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

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 126 96 120
Rank change year-on-year -30 +24 -77
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 250 293 363
As % of all permanent jobs in the North of England 1.30% 3.70% 2.13%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.83% 3.89% 2.59%
Number of salaries quoted 182 138 245
10th Percentile £40,075 £35,125 £36,250
25th Percentile £47,500 £45,187 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £61,250 £56,250 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +8.89% +2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £75,938 £79,688 £71,250
90th Percentile £83,750 £97,528 £78,750
England median annual salary £62,500 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +4.17% - -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 13,625 7,529 14,037
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the North of England 70.74% 95.10% 82.38%
Number of salaries quoted 9,065 3,708 11,166
10th Percentile £30,000 £26,500 £27,500
25th Percentile £40,000 £35,000 £36,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £50,055 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.88% +0.11% -9.09%
75th Percentile £70,000 £70,000 £65,000
90th Percentile £88,750 £84,580 £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 21 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 21 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 -21 128 £60,000 - 75
Yorkshire -33 67 £69,310 +38.62% 25
North East -14 55 £52,500 -11.02% 32
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 6 (2.40%) Apache Spark
2 4 (1.60%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 4 (1.60%) Apache
2 4 (1.60%) Apache Airflow
2 4 (1.60%) Jupyter
3 2 (0.80%) Confluence
3 2 (0.80%) nginx
3 2 (0.80%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.40%) CMS
4 1 (0.40%) Umbraco
4 1 (0.40%) WordPress
Applications
1 3 (1.20%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 1 (0.40%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.40%) Oracle SCM
1 1 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 95 (38.00%) AWS
2 81 (32.40%) Azure
3 45 (18.00%) Azure DevOps
4 33 (13.20%) Serverless
5 18 (7.20%) Azure AKS
6 16 (6.40%) GitHub
7 15 (6.00%) Azure Data Factory
8 13 (5.20%) Azure Service Bus
8 13 (5.20%) SaaS
9 12 (4.80%) GCP
10 11 (4.40%) Azure Monitor
11 10 (4.00%) Amazon S3
12 9 (3.60%) AWS CloudFormation
12 9 (3.60%) Azure Functions
12 9 (3.60%) Azure Logic Apps
13 8 (3.20%) AWS Lambda
14 7 (2.80%) Amazon EC2
15 6 (2.40%) Amazon EKS
15 6 (2.40%) PaaS
15 6 (2.40%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 3 (1.20%) HTTP
2 2 (0.80%) SMS
2 2 (0.80%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (12.40%) MongoDB
2 28 (11.20%) PostgreSQL
3 23 (9.20%) NoSQL
4 15 (6.00%) Spark SQL
5 14 (5.60%) MySQL
6 9 (3.60%) Data Warehouse
6 9 (3.60%) DynamoDB
7 4 (1.60%) Amazon Athena
7 4 (1.60%) Flink
7 4 (1.60%) Power BI
7 4 (1.60%) Relational Database
7 4 (1.60%) SQL Server
8 3 (1.20%) Elasticsearch
9 2 (0.80%) Azure SQL Database
9 2 (0.80%) PostHog
9 2 (0.80%) Redis
10 1 (0.40%) Big Data
10 1 (0.40%) BusinessObjects
Development Applications
1 38 (15.20%) GitLab
2 22 (8.80%) Jenkins
3 16 (6.40%) Git
4 15 (6.00%) JIRA
4 15 (6.00%) Postman
5 9 (3.60%) fastlane
6 7 (2.80%) Cucumber
6 7 (2.80%) Cypress.io
6 7 (2.80%) JMeter
6 7 (2.80%) REST Assured
6 7 (2.80%) Selenium
7 5 (2.00%) LabVIEW
8 4 (1.60%) Bitbucket
8 4 (1.60%) Gatling
8 4 (1.60%) JUnit
8 4 (1.60%) SonarQube
8 4 (1.60%) Spock
9 3 (1.20%) Android Studio
9 3 (1.20%) Artifactory
9 3 (1.20%) Gradle
General
1 57 (22.80%) Public Sector
2 38 (15.20%) Social Skills
3 30 (12.00%) Finance
4 23 (9.20%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 20 (8.00%) Analytical Skills
6 13 (5.20%) Banking
7 9 (3.60%) Investment Banking
7 9 (3.60%) Marketing
8 8 (3.20%) Electronics
9 7 (2.80%) Games
10 6 (2.40%) Documentation Skills
11 5 (2.00%) Legal
11 5 (2.00%) Organisational Skills
12 4 (1.60%) Manufacturing
13 3 (1.20%) French Language
13 3 (1.20%) Italian Language
13 3 (1.20%) Law
13 3 (1.20%) Portuguese Language
13 3 (1.20%) Retail
13 3 (1.20%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 74 (29.60%) Senior
2 49 (19.60%) Lead
3 48 (19.20%) Developer
4 45 (18.00%) Test Engineer
5 31 (12.40%) Software Engineer
6 27 (10.80%) Java Engineer
7 25 (10.00%) Senior Developer
8 21 (8.40%) Data Engineer
9 19 (7.60%) DevOps Engineer
10 15 (6.00%) Lead Data Engineer
11 13 (5.20%) Java Developer
11 13 (5.20%) Platform Engineer
11 13 (5.20%) Senior DevOps
11 13 (5.20%) Senior DevOps Engineer
12 12 (4.80%) Azure Engineer
12 12 (4.80%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 12 (4.80%) Senior Test Engineer
13 10 (4.00%) Full-Stack Developer
13 10 (4.00%) Java Software Engineer
13 10 (4.00%) QA Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 36 (14.40%) Spring
2 33 (13.20%) REST
3 31 (12.40%) Spring Boot
4 30 (12.00%) React
5 25 (10.00%) Node.js
6 22 (8.80%) RESTful
7 21 (8.40%) AngularJS
7 21 (8.40%) PySpark
8 18 (7.20%) .NET
9 17 (6.80%) Playwright
10 13 (5.20%) CSS
11 12 (4.80%) HTML
12 11 (4.40%) OAuth
12 11 (4.40%) OAuth2
13 10 (4.00%) Next.js
14 9 (3.60%) ARM Templates
14 9 (3.60%) Kafka
14 9 (3.60%) Vue
15 7 (2.80%) React Native
15 7 (2.80%) Ruby on Rails
Miscellaneous
1 34 (13.60%) Cloud Native
2 23 (9.20%) Mobile App
3 21 (8.40%) Product Ownership
4 10 (4.00%) Onboarding
5 6 (2.40%) Distributed Systems
5 6 (2.40%) Low-Code
6 5 (2.00%) Analytical Mindset
6 5 (2.00%) Data Structures
7 4 (1.60%) Online Games
7 4 (1.60%) Private Cloud
8 3 (1.20%) Algorithms
8 3 (1.20%) Data Centre
8 3 (1.20%) Legacy Systems
8 3 (1.20%) Marketing Technology
8 3 (1.20%) NHS
8 3 (1.20%) PKI
8 3 (1.20%) Public Cloud
9 2 (0.80%) Client/Server
9 2 (0.80%) Educational Technology
9 2 (0.80%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 19 (7.60%) Linux
2 15 (6.00%) Windows
3 14 (5.60%) Apple iOS
4 13 (5.20%) Unix
5 11 (4.40%) Android
Processes & Methodologies
1 138 (55.20%) CI/CD
2 125 (50.00%) Agile
3 100 (40.00%) DevOps
4 99 (39.60%) Mentoring
5 59 (23.60%) Problem-Solving
6 56 (22.40%) Microservices
7 53 (21.20%) Continuous Improvement
8 51 (20.40%) Infrastructure as Code
8 51 (20.40%) Software Engineering
9 48 (19.20%) Scrum
10 47 (18.80%) Full-Stack Development
11 44 (17.60%) TDD
12 40 (16.00%) Coaching
13 31 (12.40%) Continuous Integration
14 30 (12.00%) Observability
15 28 (11.20%) Deployment Automation
15 28 (11.20%) Design Patterns
16 27 (10.80%) AI
17 26 (10.40%) BDD
17 26 (10.40%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 105 (42.00%) Java
2 78 (31.20%) Python
3 67 (26.80%) SQL
4 44 (17.60%) JavaScript
5 30 (12.00%) C#
6 21 (8.40%) TypeScript
7 9 (3.60%) Kotlin
8 7 (2.80%) C++
8 7 (2.80%) Go
8 7 (2.80%) Groovy
8 7 (2.80%) Ruby
9 6 (2.40%) Bash
9 6 (2.40%) Swift
10 4 (1.60%) C
10 4 (1.60%) VB
11 3 (1.20%) Scala
12 2 (0.80%) PHP
13 1 (0.40%) Perl
13 1 (0.40%) PL/SQL
13 1 (0.40%) VBA
Qualifications
1 22 (8.80%) Degree
2 14 (5.60%) Security Cleared
3 12 (4.80%) SC Cleared
4 10 (4.00%) Computer Science Degree
5 6 (2.40%) DBS Check
6 5 (2.00%) HNC
7 4 (1.60%) ISTQB
8 3 (1.20%) BPSS Clearance
8 3 (1.20%) NVQ Level 3
9 1 (0.40%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 46 (18.40%) QA
2 19 (7.60%) Accessibility
3 11 (4.40%) GDPR
4 10 (4.00%) WCAG
5 8 (3.20%) Data Quality
System Software
1 28 (11.20%) Docker
Systems Management
1 51 (20.40%) Terraform
2 22 (8.80%) Kubernetes
3 13 (5.20%) Argo
4 6 (2.40%) Ansible
5 5 (2.00%) Grafana
6 3 (1.20%) Packer
6 3 (1.20%) Rancher
7 1 (0.40%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 18 (7.20%) Databricks
2 13 (5.20%) Microsoft
2 13 (5.20%) Salesforce
3 8 (3.20%) AppDynamics
4 7 (2.80%) Dynatrace
4 7 (2.80%) Google
5 4 (1.60%) Adobe
5 4 (1.60%) IBM
5 4 (1.60%) Oracle
5 4 (1.60%) Splunk
6 3 (1.20%) Apple
6 3 (1.20%) Keysight
7 2 (0.80%) Braze
7 2 (0.80%) dotdigital
7 2 (0.80%) Palantir
8 1 (0.40%) Blue Prism
8 1 (0.40%) DevExpress
8 1 (0.40%) Hotjar
8 1 (0.40%) Pega
8 1 (0.40%) SAP