Manual Testing Job Trends

Manual Testing
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Manual Testing skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 578 471 600
Rank change year-on-year -107 +129 -101
Permanent jobs citing Manual Testing 135 190 300
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.15% 0.43% 0.31%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.20% 0.46% 0.36%
Number of salaries quoted 95 143 263
10th Percentile £30,000 £32,500 £35,000
25th Percentile £42,500 £37,500 £36,365
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £47,500 £47,500 £45,000
Median % change year-on-year - +5.56% -10.00%
75th Percentile £57,750 £62,500 £57,500
90th Percentile £65,000 £67,500 £86,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £42,875 £42,500
% change year-on-year +10.79% +0.88% -5.56%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Manual Testing 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.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 67,575 41,082 82,390
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.71% 93.28% 84.93%
Number of salaries quoted 43,564 22,321 59,668
10th Percentile £30,000 £30,000 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,500 £41,250 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £59,684 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +0.53% +8.52% -9.84%
75th Percentile £78,750 £78,750 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £100,001 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £52,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year - +5.00% -9.09%

Manual Testing
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Manual Testing relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Manual Testing job vacancy trend in the UK

Manual Testing
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Manual Testing.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Manual Testing

Manual Testing
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Manual Testing over the 6 months to 17 May 2026.

Salary histogram for Manual Testing in the UK

Manual Testing
Top 15 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Manual Testing within the UK over the 6 months to 17 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
England -113 122 £50,000 +5.26% 41
UK excluding London -81 93 £47,500 +10.79% 37
Work from Home -19 37 £48,750 -8.02% 25
South West -29 33 £47,500 +18.75% 7
London -58 30 £55,000 -15.38% 11
South East -33 23 £52,500 +10.53% 11
North of England -42 16 £50,000 +16.62% 4
Midlands -45 13 £30,000 -33.33% 5
North West +7 12 £50,000 +13.31% 1
East Midlands -33 11 £30,000 -45.45% 1
East of England -33 6 £45,000 -15.09% 5
Wales -29 2 £25,000 - 4
West Midlands -43 2 £56,250 +32.35% 4
North East -43 2 £55,000 +59.42% 2
Yorkshire -49 2 £50,000 +58.73% 1

Manual Testing
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 3 (2.22%) Confluence
2 1 (0.74%) Apache
2 1 (0.74%) CMS
2 1 (0.74%) SharePoint
Applications
1 2 (1.48%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (1.48%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 1 (0.74%) Dynamics CRM
1 1 (0.74%) Oracle Applications
Cloud Services
1 57 (42.22%) Azure
2 40 (29.63%) Azure DevOps
3 20 (14.81%) AWS
4 13 (9.63%) GCP
5 11 (8.15%) BrowserStack
6 3 (2.22%) SaaS
7 2 (1.48%) Azure Service Bus
7 2 (1.48%) Power Platform
8 1 (0.74%) Algolia
8 1 (0.74%) AWS CodePipeline
8 1 (0.74%) Azure Data Factory
8 1 (0.74%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 1 (0.74%) BlazeMeter
8 1 (0.74%) Copilot Studio
8 1 (0.74%) Microsoft 365
8 1 (0.74%) Microsoft Copilot
8 1 (0.74%) SonarCloud
Communications & Networking
1 3 (2.22%) Cisco ISE
2 2 (1.48%) HTTP
3 1 (0.74%) Broadband
3 1 (0.74%) Cisco IOS
3 1 (0.74%) Ethernet
3 1 (0.74%) FTP
3 1 (0.74%) SD-WAN
3 1 (0.74%) SNMP
3 1 (0.74%) Spanning Tree
3 1 (0.74%) SSH
3 1 (0.74%) TACACS
3 1 (0.74%) VoIP
3 1 (0.74%) WAN
3 1 (0.74%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 4 (2.96%) SQL Server
2 3 (2.22%) Metadata
2 3 (2.22%) PostgreSQL
2 3 (2.22%) Relational Database
3 2 (1.48%) Azure SQL Database
3 2 (1.48%) DB2
4 1 (0.74%) Data Lake
4 1 (0.74%) Data Warehouse
4 1 (0.74%) Oracle Database
4 1 (0.74%) Power BI
4 1 (0.74%) Power Query
4 1 (0.74%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 37 (27.41%) Selenium
2 24 (17.78%) JIRA
3 22 (16.30%) Cypress.io
4 18 (13.33%) Postman
5 12 (8.89%) Jenkins
6 8 (5.93%) Zephyr
7 7 (5.19%) Git
8 6 (4.44%) SpecFlow
9 5 (3.70%) TestRail
10 4 (2.96%) Cucumber
10 4 (2.96%) JUnit
10 4 (2.96%) Subversion
11 3 (2.22%) Bitbucket
11 3 (2.22%) GitLab
11 3 (2.22%) JMeter
11 3 (2.22%) LoadRunner
11 3 (2.22%) REST Assured
11 3 (2.22%) SoapUI
11 3 (2.22%) TeamCity
12 2 (1.48%) webpack
General
1 30 (22.22%) Social Skills
2 19 (14.07%) Finance
3 13 (9.63%) Analytical Skills
3 13 (9.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 5 (3.70%) Digital Healthcare
5 4 (2.96%) Advertising
5 4 (2.96%) Banking
6 3 (2.22%) Aerospace
6 3 (2.22%) Health Technology
6 3 (2.22%) Public Sector
6 3 (2.22%) Retail
6 3 (2.22%) Tech for Good
7 2 (1.48%) Back Office
7 2 (1.48%) Documentation Skills
7 2 (1.48%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (0.74%) Aviation
8 1 (0.74%) Electronics
8 1 (0.74%) Games
8 1 (0.74%) Law
8 1 (0.74%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 28 (20.74%) Test Engineer
2 23 (17.04%) Lead
3 22 (16.30%) QA Engineer
4 18 (13.33%) Tester
5 16 (11.85%) QA Leader
5 16 (11.85%) Senior
6 14 (10.37%) Test Leader
7 10 (7.41%) Software Engineer
8 9 (6.67%) Analyst
8 9 (6.67%) Automation Engineer
8 9 (6.67%) QA Automation Engineer
8 9 (6.67%) Software Test Engineer
9 8 (5.93%) Development Engineer
9 8 (5.93%) Graduate
9 8 (5.93%) Software Development Engineer
9 8 (5.93%) Test Automation Engineer
9 8 (5.93%) Test Development Engineer
10 7 (5.19%) Junior
10 7 (5.19%) Quality Engineer
10 7 (5.19%) Test Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (24.44%) Playwright
2 4 (2.96%) .NET
2 4 (2.96%) CSS
2 4 (2.96%) HTML
2 4 (2.96%) Swagger
3 3 (2.22%) React
3 3 (2.22%) REST
3 3 (2.22%) RESTful
4 2 (1.48%) CSS3
4 2 (1.48%) Elastic Stack
4 2 (1.48%) Gherkin
4 2 (1.48%) HTML5
4 2 (1.48%) Kafka
4 2 (1.48%) Laravel
4 2 (1.48%) Sass
4 2 (1.48%) Vue
5 1 (0.74%) .NET Framework
5 1 (0.74%) ADO
5 1 (0.74%) RabbitMQ
5 1 (0.74%) Spring
Miscellaneous
1 11 (8.15%) Product Ownership
2 3 (2.22%) Enterprise Software
2 3 (2.22%) Housing Association
2 3 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
3 2 (1.48%) Analytical Mindset
3 2 (1.48%) Embedded Systems
3 2 (1.48%) Greenfield Project
3 2 (1.48%) NHS
3 2 (1.48%) Onboarding
4 1 (0.74%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (0.74%) Hackathon
4 1 (0.74%) Low-Code
4 1 (0.74%) Management Information System
4 1 (0.74%) Mobile App
4 1 (0.74%) Reinsurance
4 1 (0.74%) Video\Live Streaming
4 1 (0.74%) Virtual Team
4 1 (0.74%) Wiki
Operating Systems
1 7 (5.19%) Windows
2 4 (2.96%) Linux
2 4 (2.96%) Windows Server
2 4 (2.96%) Windows Server 2019
3 1 (0.74%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 117 (86.67%) Test Automation
2 72 (53.33%) CI/CD
3 60 (44.44%) Agile
4 58 (42.96%) Software Testing
5 53 (39.26%) DevOps
6 42 (31.11%) Regression Testing
7 38 (28.15%) Continuous Improvement
8 36 (26.67%) Test Strategy
9 33 (24.44%) API Testing
9 33 (24.44%) SDLC
10 29 (21.48%) User Acceptance Testing
11 27 (20.00%) Test Scripting
12 26 (19.26%) Scrum
13 25 (18.52%) Acceptance Criteria
14 22 (16.30%) Defect Management
15 19 (14.07%) Mentoring
16 16 (11.85%) Performance Testing
17 14 (10.37%) Coaching
17 14 (10.37%) Continuous Integration
17 14 (10.37%) Customer Service
Programming Languages
1 25 (18.52%) SQL
2 21 (15.56%) JavaScript
3 16 (11.85%) TypeScript
4 15 (11.11%) C#
5 11 (8.15%) Python
6 7 (5.19%) Java
7 3 (2.22%) Bash
7 3 (2.22%) MATLAB
8 2 (1.48%) C++
8 2 (1.48%) COBOL
8 2 (1.48%) PHP
8 2 (1.48%) PowerShell
8 2 (1.48%) RPG
9 1 (0.74%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 36 (26.67%) ISTQB
2 18 (13.33%) Degree
3 17 (12.59%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
4 9 (6.67%) Security Cleared
5 6 (4.44%) Computer Science Degree
6 4 (2.96%) BPSS Clearance
7 3 (2.22%) Chartered Engineer
7 3 (2.22%) DV Cleared
7 3 (2.22%) Master's Degree
8 2 (1.48%) SC Cleared
9 1 (0.74%) ISEB
9 1 (0.74%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 60 (44.44%) QA
2 29 (21.48%) Accessibility
3 3 (2.22%) ISO/IEC 12207
4 2 (1.48%) GDPR
4 2 (1.48%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.74%) Data Quality
5 1 (0.74%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 5 (3.70%) Active Directory
2 3 (2.22%) Docker
2 3 (2.22%) Terminal Server
2 3 (2.22%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 4 (2.96%) SCCM
1 4 (2.96%) SCOM
2 3 (2.22%) Kubernetes
3 2 (1.48%) Ansible
3 2 (1.48%) Terraform
4 1 (0.74%) Grafana
4 1 (0.74%) Kibana
Vendors
1 12 (8.89%) Microsoft
2 8 (5.93%) Salesforce
3 4 (2.96%) Cisco
3 4 (2.96%) ServiceNow
3 4 (2.96%) VMware
4 3 (2.22%) Juniper
4 3 (2.22%) McAfee
5 2 (1.48%) HP
5 2 (1.48%) IBM
6 1 (0.74%) Dynatrace
6 1 (0.74%) Meraki
6 1 (0.74%) Oracle
6 1 (0.74%) Pega