QA Automation Engineer Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Automation QA Engineer
UK > UK excluding London

The median Automation QA Engineer salary in the UK excluding London is £60,750 per year, according to job vacancies posted during the 6 months leading to 14 January 2026.

The table below compares current salary benchmarking and summary statistics with the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 481 549 543
Rank change year-on-year +68 -6 +141
Permanent jobs requiring a QA Automation Engineer 28 17 30
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.066% 0.047% 0.087%
As % of the Job Titles category 0.073% 0.051% 0.091%
Number of salaries quoted 24 10 27
10th Percentile £50,375 £34,750 £33,500
25th Percentile £54,375 £46,250 £38,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,750 £47,500 £53,500
Median % change year-on-year +27.89% -11.21% -0.93%
75th Percentile £64,750 £60,563 £63,125
90th Percentile £65,875 £64,375 £67,500
UK median annual salary £61,500 £63,750 £52,500
% change year-on-year -3.53% +21.43% -4.55%

All Permanent IT Job Roles
UK excluding London

For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent IT job vacancies in the UK excluding London. Most job vacancies include a discernible job title that can be normalized. As such, the figures in the second row provide an indication of the number of permanent jobs in our overall sample.

Permanent vacancies in the UK excluding London with a recognized job title 38,388 33,377 32,893
% of permanent jobs with a recognized job title 90.52% 92.91% 95.32%
Number of salaries quoted 23,454 16,215 24,936
10th Percentile £28,000 £31,250 £27,500
25th Percentile £35,000 £40,000 £36,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £50,000 £52,609 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year -4.96% +5.22% -5.25%
75th Percentile £65,000 £68,750 £65,000
90th Percentile £80,000 £82,500 £78,750
UK median annual salary £55,000 £60,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year -8.33% +4.35% -4.17%

QA Automation Engineer
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings featuring 'QA Automation Engineer' in the job title relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

QA Automation Engineer job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

QA Automation Engineer
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for QA Automation Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London.

Salary distribution trend for QA Automation Engineer job vacancies in the UK excluding London

QA Automation Engineer
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing QA Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 14 January 2026.

Salary histogram for QA Automation Engineer in the UK excluding London

QA Automation Engineer
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing QA Automation Engineer within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 14 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
North of England +18 11 £60,750 - 3
Midlands +27 7 £61,500 +23.00% 1
South East +34 6 £57,500 +21.05% 15
West Midlands +26 6 £61,500 -
North East +14 4 £60,000 - 1
Yorkshire - 4 £61,500 - 1
North West - 3 £61,500 - 1
South West +11 2 - - 3
East of England +25 1 £50,000 +42.86% 6
East Midlands -7 1 - - 1
Northern Ireland -12 1 £52,500 - 1
QA Automation Engineer
UK

QA Automation Engineer Skill Set
Top 30 Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London

For the 6 months to 14 January 2026, QA Automation Engineer job roles required the following skills and capabilities in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number of co-occurrences and as a proportion of all permanent job ads across the UK excluding London region featuring QA Automation Engineer in the job title.

1 28 (100.00%) QA
2 27 (96.43%) Test Automation
3 24 (85.71%) QA Automation
4 16 (57.14%) API Testing
5 15 (53.57%) C#
5 15 (53.57%) Mentoring
6 12 (42.86%) Selenium
7 10 (35.71%) SaaS
8 9 (32.14%) Cucumber
8 9 (32.14%) Postman
8 9 (32.14%) Python
9 8 (28.57%) Coaching
10 7 (25.00%) Fintech
10 7 (25.00%) Java
10 7 (25.00%) SQL
11 6 (21.43%) People Management
11 6 (21.43%) pytest
11 6 (21.43%) SoapUI
11 6 (21.43%) Technical Leadership
12 5 (17.86%) Agile
12 5 (17.86%) CI/CD
12 5 (17.86%) JavaScript
12 5 (17.86%) SOAP
13 4 (14.29%) Batch Processing
13 4 (14.29%) Go
13 4 (14.29%) Performance Testing
13 4 (14.29%) PHP
13 4 (14.29%) Relational Database
14 3 (10.71%) Appium
14 3 (10.71%) BDD

QA Automation Engineer Skill Set
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 10 (35.71%) SaaS
2 2 (7.14%) Azure
3 1 (3.57%) Azure DevOps
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (14.29%) Relational Database
2 2 (7.14%) CockroachDB
Development Applications
1 12 (42.86%) Selenium
2 9 (32.14%) Cucumber
2 9 (32.14%) Postman
3 6 (21.43%) SoapUI
4 3 (10.71%) Appium
4 3 (10.71%) Jenkins
4 3 (10.71%) JIRA
4 3 (10.71%) JMeter
4 3 (10.71%) JUnit
4 3 (10.71%) REST Assured
4 3 (10.71%) TestNG
5 2 (7.14%) Git
5 2 (7.14%) GitLab
5 2 (7.14%) SpecFlow
6 1 (3.57%) Katalon Studio
6 1 (3.57%) NUnit
General
1 5 (17.86%) Finance
2 2 (7.14%) Games
3 1 (3.57%) Financial Institution
3 1 (3.57%) Social Skills
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 6 (21.43%) pytest
2 5 (17.86%) SOAP
3 3 (10.71%) Playwright
4 2 (7.14%) .NET
4 2 (7.14%) Elastic Stack
5 1 (3.57%) Kafka
5 1 (3.57%) RabbitMQ
5 1 (3.57%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 10 (35.71%) Product Ownership
2 1 (3.57%) Hedge funds
Processes & Methodologies
1 27 (96.43%) Test Automation
2 24 (85.71%) QA Automation
3 16 (57.14%) API Testing
4 15 (53.57%) Mentoring
5 8 (28.57%) Coaching
6 7 (25.00%) Fintech
7 6 (21.43%) People Management
7 6 (21.43%) Technical Leadership
8 5 (17.86%) Agile
8 5 (17.86%) CI/CD
9 4 (14.29%) Batch Processing
9 4 (14.29%) Performance Testing
10 3 (10.71%) BDD
10 3 (10.71%) DevOps
10 3 (10.71%) Manual Testing
11 2 (7.14%) Code Quality
11 2 (7.14%) SDLC
11 2 (7.14%) Software Testing
11 2 (7.14%) TDD
11 2 (7.14%) Test Management
Programming Languages
1 15 (53.57%) C#
2 9 (32.14%) Python
3 7 (25.00%) Java
3 7 (25.00%) SQL
4 5 (17.86%) JavaScript
5 4 (14.29%) Go
5 4 (14.29%) PHP
6 2 (7.14%) TypeScript
7 1 (3.57%) Groovy
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 28 (100.00%) QA
Vendors
1 2 (7.14%) Oracle
1 2 (7.14%) Splunk