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 17 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 79 94 96
Rank change year-on-year +15 +2 -24
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,396 1,559 2,058
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.09% 3.16% 2.64%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.86% 3.56% 3.26%
Number of salaries quoted 1,294 734 1,022
10th Percentile £41,250 £38,773 £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% -4.36%
75th Percentile £80,000 £82,751 £77,188
90th Percentile £95,000 £100,000 £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 83,912 43,812 63,193
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.03% 88.75% 81.16%
Number of salaries quoted 58,112 24,707 35,897
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £42,000 £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 17 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 17 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 +4 1,946 £62,500 -2.46% 3,429
UK excluding London +17 1,521 £57,500 - 2,095
Work from Home +16 865 £65,000 +4.00% 1,517
London +3 709 £80,000 - 1,760
North of England +28 385 £57,500 -4.17% 486
South East -4 268 £60,000 +4.35% 446
South West +10 259 £60,000 +12.38% 277
Midlands -5 204 £55,000 -10.57% 207
North West -5 189 £60,000 - 283
Northern Ireland +13 165 £80,000 +45.45% 99
Wales +10 131 £55,000 +4.76% 39
West Midlands -10 115 £55,000 -2.22% 133
North East +15 106 £52,500 +50.00% 63
Yorkshire +3 90 £69,310 +26.02% 141
East Midlands -34 89 £55,000 -12.00% 73
East of England -33 77 £50,000 -14.53% 230
Scotland -48 47 £61,250 -12.50% 322

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 57 (2.38%) Confluence
2 31 (1.29%) Apache Spark
3 24 (1.00%) Apache
3 24 (1.00%) SharePoint
4 18 (0.75%) Apache Airflow
5 17 (0.71%) Jupyter
6 14 (0.58%) Anypoint
6 14 (0.58%) Mule
7 13 (0.54%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 13 (0.54%) CMS
8 6 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
8 6 (0.25%) Umbraco
9 5 (0.21%) Cloud Foundry
9 5 (0.21%) nginx
9 5 (0.21%) SAS
10 4 (0.17%) Headless CMS
10 4 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
10 4 (0.17%) WinCC
11 3 (0.13%) Camunda
11 3 (0.13%) WordPress
Applications
1 81 (3.38%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
2 14 (0.58%) Simulink
3 9 (0.38%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.25%) Lightworks
4 6 (0.25%) Moqups
5 4 (0.17%) Chatbot
6 3 (0.13%) MS Visio
7 2 (0.083%) CANalyzer
7 2 (0.083%) EPLAN
7 2 (0.083%) PlantUML
8 1 (0.042%) AutoCAD
8 1 (0.042%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.042%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 68 (2.84%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.13%) Dynamics GP
3 11 (0.46%) SAP S/4HANA
4 5 (0.21%) Visualfiles
5 3 (0.13%) Magento
5 3 (0.13%) Oracle Applications
5 3 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
5 3 (0.13%) SAP ERP
6 2 (0.083%) Endur
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%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.042%) Findur
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
1 808 (33.72%) AWS
2 683 (28.51%) Azure
3 318 (13.27%) SaaS
4 255 (10.64%) GCP
5 248 (10.35%) Azure DevOps
6 203 (8.47%) GitHub
7 193 (8.06%) Serverless
8 106 (4.42%) GitHub Actions
9 99 (4.13%) AWS CloudFormation
10 93 (3.88%) Amazon EKS
11 87 (3.63%) AWS Lambda
12 81 (3.38%) Amazon S3
13 63 (2.63%) Power Platform
14 59 (2.46%) Google Ads
14 59 (2.46%) Meta Ads
15 54 (2.25%) Azure Logic Apps
16 53 (2.21%) Azure Service Bus
17 48 (2.00%) Azure Monitor
18 44 (1.84%) Azure Functions
19 40 (1.67%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 57 (2.38%) Broadband
2 29 (1.21%) TCP/IP
3 24 (1.00%) Firewall
4 23 (0.96%) DNS
5 17 (0.71%) SSL
6 16 (0.67%) Wireless
7 13 (0.54%) DHCP
7 13 (0.54%) DMARC
7 13 (0.54%) HTTP
7 13 (0.54%) Modbus
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%) LTE
10 9 (0.38%) 3GPP
10 9 (0.38%) Ethernet
10 9 (0.38%) Network Security
11 7 (0.29%) RANAP
11 7 (0.29%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 138 (5.76%) PostgreSQL
2 127 (5.30%) NoSQL
3 88 (3.67%) MongoDB
4 82 (3.42%) SQL Server
5 66 (2.75%) Relational Database
6 46 (1.92%) DynamoDB
7 41 (1.71%) MySQL
8 40 (1.67%) Redis
9 36 (1.50%) Power BI
10 35 (1.46%) Data Warehouse
11 32 (1.34%) Data Lake
12 29 (1.21%) BigQuery
13 24 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
14 21 (0.88%) Amazon RDS
14 21 (0.88%) Semantic Layer
15 20 (0.83%) Metadata
16 16 (0.67%) Elasticsearch
17 13 (0.54%) Spark SQL
18 12 (0.50%) Amazon Redshift
18 12 (0.50%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 364 (15.19%) Git
2 235 (9.81%) GitLab
3 214 (8.93%) Jenkins
4 165 (6.89%) Selenium
5 153 (6.39%) JIRA
6 108 (4.51%) Cypress.io
7 107 (4.47%) Cucumber
8 96 (4.01%) Postman
9 70 (2.92%) TeamCity
10 52 (2.17%) JMeter
11 47 (1.96%) JUnit
12 41 (1.71%) REST Assured
13 34 (1.42%) Zephyr
14 31 (1.29%) Gatling
15 30 (1.25%) SonarQube
16 27 (1.13%) LabVIEW
17 25 (1.04%) TestRail
18 24 (1.00%) Bitbucket
18 24 (1.00%) Robot Framework
19 23 (0.96%) Maven
General
1 664 (27.71%) Social Skills
2 584 (24.37%) Finance
3 363 (15.15%) Analytical Skills
4 265 (11.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 226 (9.43%) Public Sector
6 203 (8.47%) Banking
6 203 (8.47%) Law
7 166 (6.93%) Marketing
8 144 (6.01%) Legal
9 124 (5.18%) Retail
10 108 (4.51%) Manufacturing
11 86 (3.59%) Electronics
12 80 (3.34%) Financial Institution
13 59 (2.46%) Back Office
14 48 (2.00%) Aerospace
15 44 (1.84%) Telecoms
16 40 (1.67%) Games
17 33 (1.38%) Documentation Skills
18 29 (1.21%) Automotive
19 25 (1.04%) Front Office
Job Titles
1 665 (27.75%) Senior
2 353 (14.73%) Software Engineer
3 338 (14.11%) Developer
4 329 (13.73%) Lead
5 253 (10.56%) Test Engineer
6 127 (5.30%) Senior Developer
7 116 (4.84%) Java Engineer
8 104 (4.34%) Senior Software Engineer
9 103 (4.30%) DevOps Engineer
10 102 (4.26%) QA Engineer
11 88 (3.67%) Test Automation Engineer
12 80 (3.34%) Full-Stack Engineer
13 75 (3.13%) Analyst
14 72 (3.01%) Data Engineer
15 69 (2.88%) Lead Software Engineer
16 62 (2.59%) Architect
16 62 (2.59%) Principal Engineer
17 61 (2.55%) Marketing Manager
17 61 (2.55%) Software Developer
17 61 (2.55%) Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 331 (13.81%) Terraform
2 244 (10.18%) REST
3 238 (9.93%) React
4 224 (9.35%) .NET
5 209 (8.72%) Playwright
6 200 (8.35%) Node.js
7 195 (8.14%) Spring
8 194 (8.10%) RESTful
9 144 (6.01%) Spring Boot
10 133 (5.55%) Kafka
11 127 (5.30%) CSS
12 119 (4.97%) HTML
13 115 (4.80%) AngularJS
14 73 (3.05%) OAuth
15 66 (2.75%) Middleware
15 66 (2.75%) OAuth2
16 61 (2.55%) JSON
17 53 (2.21%) Vue
18 52 (2.17%) Next.js
19 51 (2.13%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 423 (17.65%) Cloud Native
2 290 (12.10%) Product Ownership
3 207 (8.64%) Distributed Systems
4 104 (4.34%) Mobile App
5 103 (4.30%) Onboarding
6 95 (3.96%) Enterprise Software
7 90 (3.76%) Public Cloud
8 84 (3.51%) Blog
9 77 (3.21%) Virtual Team
10 66 (2.75%) Legacy Systems
11 64 (2.67%) Marketing Technology
12 54 (2.25%) Algorithms
13 53 (2.21%) Cyber Threat
14 49 (2.05%) Low-Code
15 46 (1.92%) Self-Motivation
16 45 (1.88%) Embedded Systems
17 43 (1.79%) Data Structures
18 41 (1.71%) e-Learning
19 39 (1.63%) Management Information System
20 35 (1.46%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 186 (7.76%) Linux
2 103 (4.30%) Windows
3 63 (2.63%) Android
4 58 (2.42%) Unix
5 56 (2.34%) Apple iOS
6 9 (0.38%) Embedded Linux
6 9 (0.38%) Windows Server
7 8 (0.33%) CentOS
8 7 (0.29%) FreeRTOS
9 4 (0.17%) AIX
9 4 (0.17%) Debian
9 4 (0.17%) Kali Linux
9 4 (0.17%) VMS
10 3 (0.13%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.083%) OpenWrt
12 1 (0.042%) Mac OS
12 1 (0.042%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 1 (0.042%) ThreadX
12 1 (0.042%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,347 (56.22%) CI/CD
2 1,009 (42.11%) Agile
3 862 (35.98%) DevOps
4 775 (32.35%) Software Engineering
5 701 (29.26%) Continuous Improvement
6 623 (26.00%) Mentoring
7 597 (24.92%) AI
8 545 (22.75%) Problem-Solving
9 443 (18.49%) Microservices
10 419 (17.49%) Software Testing
11 389 (16.24%) Infrastructure as Code
12 323 (13.48%) Test Strategy
13 302 (12.60%) Validation
14 295 (12.31%) Code Quality
15 292 (12.19%) Coaching
16 288 (12.02%) Observability
17 276 (11.52%) Full-Stack Development
18 264 (11.02%) Containerisation
19 260 (10.85%) Technical Leadership
20 256 (10.68%) Decision-Making
Programming Languages
1 689 (28.76%) Python
2 584 (24.37%) Java
3 456 (19.03%) SQL
4 439 (18.32%) JavaScript
5 348 (14.52%) TypeScript
6 336 (14.02%) C#
7 124 (5.18%) C++
8 105 (4.38%) PowerShell
9 98 (4.09%) Go
10 90 (3.76%) Bash
11 80 (3.34%) C
12 35 (1.46%) Kotlin
12 35 (1.46%) PHP
13 32 (1.34%) Rust
14 28 (1.17%) Ruby
15 27 (1.13%) Groovy
16 25 (1.04%) MATLAB
17 24 (1.00%) Bicep
18 21 (0.88%) Swift
19 15 (0.63%) Scala
Qualifications
1 348 (14.52%) Security Cleared
2 247 (10.31%) Degree
3 213 (8.89%) SC Cleared
4 105 (4.38%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (3.38%) ISTQB
6 64 (2.67%) DV Cleared
7 57 (2.38%) AWS Certification
7 57 (2.38%) CISSP
8 54 (2.25%) CISM
8 54 (2.25%) ITIL Certification
9 47 (1.96%) Master's Degree
10 41 (1.71%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 36 (1.50%) HNC
12 32 (1.34%) BPSS Clearance
12 32 (1.34%) HND
13 17 (0.71%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.67%) ISEB
15 13 (0.54%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 12 (0.50%) Azure Certification
17 11 (0.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 559 (23.33%) QA
2 204 (8.51%) Accessibility
3 83 (3.46%) Data Quality
4 69 (2.88%) WCAG
5 56 (2.34%) NIST
6 48 (2.00%) ISO 22301
7 41 (1.71%) GDPR
8 13 (0.54%) SLA
9 11 (0.46%) GRC
10 9 (0.38%) SOC 2
10 9 (0.38%) Software Quality Assurance
11 8 (0.33%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 8 (0.33%) MISRA
12 6 (0.25%) COBIT
12 6 (0.25%) JTAG
12 6 (0.25%) PMO
13 5 (0.21%) NCSC
14 4 (0.17%) ECSS
14 4 (0.17%) ISO 20022
14 4 (0.17%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 331 (13.81%) Docker
2 43 (1.79%) Firmware
3 14 (0.58%) Active Directory
4 12 (0.50%) VMware Infrastructure
5 11 (0.46%) Embedded Firmware
6 8 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
7 5 (0.21%) Hyper-V
8 3 (0.13%) KVM
9 2 (0.083%) ProxySG
10 1 (0.042%) IAG
10 1 (0.042%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.042%) QEMU
10 1 (0.042%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 343 (14.32%) Kubernetes
2 150 (6.26%) Grafana
3 79 (3.30%) Ansible
4 63 (2.63%) Prometheus
5 29 (1.21%) Argo
6 17 (0.71%) Kibana
7 15 (0.63%) Puppet
8 14 (0.58%) CloudHub
9 9 (0.38%) logstash
9 9 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
9 9 (0.38%) Rancher
10 8 (0.33%) HP Fortify
10 8 (0.33%) Single Sign-On
11 7 (0.29%) Functional Safety
12 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
12 6 (0.25%) vCenter Server
13 5 (0.21%) Packer
14 3 (0.13%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 3 (0.13%) SCCM
14 3 (0.13%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 259 (10.81%) Microsoft
2 124 (5.18%) Google
3 62 (2.59%) Databricks
4 60 (2.50%) Salesforce
5 53 (2.21%) Oracle
6 49 (2.05%) SAP
7 44 (1.84%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.50%) Splunk
9 28 (1.17%) Dynatrace
10 24 (1.00%) Pega
11 20 (0.83%) MuleSoft
12 19 (0.79%) AppDynamics
12 19 (0.79%) VMware
13 17 (0.71%) IBM
14 16 (0.67%) OpenAI
15 15 (0.63%) Allen-Bradley
15 15 (0.63%) Atlassian
15 15 (0.63%) Red Hat
16 14 (0.58%) Adobe
17 13 (0.54%) SendGrid