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 4 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 82 99
Rank change year-on-year -9 +17 -65
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,807 1,578 2,694
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.95% 3.61% 2.62%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.65% 3.88% 3.16%
Number of salaries quoted 1,124 796 1,731
10th Percentile £42,125 £40,000 £36,250
25th Percentile £48,750 £47,875 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £62,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year - +8.70% -11.54%
75th Percentile £83,750 £82,500 £72,433
90th Percentile £97,500 £99,750 £87,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £57,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +4.35% +9.52% -8.70%

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 68,107 40,669 85,373
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.51% 93.11% 83.11%
Number of salaries quoted 45,062 21,401 61,158
10th Percentile £30,000 £29,500 £29,250
25th Percentile £41,114 £40,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £57,500 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.35% +4.55% -9.69%
75th Percentile £78,750 £77,500 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £100,000 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £52,500 £50,967 £50,000
% change year-on-year +3.01% +1.93% -9.09%

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 4 June 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 4 June 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 -5 1,583 £62,500 - 796
UK excluding London -37 983 £60,000 +4.35% 569
Work from Home +12 737 £65,000 +8.33% 706
London +28 659 £80,000 +10.34% 321
North of England -34 271 £61,250 +2.48% 160
South East -36 200 £60,000 +9.09% 132
South West -23 176 £55,000 -8.33% 66
Midlands -27 166 £58,750 +2.17% 80
North West -15 140 £60,000 -7.69% 96
West Midlands -42 83 £61,000 -6.15% 53
East Midlands -14 82 £55,000 +19.57% 27
Yorkshire -36 67 £75,000 +49.34% 38
North East 0 64 £52,500 -8.70% 27
East of England -27 64 £50,000 -12.28% 63
Scotland -35 57 £60,000 -2.04% 37
Wales 0 51 £56,250 -2.17% 15
Northern Ireland -37 11 £80,000 +45.45% 29

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 36 (1.99%) Confluence
2 27 (1.49%) Apache Airflow
3 20 (1.11%) Apache Spark
4 19 (1.05%) Jupyter
5 18 (1.00%) Apache
6 14 (0.77%) SharePoint
7 10 (0.55%) Palantir Foundry
8 9 (0.50%) CMS
8 9 (0.50%) IIS
9 8 (0.44%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 8 (0.44%) Appian
10 5 (0.28%) Anypoint
10 5 (0.28%) Umbraco
11 4 (0.22%) Mule
11 4 (0.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
11 4 (0.22%) SAS
12 3 (0.17%) WordPress
13 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
13 2 (0.11%) nginx
13 2 (0.11%) Oracle Application Server
Applications
1 15 (0.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 11 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
3 6 (0.33%) PlantUML
3 6 (0.33%) Simulink
4 5 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 3 (0.17%) CANalyzer
5 3 (0.17%) Fusion 360
6 2 (0.11%) Adobe Creative Suite
6 2 (0.11%) MS Visio
7 1 (0.055%) Chatbot
7 1 (0.055%) Lightworks
7 1 (0.055%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 10 (0.55%) Dynamics CRM
2 7 (0.39%) Oracle ERP
3 5 (0.28%) Visualfiles
4 4 (0.22%) Dynamics AX
4 4 (0.22%) Oracle EBS
5 3 (0.17%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 3 (0.17%) SAP S/4HANA
6 2 (0.11%) Shopify
6 2 (0.11%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.11%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.055%) Elite 3E
7 1 (0.055%) Endur
7 1 (0.055%) Findur
7 1 (0.055%) FLEXCUBE
7 1 (0.055%) Magento
7 1 (0.055%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.055%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.055%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.055%) Oracle Financials
7 1 (0.055%) Oracle SCM
Cloud Services
1 610 (33.76%) AWS
2 558 (30.88%) Azure
3 250 (13.84%) Azure DevOps
4 215 (11.90%) GCP
5 168 (9.30%) Serverless
6 157 (8.69%) GitHub
7 129 (7.14%) SaaS
8 75 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
8 75 (4.15%) GitHub Actions
9 74 (4.10%) AWS Lambda
10 72 (3.98%) Amazon S3
11 66 (3.65%) AWS CloudFormation
12 57 (3.15%) PaaS
13 47 (2.60%) Power Platform
14 45 (2.49%) Azure Service Bus
15 42 (2.32%) dbt
16 41 (2.27%) Azure Data Factory
17 40 (2.21%) Azure Monitor
18 39 (2.16%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 39 (2.16%) Azure Logic Apps
Communications & Networking
1 51 (2.82%) Broadband
2 26 (1.44%) Firewall
3 13 (0.72%) CHAP
3 13 (0.72%) DNS
4 12 (0.66%) WAN
5 11 (0.61%) SD-WAN
6 10 (0.55%) 5G
7 7 (0.39%) DMARC
8 6 (0.33%) Bluetooth
8 6 (0.33%) HTTP
8 6 (0.33%) Wireless
9 5 (0.28%) MQTT
9 5 (0.28%) SMS
9 5 (0.28%) VPN
9 5 (0.28%) Wi-Fi
9 5 (0.28%) ZigBee
10 4 (0.22%) DHCP
10 4 (0.22%) LTE
10 4 (0.22%) SSL
10 4 (0.22%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 128 (7.08%) NoSQL
2 110 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
3 88 (4.87%) MongoDB
4 70 (3.87%) SQL Server
5 39 (2.16%) DynamoDB
6 29 (1.60%) Data Warehouse
6 29 (1.60%) MySQL
6 29 (1.60%) Relational Database
7 26 (1.44%) Power BI
8 20 (1.11%) Amazon RDS
9 18 (1.00%) BigQuery
9 18 (1.00%) Metadata
9 18 (1.00%) Spark SQL
10 16 (0.89%) Redis
11 15 (0.83%) Oracle Database
12 12 (0.66%) Data Lake
13 11 (0.61%) Semantic Layer
14 10 (0.55%) Amazon Athena
14 10 (0.55%) Pinecone
15 8 (0.44%) Flink
Development Applications
1 208 (11.51%) Git
2 154 (8.52%) Jenkins
3 144 (7.97%) Selenium
4 142 (7.86%) GitLab
5 111 (6.14%) JIRA
6 81 (4.48%) Cypress.io
7 73 (4.04%) Cucumber
8 61 (3.38%) TeamCity
9 60 (3.32%) Postman
10 42 (2.32%) JMeter
11 34 (1.88%) REST Assured
12 29 (1.60%) JUnit
12 29 (1.60%) SpecFlow
13 26 (1.44%) CircleCI
14 23 (1.27%) LabVIEW
15 21 (1.16%) TestRail
15 21 (1.16%) Zephyr
16 19 (1.05%) Crashlytics
17 18 (1.00%) Gatling
17 18 (1.00%) MLflow
General
1 461 (25.51%) Social Skills
2 427 (23.63%) Finance
3 190 (10.51%) Banking
4 183 (10.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 153 (8.47%) Public Sector
6 152 (8.41%) Analytical Skills
7 118 (6.53%) Law
8 97 (5.37%) Retail
9 62 (3.43%) Financial Institution
10 59 (3.27%) Manufacturing
11 57 (3.15%) Electronics
12 48 (2.66%) Back Office
13 43 (2.38%) Games
14 33 (1.83%) Legal
15 32 (1.77%) Front Office
16 31 (1.72%) Marketing
17 19 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
18 18 (1.00%) Documentation Skills
18 18 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
19 17 (0.94%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 477 (26.40%) Senior
2 295 (16.33%) Lead
3 266 (14.72%) Software Engineer
4 253 (14.00%) Developer
5 213 (11.79%) Test Engineer
6 114 (6.31%) Senior Developer
7 105 (5.81%) Java Engineer
8 88 (4.87%) Test Automation Engineer
9 87 (4.81%) QA Engineer
10 80 (4.43%) Tester
11 78 (4.32%) Senior Software Engineer
12 75 (4.15%) Test Leader
13 64 (3.54%) Full-Stack Engineer
14 61 (3.38%) Data Engineer
15 58 (3.21%) Architect
16 56 (3.10%) Senior Test Engineer
17 55 (3.04%) DevOps Engineer
18 49 (2.71%) Analyst
19 47 (2.60%) Python Developer
20 46 (2.55%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 193 (10.68%) .NET
2 189 (10.46%) React
3 158 (8.74%) REST
4 154 (8.52%) Playwright
5 151 (8.36%) RESTful
6 135 (7.47%) Spring
7 130 (7.19%) Node.js
8 96 (5.31%) Kafka
9 95 (5.26%) Spring Boot
10 67 (3.71%) AngularJS
11 63 (3.49%) HTML
12 62 (3.43%) CSS
13 55 (3.04%) OAuth
14 46 (2.55%) OAuth2
15 43 (2.38%) JSON
15 43 (2.38%) RabbitMQ
16 36 (1.99%) .NET Framework
16 36 (1.99%) ASP.NET
16 36 (1.99%) pytest
16 36 (1.99%) PyTorch
Miscellaneous
1 317 (17.54%) Cloud Native
2 190 (10.51%) Product Ownership
3 125 (6.92%) Distributed Systems
4 95 (5.26%) Mobile App
5 58 (3.21%) Management Information System
6 53 (2.93%) Public Cloud
7 52 (2.88%) Enterprise Software
8 49 (2.71%) Algorithms
9 47 (2.60%) Onboarding
10 43 (2.38%) Low-Code
11 39 (2.16%) Data Structures
12 37 (2.05%) Greenfield Project
12 37 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
13 33 (1.83%) Self-Motivation
14 25 (1.38%) Blog
14 25 (1.38%) Embedded Systems
14 25 (1.38%) Video\Live Streaming
15 24 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
16 23 (1.27%) Hedge funds
17 21 (1.16%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 157 (8.69%) Linux
2 76 (4.21%) Windows
3 70 (3.87%) Apple iOS
4 59 (3.27%) Android
5 50 (2.77%) Unix
6 9 (0.50%) CentOS
7 8 (0.44%) Windows Server
8 4 (0.22%) Kali Linux
8 4 (0.22%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 3 (0.17%) FreeRTOS
9 3 (0.17%) Ubuntu
10 2 (0.11%) AIX
10 2 (0.11%) Debian
10 2 (0.11%) Windows Server 2019
11 1 (0.055%) ThreadX
11 1 (0.055%) VxWorks
11 1 (0.055%) Windows 10
11 1 (0.055%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 988 (54.68%) CI/CD
2 752 (41.62%) Agile
3 620 (34.31%) DevOps
4 490 (27.12%) Software Engineering
5 442 (24.46%) Continuous Improvement
6 441 (24.41%) Mentoring
7 367 (20.31%) Problem-Solving
8 326 (18.04%) Microservices
9 322 (17.82%) Infrastructure as Code
10 294 (16.27%) AI
11 277 (15.33%) Software Testing
12 249 (13.78%) Observability
13 237 (13.12%) Containerisation
14 233 (12.89%) Coaching
15 221 (12.23%) Full-Stack Development
16 219 (12.12%) Test Strategy
17 199 (11.01%) Validation
18 198 (10.96%) Clean Code
19 178 (9.85%) Technical Leadership
20 172 (9.52%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 564 (31.21%) Python
2 494 (27.34%) Java
3 307 (16.99%) SQL
4 264 (14.61%) JavaScript
5 228 (12.62%) C#
6 226 (12.51%) TypeScript
7 95 (5.26%) C++
8 80 (4.43%) Bash
9 75 (4.15%) Go
10 68 (3.76%) PowerShell
11 57 (3.15%) C
12 32 (1.77%) Kotlin
13 31 (1.72%) Bicep
13 31 (1.72%) Rust
14 24 (1.33%) Swift
15 22 (1.22%) PHP
16 21 (1.16%) MATLAB
17 16 (0.89%) Groovy
17 16 (0.89%) PL/SQL
18 15 (0.83%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 235 (13.00%) Degree
2 204 (11.29%) Security Cleared
3 122 (6.75%) SC Cleared
4 93 (5.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 77 (4.26%) ISTQB
6 42 (2.32%) DV Cleared
7 30 (1.66%) Master's Degree
8 29 (1.60%) AWS Certification
9 21 (1.16%) CISSP
10 20 (1.11%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 18 (1.00%) DBS Check
12 17 (0.94%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 15 (0.83%) HND
14 13 (0.72%) CGEIT
14 13 (0.72%) CISA
14 13 (0.72%) CISM
14 13 (0.72%) FFIEC
14 13 (0.72%) PhD
14 13 (0.72%) SANS
15 11 (0.61%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 407 (22.52%) QA
2 157 (8.69%) Accessibility
3 82 (4.54%) Data Quality
4 50 (2.77%) GDPR
5 28 (1.55%) WCAG
6 25 (1.38%) NIST
7 18 (1.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 15 (0.83%) SLA
9 14 (0.77%) COBIT
10 12 (0.66%) Software Quality Assurance
11 11 (0.61%) GRC
12 9 (0.50%) ISO 22301
13 8 (0.44%) ISO 9001
14 7 (0.39%) SOC 2
15 6 (0.33%) PMO
16 5 (0.28%) JTAG
17 4 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
17 4 (0.22%) Sarbanes-Oxley
18 3 (0.17%) ISO 13485
18 3 (0.17%) PERC
System Software
1 250 (13.84%) Docker
2 24 (1.33%) VMware Infrastructure
3 20 (1.11%) Firmware
4 18 (1.00%) Hyper-V
5 16 (0.89%) Active Directory
6 15 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
7 14 (0.77%) KVM
8 8 (0.44%) Embedded Firmware
9 2 (0.11%) Terminal Server
9 2 (0.11%) vSphere
10 1 (0.055%) IAG
10 1 (0.055%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.055%) Xen
Systems Management
1 307 (16.99%) Terraform
2 288 (15.94%) Kubernetes
3 136 (7.53%) Grafana
4 75 (4.15%) Ansible
5 66 (3.65%) Prometheus
6 26 (1.44%) Argo
7 17 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
8 13 (0.72%) Kibana
9 8 (0.44%) logstash
10 5 (0.28%) HP Fortify
10 5 (0.28%) SCCM
10 5 (0.28%) SCOM
11 4 (0.22%) CloudHub
11 4 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
11 4 (0.22%) Packer
11 4 (0.22%) vCenter Server
12 3 (0.17%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.17%) Puppet
12 3 (0.17%) Rancher
12 3 (0.17%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 138 (7.64%) Microsoft
2 55 (3.04%) Databricks
2 55 (3.04%) Oracle
3 49 (2.71%) Salesforce
4 40 (2.21%) VMware
5 36 (1.99%) Google
6 24 (1.33%) ServiceNow
7 23 (1.27%) Splunk
8 21 (1.16%) OpenAI
9 19 (1.05%) Dynatrace
10 18 (1.00%) SAP
11 16 (0.89%) Braze
12 14 (0.77%) Amplitude
13 13 (0.72%) CrowdStrike
13 13 (0.72%) IFS
13 13 (0.72%) MuleSoft
14 12 (0.66%) AppDynamics
14 12 (0.66%) Commvault
14 12 (0.66%) Foundry
15 11 (0.61%) Atlassian