Test Automation Job Trends

Automated Testing
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Test Automation skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 22 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 91 85
Rank change year-on-year +11 -6 -13
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,405 1,535 2,178
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.07% 3.14% 2.86%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.83% 3.54% 3.52%
Number of salaries quoted 1,298 721 986
10th Percentile £41,250 £38,825 £38,750
25th Percentile £47,500 £50,000 £46,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £62,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year - +4.17% -4.00%
75th Percentile £80,000 £83,750 £77,500
90th Percentile £93,825 £102,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £57,500 £55,000
% change year-on-year - +4.55% -4.35%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

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.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 84,843 43,391 61,954
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.02% 88.66% 81.33%
Number of salaries quoted 58,659 24,441 34,825
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,250
25th Percentile £41,969 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -9.52% -2.78%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Test Automation job vacancy trend in the UK

Test Automation
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Test Automation.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Test Automation

Test Automation
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 22 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Test Automation within the UK over the 6 months to 22 September 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 +7 1,959 £62,500 -0.91% 2,777
UK excluding London +13 1,531 £57,500 - 1,798
Work from Home +12 862 £67,500 +8.00% 1,171
London -2 707 £80,000 - 1,249
North of England +20 389 £57,500 -4.17% 449
South East +6 272 £60,000 +4.35% 397
South West +13 258 £60,000 +14.29% 262
Midlands -9 206 £54,000 -10.00% 209
North West -12 189 £60,000 - 249
Northern Ireland +10 164 £80,000 +45.45% 63
Wales +9 130 £55,000 +2.33% 47
West Midlands -16 118 £52,500 -3.23% 143
North East +17 108 £55,000 +78.86% 72
Yorkshire +12 95 £69,310 +26.02% 128
East Midlands -23 88 £54,000 -13.60% 65
East of England -25 82 £47,500 -18.80% 170
Scotland -57 45 £61,250 -12.50% 210

Test Automation
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 56 (2.33%) Confluence
2 33 (1.37%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.08%) Apache
4 24 (1.00%) SharePoint
5 19 (0.79%) Apache Airflow
6 18 (0.75%) Jupyter
7 14 (0.58%) Anypoint
7 14 (0.58%) CMS
7 14 (0.58%) Mule
8 13 (0.54%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 8 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
10 6 (0.25%) nginx
10 6 (0.25%) Umbraco
11 5 (0.21%) Cloud Foundry
11 5 (0.21%) Headless CMS
11 5 (0.21%) SAS
11 5 (0.21%) WinCC
12 4 (0.17%) Camunda
12 4 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
13 3 (0.12%) OpenStack
Applications
1 81 (3.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
2 14 (0.58%) Simulink
3 9 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.25%) Lightworks
4 6 (0.25%) Moqups
5 5 (0.21%) Chatbot
6 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
7 2 (0.083%) CANalyzer
7 2 (0.083%) EPLAN
7 2 (0.083%) PlantUML
7 2 (0.083%) SOLIDWORKS
8 1 (0.042%) AutoCAD
8 1 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 68 (2.83%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.12%) Dynamics GP
3 11 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
4 5 (0.21%) Visualfiles
5 3 (0.12%) Magento
5 3 (0.12%) Oracle Applications
5 3 (0.12%) Payment Gateway
5 3 (0.12%) SAP ERP
6 2 (0.083%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.083%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.083%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.083%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.042%) Adobe Campaign
7 1 (0.042%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.042%) Endur
7 1 (0.042%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.042%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.042%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.042%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.042%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 804 (33.43%) AWS
2 679 (28.23%) Azure
3 322 (13.39%) SaaS
4 253 (10.52%) GCP
5 247 (10.27%) Azure DevOps
6 204 (8.48%) GitHub
7 198 (8.23%) Serverless
8 111 (4.62%) GitHub Actions
9 99 (4.12%) AWS CloudFormation
10 98 (4.07%) Amazon EKS
11 90 (3.74%) AWS Lambda
12 84 (3.49%) Amazon S3
13 65 (2.70%) Power Platform
14 59 (2.45%) Google Ads
14 59 (2.45%) Meta Ads
15 57 (2.37%) Azure Service Bus
16 56 (2.33%) Azure Logic Apps
17 53 (2.20%) Azure Monitor
18 49 (2.04%) Azure Functions
19 41 (1.70%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 56 (2.33%) Broadband
2 29 (1.21%) TCP/IP
3 26 (1.08%) DNS
3 26 (1.08%) Firewall
4 17 (0.71%) SSL
5 16 (0.67%) Wireless
6 14 (0.58%) DMARC
6 14 (0.58%) Modbus
7 13 (0.54%) DHCP
7 13 (0.54%) HTTP
7 13 (0.54%) MQTT
7 13 (0.54%) Wi-Fi
8 11 (0.46%) 5G
8 11 (0.46%) WAN
9 10 (0.42%) Ethernet
9 10 (0.42%) LTE
9 10 (0.42%) Network Security
10 9 (0.37%) 3GPP
11 7 (0.29%) GSM
11 7 (0.29%) UMTS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 144 (5.99%) PostgreSQL
2 124 (5.16%) NoSQL
3 90 (3.74%) MongoDB
4 82 (3.41%) SQL Server
5 68 (2.83%) Relational Database
6 47 (1.95%) Redis
7 45 (1.87%) DynamoDB
8 41 (1.70%) MySQL
9 38 (1.58%) Power BI
10 35 (1.46%) Data Warehouse
11 34 (1.41%) Data Lake
12 30 (1.25%) BigQuery
13 25 (1.04%) Amazon Athena
14 24 (1.00%) Amazon RDS
15 22 (0.91%) Metadata
15 22 (0.91%) Semantic Layer
16 15 (0.62%) Elasticsearch
17 14 (0.58%) Amazon Aurora
17 14 (0.58%) Azure SQL Database
18 13 (0.54%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 370 (15.38%) Git
2 239 (9.94%) GitLab
3 217 (9.02%) Jenkins
4 163 (6.78%) Selenium
5 150 (6.24%) JIRA
6 107 (4.45%) Cucumber
7 105 (4.37%) Cypress.io
8 92 (3.83%) Postman
9 70 (2.91%) TeamCity
10 50 (2.08%) JMeter
11 48 (2.00%) JUnit
12 38 (1.58%) REST Assured
13 33 (1.37%) Zephyr
14 31 (1.29%) Gatling
15 30 (1.25%) SonarQube
16 28 (1.16%) LabVIEW
17 24 (1.00%) Bitbucket
17 24 (1.00%) Robot Framework
17 24 (1.00%) TestRail
18 23 (0.96%) Maven
General
1 669 (27.82%) Social Skills
2 583 (24.24%) Finance
3 373 (15.51%) Analytical Skills
4 268 (11.14%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 228 (9.48%) Public Sector
6 203 (8.44%) Banking
6 203 (8.44%) Law
7 170 (7.07%) Marketing
8 141 (5.86%) Legal
9 126 (5.24%) Retail
10 116 (4.82%) Manufacturing
11 88 (3.66%) Electronics
12 80 (3.33%) Financial Institution
13 60 (2.49%) Back Office
14 51 (2.12%) Aerospace
15 43 (1.79%) Telecoms
16 38 (1.58%) Games
17 33 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
18 30 (1.25%) Automotive
19 24 (1.00%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 659 (27.40%) Senior
2 352 (14.64%) Software Engineer
3 334 (13.89%) Developer
4 328 (13.64%) Lead
5 250 (10.40%) Test Engineer
6 120 (4.99%) Senior Developer
7 113 (4.70%) Java Engineer
8 109 (4.53%) DevOps Engineer
9 101 (4.20%) QA Engineer
9 101 (4.20%) Senior Software Engineer
10 87 (3.62%) Test Automation Engineer
11 80 (3.33%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 78 (3.24%) Analyst
13 73 (3.04%) Data Engineer
14 69 (2.87%) Lead Software Engineer
15 67 (2.79%) Architect
16 63 (2.62%) Principal Engineer
16 63 (2.62%) Tester
17 61 (2.54%) Marketing Manager
17 61 (2.54%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 338 (14.05%) Terraform
2 247 (10.27%) REST
3 233 (9.69%) React
4 226 (9.40%) .NET
5 206 (8.57%) Playwright
6 201 (8.36%) Node.js
7 196 (8.15%) RESTful
8 195 (8.11%) Spring
9 144 (5.99%) Spring Boot
10 136 (5.65%) Kafka
11 126 (5.24%) CSS
12 118 (4.91%) HTML
13 116 (4.82%) AngularJS
14 78 (3.24%) OAuth
15 70 (2.91%) Middleware
15 70 (2.91%) OAuth2
16 63 (2.62%) JSON
17 53 (2.20%) Next.js
17 53 (2.20%) PySpark
18 51 (2.12%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 421 (17.51%) Cloud Native
2 288 (11.98%) Product Ownership
3 208 (8.65%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (4.45%) Onboarding
5 102 (4.24%) Mobile App
6 98 (4.07%) Enterprise Software
7 90 (3.74%) Public Cloud
8 84 (3.49%) Blog
9 79 (3.28%) Virtual Team
10 66 (2.74%) Legacy Systems
11 64 (2.66%) Marketing Technology
12 53 (2.20%) Cyber Threat
13 52 (2.16%) Algorithms
14 50 (2.08%) Low-Code
15 48 (2.00%) Self-Motivation
16 47 (1.95%) Embedded Systems
17 43 (1.79%) Data Structures
18 41 (1.70%) e-Learning
19 40 (1.66%) Management Information System
20 37 (1.54%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 182 (7.57%) Linux
2 103 (4.28%) Windows
3 65 (2.70%) Android
4 57 (2.37%) Apple iOS
4 57 (2.37%) Unix
5 9 (0.37%) Embedded Linux
5 9 (0.37%) Windows Server
6 8 (0.33%) CentOS
7 7 (0.29%) FreeRTOS
8 4 (0.17%) AIX
8 4 (0.17%) Debian
8 4 (0.17%) Kali Linux
8 4 (0.17%) VMS
9 3 (0.12%) VxWorks
10 2 (0.083%) OpenWrt
11 1 (0.042%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.042%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
11 1 (0.042%) ThreadX
11 1 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,352 (56.22%) CI/CD
2 1,003 (41.70%) Agile
3 866 (36.01%) DevOps
4 779 (32.39%) Software Engineering
5 708 (29.44%) Continuous Improvement
6 622 (25.86%) Mentoring
7 596 (24.78%) AI
8 554 (23.04%) Problem-Solving
9 447 (18.59%) Microservices
10 423 (17.59%) Software Testing
11 392 (16.30%) Infrastructure as Code
12 319 (13.26%) Test Strategy
13 307 (12.77%) Validation
14 296 (12.31%) Observability
15 293 (12.18%) Code Quality
16 292 (12.14%) Coaching
17 268 (11.14%) Containerisation
17 268 (11.14%) Full-Stack Development
18 263 (10.94%) Technical Leadership
19 258 (10.73%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 688 (28.61%) Python
2 578 (24.03%) Java
3 456 (18.96%) SQL
4 431 (17.92%) JavaScript
5 350 (14.55%) TypeScript
6 336 (13.97%) C#
7 124 (5.16%) C++
8 103 (4.28%) PowerShell
9 97 (4.03%) Go
10 93 (3.87%) Bash
11 79 (3.28%) C
12 36 (1.50%) Kotlin
13 35 (1.46%) PHP
14 32 (1.33%) Rust
15 30 (1.25%) Groovy
16 29 (1.21%) Ruby
17 26 (1.08%) Bicep
18 25 (1.04%) MATLAB
19 21 (0.87%) Swift
20 16 (0.67%) Scala
Qualifications
1 362 (15.05%) Security Cleared
2 251 (10.44%) Degree
3 223 (9.27%) SC Cleared
4 104 (4.32%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (3.28%) ISTQB
6 64 (2.66%) DV Cleared
7 57 (2.37%) AWS Certification
8 56 (2.33%) CISSP
9 54 (2.25%) ITIL Certification
10 53 (2.20%) CISM
11 47 (1.95%) Master's Degree
12 41 (1.70%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 40 (1.66%) HNC
14 34 (1.41%) HND
15 33 (1.37%) BPSS Clearance
16 17 (0.71%) DBS Check
17 16 (0.67%) ISEB
18 15 (0.62%) Azure Certification
19 13 (0.54%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 11 (0.46%) NVQ Level 4
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 555 (23.08%) QA
2 204 (8.48%) Accessibility
3 85 (3.53%) Data Quality
4 68 (2.83%) WCAG
5 55 (2.29%) NIST
6 48 (2.00%) ISO 22301
7 39 (1.62%) GDPR
8 13 (0.54%) SLA
9 10 (0.42%) GRC
10 9 (0.37%) MISRA
10 9 (0.37%) SOC 2
10 9 (0.37%) Software Quality Assurance
11 7 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
12 6 (0.25%) JTAG
12 6 (0.25%) PMO
13 5 (0.21%) COBIT
13 5 (0.21%) NCSC
14 4 (0.17%) IEC 61508
14 4 (0.17%) ISO 20022
14 4 (0.17%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 336 (13.97%) Docker
2 44 (1.83%) Firmware
3 14 (0.58%) Active Directory
4 11 (0.46%) Embedded Firmware
4 11 (0.46%) VMware Infrastructure
5 8 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
6 4 (0.17%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.083%) KVM
7 2 (0.083%) ProxySG
8 1 (0.042%) IAG
8 1 (0.042%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.042%) QEMU
8 1 (0.042%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 347 (14.43%) Kubernetes
2 158 (6.57%) Grafana
3 80 (3.33%) Ansible
4 67 (2.79%) Prometheus
5 30 (1.25%) Argo
6 17 (0.71%) Kibana
7 16 (0.67%) Puppet
8 14 (0.58%) CloudHub
9 12 (0.50%) Rancher
10 11 (0.46%) Microsoft Intune
11 9 (0.37%) logstash
12 8 (0.33%) Functional Safety
12 8 (0.33%) HP Fortify
12 8 (0.33%) Single Sign-On
13 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
13 6 (0.25%) vCenter Server
14 5 (0.21%) Packer
15 3 (0.12%) SCCM
15 3 (0.12%) SCOM
15 3 (0.12%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 262 (10.89%) Microsoft
2 126 (5.24%) Google
3 65 (2.70%) Databricks
4 61 (2.54%) Salesforce
5 54 (2.25%) Oracle
6 50 (2.08%) SAP
7 46 (1.91%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.50%) Splunk
9 35 (1.46%) Dynatrace
10 23 (0.96%) Pega
11 20 (0.83%) MuleSoft
12 19 (0.79%) AppDynamics
13 18 (0.75%) VMware
14 17 (0.71%) IBM
15 16 (0.67%) OpenAI
16 15 (0.62%) Adobe
16 15 (0.62%) Allen-Bradley
16 15 (0.62%) Atlassian
16 15 (0.62%) Red Hat
17 14 (0.58%) SendGrid