetes
3 13 (3.79%) Argo
4 4 (1.17%) Ansible
4 4 (1.17%) Grafana
5 3 (0.87%) Packer
6 1 (0.29%) Fluentd
6 1 (0.29%) HP Fortify
6 1 (0.29%) Kibana
6 1 (0.29%) Microsoft Intune
6 1 (0.29%) Progress Chef
6 1 (0.29%) Puppet
Vendors
1 23 (6.71%) Databricks
2 20 (5.83%) Microsoft
3 15 (4.37%) Dynatrace
4 14 (4.08%) Splunk
5 13 (3.79%) Adobe
5 13 (3.79%) AppDynamics
6 10 (2.92%) Google
7 9 (2.62%) Salesforce
8 7 (2.04%) Apple
8 7 (2.04%) Pega
9 3 (0.87%) IBM
9 3 (0.87%) Keysight
9 3 (0.87%) Oracle
10 2 (0.58%) Braze
10 2 (0.58%) Confluent
10 2 (0.58%) dotdigital
10 2 (0.58%) UiPath
11 1 (0.29%) Blue Prism
11 1 (0.29%) DevExpress
11 1 (0.29%) SAP