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 1 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 138 110 126
Rank change year-on-year -28 +16 -85
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 214 186 358
As % of all permanent jobs in the North of England 1.17% 2.62% 2.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.61% 2.77% 2.58%
Number of salaries quoted 152 140 238
10th Percentile £40,000 £35,875 £36,250
25th Percentile £48,289 £44,688 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £63,750 £55,000 £56,250
Median % change year-on-year +15.91% -2.22% -0.44%
75th Percentile £75,313 £80,688 £71,250
90th Percentile £83,750 £97,528 £78,750
England median annual salary £65,000 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +8.33% - -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 13,260 6,715 13,852
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North of England 72.68% 94.51% 83.24%
Number of salaries quoted 8,176 3,748 11,041
10th Percentile £29,000 £27,750 £27,500
25th Percentile £38,750 £36,625 £36,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £52,500 £52,138 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +0.69% +4.28% -9.09%
75th Percentile £70,000 £70,000 £65,000
90th Percentile £87,500 £85,000 £80,000
England median annual salary £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year - +9.09% -12.00%

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 1 May 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 1 May 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 -9 105 £62,000 +12.73% 56
Yorkshire -61 65 £69,310 +38.01% 35
North East -19 44 £55,000 -6.78% 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 5 (2.34%) Apache Spark
2 2 (0.93%) Apache
2 2 (0.93%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (0.93%) Confluence
2 2 (0.93%) Jupyter
2 2 (0.93%) nginx
3 1 (0.47%) CMS
3 1 (0.47%) Oracle Workflow
3 1 (0.47%) SharePoint
3 1 (0.47%) Umbraco
3 1 (0.47%) WordPress
Applications
1 3 (1.40%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.47%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.47%) Oracle SCM
1 1 (0.47%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 81 (37.85%) AWS
2 71 (33.18%) Azure
3 34 (15.89%) Azure DevOps
4 28 (13.08%) Serverless
5 18 (8.41%) Azure AKS
6 17 (7.94%) SaaS
7 15 (7.01%) GCP
8 13 (6.07%) Azure Service Bus
9 12 (5.61%) Azure Data Factory
10 10 (4.67%) GitHub
11 9 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
11 9 (4.21%) Azure Monitor
12 7 (3.27%) Amazon S3
12 7 (3.27%) AWS Lambda
12 7 (3.27%) Azure Functions
12 7 (3.27%) Azure Logic Apps
13 6 (2.80%) Amazon EKS
13 6 (2.80%) dbt
13 6 (2.80%) PaaS
13 6 (2.80%) Salesforce Service Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 4 (1.87%) HTTP
2 3 (1.40%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (14.49%) MongoDB
2 29 (13.55%) PostgreSQL
3 21 (9.81%) NoSQL
4 16 (7.48%) MySQL
5 12 (5.61%) Spark SQL
6 7 (3.27%) Data Warehouse
6 7 (3.27%) DynamoDB
7 5 (2.34%) SQL Server
8 4 (1.87%) Flink
8 4 (1.87%) Power BI
9 3 (1.40%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (1.40%) Relational Database
10 2 (0.93%) Amazon Athena
10 2 (0.93%) PostHog
10 2 (0.93%) Redis
11 1 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
11 1 (0.47%) Big Data
11 1 (0.47%) BusinessObjects
11 1 (0.47%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 30 (14.02%) GitLab
2 16 (7.48%) JIRA
3 15 (7.01%) Postman
4 13 (6.07%) Git
4 13 (6.07%) Jenkins
5 10 (4.67%) Cucumber
5 10 (4.67%) Selenium
6 8 (3.74%) JMeter
7 7 (3.27%) Cypress.io
7 7 (3.27%) REST Assured
8 4 (1.87%) Bitbucket
8 4 (1.87%) Gatling
8 4 (1.87%) SonarQube
9 3 (1.40%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.40%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 3 (1.40%) fastlane
9 3 (1.40%) LabVIEW
9 3 (1.40%) LoadRunner
9 3 (1.40%) SpecFlow
9 3 (1.40%) TestRail
General
1 45 (21.03%) Public Sector
2 40 (18.69%) Social Skills
3 27 (12.62%) Finance
4 16 (7.48%) Analytical Skills
4 16 (7.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 11 (5.14%) Banking
6 7 (3.27%) Games
6 7 (3.27%) Investment Banking
7 6 (2.80%) Marketing
8 5 (2.34%) Organisational Skills
9 4 (1.87%) Law
9 4 (1.87%) Legal
10 3 (1.40%) Documentation Skills
10 3 (1.40%) Electronics
10 3 (1.40%) French Language
10 3 (1.40%) Health Technology
10 3 (1.40%) Italian Language
10 3 (1.40%) Portuguese Language
10 3 (1.40%) Retail
10 3 (1.40%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 64 (29.91%) Senior
2 42 (19.63%) Lead
3 38 (17.76%) Developer
4 31 (14.49%) Test Engineer
5 27 (12.62%) Java Engineer
6 24 (11.21%) Software Engineer
7 20 (9.35%) Data Engineer
7 20 (9.35%) Senior Developer
8 18 (8.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 13 (6.07%) QA Engineer
9 13 (6.07%) Senior DevOps
9 13 (6.07%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 12 (5.61%) Lead Data Engineer
11 11 (5.14%) Platform Engineer
12 10 (4.67%) Full-Stack Developer
12 10 (4.67%) Java Software Engineer
12 10 (4.67%) Test Automation Engineer
12 10 (4.67%) Test Leader
13 9 (4.21%) Applications Engineer
13 9 (4.21%) Senior Applications Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (14.02%) Spring
2 28 (13.08%) REST
3 27 (12.62%) Spring Boot
4 26 (12.15%) React
5 23 (10.75%) Node.js
6 17 (7.94%) Playwright
6 17 (7.94%) PySpark
7 16 (7.48%) .NET
7 16 (7.48%) RESTful
8 11 (5.14%) AngularJS
8 11 (5.14%) CSS
8 11 (5.14%) OAuth
8 11 (5.14%) OAuth2
9 10 (4.67%) HTML
9 10 (4.67%) Vue
10 9 (4.21%) Kafka
11 7 (3.27%) ARM Templates
12 6 (2.80%) Flask
12 6 (2.80%) RabbitMQ
13 5 (2.34%) Elastic Stack
Miscellaneous
1 26 (12.15%) Cloud Native
2 10 (4.67%) Mobile App
3 9 (4.21%) Product Ownership
4 8 (3.74%) Onboarding
5 5 (2.34%) Analytical Mindset
5 5 (2.34%) Data Structures
6 4 (1.87%) Distributed Systems
6 4 (1.87%) Online Games
7 3 (1.40%) Algorithms
7 3 (1.40%) Client/Server
7 3 (1.40%) Data Centre
7 3 (1.40%) Legacy Systems
7 3 (1.40%) Low-Code
7 3 (1.40%) NHS
7 3 (1.40%) PKI
7 3 (1.40%) Public Cloud
8 2 (0.93%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (0.93%) Educational Technology
8 2 (0.93%) Greenfield Project
9 1 (0.47%) Sports Betting
Operating Systems
1 19 (8.88%) Linux
2 16 (7.48%) Windows
3 13 (6.07%) Unix
4 11 (5.14%) Apple iOS
5 8 (3.74%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 112 (52.34%) CI/CD
2 96 (44.86%) Agile
3 83 (38.79%) DevOps
3 83 (38.79%) Mentoring
4 50 (23.36%) Problem-Solving
5 47 (21.96%) Microservices
6 46 (21.50%) Continuous Improvement
7 43 (20.09%) Infrastructure as Code
8 42 (19.63%) Software Engineering
9 36 (16.82%) Coaching
10 33 (15.42%) TDD
11 32 (14.95%) Scrum
12 30 (14.02%) Full-Stack Development
13 28 (13.08%) BDD
13 28 (13.08%) Observability
14 26 (12.15%) Continuous Integration
14 26 (12.15%) Event-Driven
15 21 (9.81%) AI
16 20 (9.35%) Software Testing
16 20 (9.35%) Test Strategy
Programming Languages
1 84 (39.25%) Java
2 64 (29.91%) Python
3 61 (28.50%) SQL
4 31 (14.49%) C#
5 28 (13.08%) JavaScript
6 14 (6.54%) TypeScript
7 8 (3.74%) Go
8 6 (2.80%) Kotlin
9 5 (2.34%) Scala
10 4 (1.87%) Bash
11 3 (1.40%) C++
11 3 (1.40%) Groovy
11 3 (1.40%) PHP
11 3 (1.40%) Swift
12 2 (0.93%) VB
13 1 (0.47%) C
13 1 (0.47%) Delphi
13 1 (0.47%) Perl
13 1 (0.47%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.47%) VBA
Qualifications
1 19 (8.88%) Degree
2 12 (5.61%) Security Cleared
3 10 (4.67%) SC Cleared
4 8 (3.74%) Computer Science Degree
4 8 (3.74%) DBS Check
5 3 (1.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 3 (1.40%) ISTQB
6 1 (0.47%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 49 (22.90%) QA
2 10 (4.67%) GDPR
3 7 (3.27%) Accessibility
4 6 (2.80%) Data Quality
5 3 (1.40%) WCAG
System Software
1 18 (8.41%) Docker
Systems Management
1 43 (20.09%) Terraform
2 19 (8.88%) Kubernetes
3 13 (6.07%) Argo
4 6 (2.80%) Ansible
4 6 (2.80%) Grafana
5 3 (1.40%) Packer
5 3 (1.40%) Rancher
6 1 (0.47%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 17 (7.94%) Databricks
2 13 (6.07%) Microsoft
2 13 (6.07%) Salesforce
3 8 (3.74%) Oracle
4 4 (1.87%) AppDynamics
4 4 (1.87%) Google
4 4 (1.87%) IBM
4 4 (1.87%) Palantir
5 2 (0.93%) SAP
6 1 (0.47%) Blue Prism
6 1 (0.47%) DevExpress
6 1 (0.47%) Dynatrace
6 1 (0.47%) Hotjar
6 1 (0.47%) Pega
6 1 (0.47%) Software AG
6 1 (0.47%) webMethods