QA Automation Job Trends in the South West

Quality Assurance (QA) Automation
England > South West

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the South West requiring QA Automation skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 13 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 178 188 211
Rank change year-on-year +10 +23 +43
Permanent jobs citing QA Automation 3 3 11
As % of all permanent jobs in the South West 0.059% 0.072% 0.23%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.083% 0.085% 0.26%
Number of salaries quoted 1 3 8
10th Percentile - £38,250 £43,650
25th Percentile £66,250 £46,875 £51,563
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £67,500 £62,500 £58,750
Median % change year-on-year +8.00% +6.38% +9.30%
75th Percentile £68,750 £66,875 £62,813
90th Percentile - £68,750 £64,875
England median annual salary £61,500 £63,750 £60,000
% change year-on-year -3.53% +6.25% +9.09%

All Process & Methodology Skills
South West

QA 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 South West.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 3,620 3,550 4,269
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the South West 71.51% 85.42% 89.53%
Number of salaries quoted 2,491 1,780 3,234
10th Percentile £28,000 £30,450 £30,000
25th Percentile £34,875 £40,236 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £50,000 £54,439 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year -8.15% +3.69% +2.94%
75th Percentile £67,500 £68,750 £67,500
90th Percentile £80,000 £81,250 £81,100
England median annual salary £55,000 £60,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year -8.33% - -4.00%

QA Automation
Job Vacancy Trend in the South West

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing QA Automation relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the South West.

QA Automation job vacancy trend in the South West

QA Automation
Salary Trend in the South West

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing QA Automation.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South West citing QA Automation

QA Automation
Job Locations in the South West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing QA Automation within the South West region over the 6 months to 13 January 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
Dorset - 2 - - 2
Wiltshire - 1 £67,500 -
QA Automation
England

QA Automation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South West 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:

Cloud Services
1 1 (33.33%) AWS
1 1 (33.33%) Azure
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (66.67%) CockroachDB
Development Applications
1 3 (100.00%) Cucumber
1 3 (100.00%) Postman
2 2 (66.67%) Git
2 2 (66.67%) GitLab
2 2 (66.67%) Jenkins
2 2 (66.67%) JUnit
2 2 (66.67%) REST Assured
2 2 (66.67%) SoapUI
2 2 (66.67%) TestNG
3 1 (33.33%) JIRA
3 1 (33.33%) Selenium
Job Titles
1 3 (100.00%) QA Engineer
2 2 (66.67%) Automation Engineer
2 2 (66.67%) QA Automation Engineer
3 1 (33.33%) Lead
3 1 (33.33%) QA Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (66.67%) Elastic Stack
1 2 (66.67%) pytest
2 1 (33.33%) Kafka
2 1 (33.33%) RabbitMQ
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (66.67%) API Testing
1 2 (66.67%) CI/CD
1 2 (66.67%) DevOps
1 2 (66.67%) Test Automation
2 1 (33.33%) BDD
2 1 (33.33%) Defect Tracking
2 1 (33.33%) Event-Driven
2 1 (33.33%) Fintech
2 1 (33.33%) Microservices
2 1 (33.33%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 3 (100.00%) Java
1 3 (100.00%) SQL
2 2 (66.67%) C#
2 2 (66.67%) JavaScript
2 2 (66.67%) Python
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (100.00%) QA
Vendors
1 2 (66.67%) Oracle
1 2 (66.67%) Splunk