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 18 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 81 92 99
Rank change year-on-year +11 +7 -33
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,243 1,638 2,040
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.09% 3.28% 2.46%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.85% 3.68% 3.05%
Number of salaries quoted 1,240 792 1,230
10th Percentile £42,000 £37,500 £38,250
25th Percentile £48,750 £47,500 £46,117
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £62,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £80,250 £82,500 £72,322
90th Percentile £95,125 £97,500 £88,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% - -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 78,793 44,552 66,983
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.35% 89.17% 80.87%
Number of salaries quoted 54,339 25,245 43,003
10th Percentile £31,000 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,750 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.71%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,650 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year +15.79% -5.00% -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 18 August 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 18 August 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 1,820 £65,000 +3.05% 629
UK excluding London +9 1,434 £60,000 +9.09% 524
Work from Home +23 876 £67,500 +8.00% 274
London +1 660 £80,000 - 179
North of England +22 361 £58,750 +2.17% 126
South East 0 258 £62,000 +10.22% 154
South West +5 237 £60,000 +14.29% 92
Midlands -4 194 £60,000 - 80
North West +4 183 £65,000 - 59
Northern Ireland +7 166 £80,000 +45.45% 5
West Midlands -12 104 £62,500 +0.81% 54
Wales +7 103 £55,000 - 4
North East +7 103 £55,000 +59.42% 31
East Midlands -16 89 £57,500 - 26
Yorkshire -13 75 £69,310 +41.45% 36
East of England -42 70 £50,000 -12.28% 58
Scotland -38 58 £62,500 +4.17% 20

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 49 (2.18%) Confluence
2 29 (1.29%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.16%) SharePoint
4 25 (1.11%) Apache
5 24 (1.07%) Apache Airflow
6 17 (0.76%) Jupyter
7 14 (0.62%) Anypoint
7 14 (0.62%) Mule
8 13 (0.58%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 11 (0.49%) CMS
10 5 (0.22%) Cloud Foundry
10 5 (0.22%) IIS
10 5 (0.22%) Microsoft Exchange
10 5 (0.22%) nginx
10 5 (0.22%) Umbraco
11 4 (0.18%) Camunda
11 4 (0.18%) SAS
12 3 (0.13%) Palantir Foundry
12 3 (0.13%) WordPress
13 2 (0.089%) NServiceBus
Applications
1 47 (2.10%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.62%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.53%) Simulink
4 7 (0.31%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.22%) Lightworks
5 5 (0.22%) Moqups
6 4 (0.18%) PlantUML
7 3 (0.13%) CANalyzer
7 3 (0.13%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.13%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.045%) AutoCAD
8 1 (0.045%) Microsoft Project
8 1 (0.045%) SOLIDWORKS
Business Applications
1 67 (2.99%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.20%) Dynamics GP
3 9 (0.40%) SAP S/4HANA
4 5 (0.22%) Visualfiles
5 3 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
5 3 (0.13%) Oracle Applications
5 3 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.089%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.089%) Magento
6 2 (0.089%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.089%) SAP ERP
6 2 (0.089%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.089%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.045%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.045%) Elite 3E
7 1 (0.045%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.045%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.045%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.045%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.045%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 785 (35.00%) AWS
2 671 (29.92%) Azure
3 285 (12.71%) SaaS
4 252 (11.23%) Azure DevOps
5 240 (10.70%) GCP
6 187 (8.34%) GitHub
7 185 (8.25%) Serverless
8 95 (4.24%) AWS CloudFormation
8 95 (4.24%) GitHub Actions
9 80 (3.57%) AWS Lambda
10 73 (3.25%) Amazon S3
11 65 (2.90%) Amazon EKS
12 62 (2.76%) Power Platform
13 53 (2.36%) Azure Service Bus
14 49 (2.18%) Azure Logic Apps
14 49 (2.18%) PaaS
15 44 (1.96%) Azure Monitor
16 42 (1.87%) dbt
17 41 (1.83%) Amazon EC2
18 35 (1.56%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 73 (3.25%) Broadband
2 25 (1.11%) Firewall
3 15 (0.67%) DNS
3 15 (0.67%) SSL
3 15 (0.67%) TCP/IP
3 15 (0.67%) Wireless
4 13 (0.58%) DMARC
4 13 (0.58%) Wi-Fi
5 12 (0.53%) MQTT
6 9 (0.40%) 3GPP
6 9 (0.40%) HTTP
6 9 (0.40%) LTE
6 9 (0.40%) WAN
7 8 (0.36%) DHCP
7 8 (0.36%) Network Security
8 7 (0.31%) CHAP
8 7 (0.31%) Radio Access Network
8 7 (0.31%) RANAP
8 7 (0.31%) SS7
8 7 (0.31%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 129 (5.75%) PostgreSQL
2 121 (5.39%) NoSQL
3 92 (4.10%) MongoDB
4 77 (3.43%) SQL Server
5 58 (2.59%) Relational Database
6 47 (2.10%) DynamoDB
7 37 (1.65%) MySQL
8 33 (1.47%) Data Warehouse
9 31 (1.38%) Power BI
10 28 (1.25%) Redis
11 26 (1.16%) BigQuery
12 22 (0.98%) Data Lake
13 18 (0.80%) Amazon RDS
13 18 (0.80%) Spark SQL
14 17 (0.76%) Metadata
14 17 (0.76%) Semantic Layer
15 16 (0.71%) Amazon Athena
16 13 (0.58%) Elasticsearch
17 12 (0.53%) Oracle Database
18 11 (0.49%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 310 (13.82%) Git
2 206 (9.18%) GitLab
3 202 (9.01%) Jenkins
4 159 (7.09%) Selenium
5 141 (6.29%) JIRA
6 100 (4.46%) Cypress.io
7 98 (4.37%) Cucumber
8 89 (3.97%) Postman
9 53 (2.36%) TeamCity
10 51 (2.27%) JMeter
11 44 (1.96%) JUnit
12 40 (1.78%) REST Assured
13 35 (1.56%) Zephyr
14 31 (1.38%) Gatling
15 29 (1.29%) SonarQube
16 27 (1.20%) TestRail
17 24 (1.07%) Bitbucket
17 24 (1.07%) SpecFlow
18 21 (0.94%) fastlane
19 19 (0.85%) Maven
General
1 628 (28.00%) Social Skills
2 520 (23.18%) Finance
3 300 (13.37%) Analytical Skills
4 236 (10.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 219 (9.76%) Public Sector
6 194 (8.65%) Law
7 181 (8.07%) Banking
8 147 (6.55%) Legal
9 130 (5.80%) Marketing
10 93 (4.15%) Retail
11 87 (3.88%) Manufacturing
12 71 (3.17%) Electronics
13 65 (2.90%) Financial Institution
14 53 (2.36%) Games
15 48 (2.14%) Back Office
16 38 (1.69%) Aerospace
17 35 (1.56%) Telecoms
18 29 (1.29%) Front Office
19 25 (1.11%) Documentation Skills
20 20 (0.89%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 637 (28.40%) Senior
2 356 (15.87%) Lead
3 329 (14.67%) Software Engineer
4 319 (14.22%) Developer
5 235 (10.48%) Test Engineer
6 123 (5.48%) Senior Developer
7 108 (4.81%) Java Engineer
8 99 (4.41%) Senior Software Engineer
9 92 (4.10%) QA Engineer
10 91 (4.06%) DevOps Engineer
11 84 (3.74%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 83 (3.70%) Test Automation Engineer
13 68 (3.03%) Lead Software Engineer
14 67 (2.99%) Architect
14 67 (2.99%) Test Leader
15 65 (2.90%) Data Engineer
16 64 (2.85%) Senior Manager
17 63 (2.81%) Software Developer
17 63 (2.81%) Tester
18 61 (2.72%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 235 (10.48%) React
2 217 (9.67%) .NET
3 209 (9.32%) REST
4 191 (8.52%) Playwright
5 190 (8.47%) Node.js
6 187 (8.34%) Spring
7 182 (8.11%) RESTful
8 139 (6.20%) Spring Boot
9 121 (5.39%) Kafka
10 110 (4.90%) AngularJS
11 98 (4.37%) CSS
12 93 (4.15%) HTML
13 67 (2.99%) OAuth
14 63 (2.81%) Middleware
15 61 (2.72%) OAuth2
16 56 (2.50%) JSON
17 50 (2.23%) Next.js
18 48 (2.14%) Vue
19 47 (2.10%) RabbitMQ
20 44 (1.96%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 380 (16.94%) Cloud Native
2 258 (11.50%) Product Ownership
3 193 (8.60%) Distributed Systems
4 110 (4.90%) Mobile App
5 90 (4.01%) Enterprise Software
6 77 (3.43%) Blog
7 76 (3.39%) Public Cloud
7 76 (3.39%) Virtual Team
8 73 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
9 66 (2.94%) Onboarding
10 64 (2.85%) Marketing Technology
11 61 (2.72%) Algorithms
12 60 (2.67%) Cyber Threat
13 53 (2.36%) Low-Code
14 49 (2.18%) Management Information System
15 46 (2.05%) Self-Motivation
16 45 (2.01%) Data Structures
17 38 (1.69%) Greenfield Project
18 36 (1.60%) Embedded Systems
19 34 (1.52%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 189 (8.43%) Linux
2 101 (4.50%) Windows
3 63 (2.81%) Apple iOS
4 58 (2.59%) Android
5 52 (2.32%) Unix
6 12 (0.53%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.31%) CentOS
7 7 (0.31%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.27%) FreeRTOS
9 5 (0.22%) Kali Linux
10 4 (0.18%) AIX
10 4 (0.18%) Debian
11 3 (0.13%) VxWorks
12 2 (0.089%) VMS
13 1 (0.045%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 1 (0.045%) ThreadX
13 1 (0.045%) Ubuntu
13 1 (0.045%) Windows 10
13 1 (0.045%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,256 (56.00%) CI/CD
2 981 (43.74%) Agile
3 833 (37.14%) DevOps
4 721 (32.14%) Software Engineering
5 670 (29.87%) Continuous Improvement
6 594 (26.48%) Mentoring
7 517 (23.05%) AI
8 475 (21.18%) Problem-Solving
9 409 (18.23%) Microservices
10 386 (17.21%) Infrastructure as Code
11 379 (16.90%) Software Testing
12 319 (14.22%) Test Strategy
13 282 (12.57%) Full-Stack Development
14 279 (12.44%) Observability
15 278 (12.39%) Code Quality
16 277 (12.35%) Containerisation
17 265 (11.81%) Validation
18 261 (11.64%) Coaching
19 252 (11.23%) Decision-Making
20 239 (10.66%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 692 (30.85%) Python
2 569 (25.37%) Java
3 407 (18.15%) JavaScript
4 375 (16.72%) SQL
5 332 (14.80%) TypeScript
6 325 (14.49%) C#
7 127 (5.66%) C++
8 109 (4.86%) PowerShell
9 92 (4.10%) Go
10 78 (3.48%) C
11 75 (3.34%) Bash
12 39 (1.74%) Kotlin
13 34 (1.52%) Rust
14 32 (1.43%) PHP
15 31 (1.38%) Swift
16 27 (1.20%) Ruby
17 21 (0.94%) Bicep
17 21 (0.94%) MATLAB
18 19 (0.85%) Groovy
19 16 (0.71%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 308 (13.73%) Security Cleared
2 246 (10.97%) Degree
3 190 (8.47%) SC Cleared
4 110 (4.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 76 (3.39%) ISTQB
6 61 (2.72%) CISSP
7 60 (2.67%) ITIL Certification
8 59 (2.63%) DV Cleared
9 56 (2.50%) CISM
10 47 (2.10%) AWS Certification
11 39 (1.74%) Master's Degree
12 33 (1.47%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 29 (1.29%) BPSS Clearance
14 23 (1.03%) HNC
15 18 (0.80%) HND
16 17 (0.76%) ISEB
17 16 (0.71%) DBS Check
18 14 (0.62%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
19 12 (0.53%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 10 (0.45%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 529 (23.58%) QA
2 208 (9.27%) Accessibility
3 69 (3.08%) Data Quality
4 63 (2.81%) WCAG
5 62 (2.76%) NIST
6 51 (2.27%) ISO 22301
7 47 (2.10%) GDPR
8 14 (0.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 14 (0.62%) SLA
9 12 (0.53%) GRC
10 11 (0.49%) SOC 2
10 11 (0.49%) Software Quality Assurance
11 8 (0.36%) COBIT
11 8 (0.36%) MISRA
12 7 (0.31%) JTAG
13 6 (0.27%) PMO
14 5 (0.22%) Cyber Essentials
14 5 (0.22%) ISO 9001
14 5 (0.22%) NCSC
14 5 (0.22%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 311 (13.87%) Docker
2 34 (1.52%) Firmware
3 18 (0.80%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.71%) Active Directory
4 16 (0.71%) Virtual Machines
5 10 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
5 10 (0.45%) Hyper-V
6 8 (0.36%) KVM
7 2 (0.089%) ProxySG
7 2 (0.089%) vSphere
8 1 (0.045%) IAG
8 1 (0.045%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.045%) Terminal Server
8 1 (0.045%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 319 (14.22%) Kubernetes
2 314 (14.00%) Terraform
3 129 (5.75%) Grafana
4 84 (3.74%) Ansible
5 56 (2.50%) Prometheus
6 28 (1.25%) Argo
7 16 (0.71%) Kibana
8 14 (0.62%) CloudHub
9 12 (0.53%) Puppet
10 9 (0.40%) logstash
10 9 (0.40%) Microsoft Intune
11 8 (0.36%) HP Fortify
11 8 (0.36%) Single Sign-On
12 6 (0.27%) Functional Safety
12 6 (0.27%) vCenter Server
13 5 (0.22%) Packer
13 5 (0.22%) Progress Chef
14 4 (0.18%) SCCM
14 4 (0.18%) SCOM
15 3 (0.13%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 212 (9.45%) Microsoft
2 91 (4.06%) Google
3 62 (2.76%) Databricks
4 57 (2.54%) Oracle
5 52 (2.32%) Salesforce
6 40 (1.78%) ServiceNow
7 37 (1.65%) SAP
8 34 (1.52%) Splunk
9 31 (1.38%) VMware
10 25 (1.11%) Dynatrace
11 21 (0.94%) Pega
12 19 (0.85%) AppDynamics
13 17 (0.76%) MuleSoft
14 16 (0.71%) Atlassian
15 15 (0.67%) IBM
15 15 (0.67%) OpenAI
16 14 (0.62%) Adobe
16 14 (0.62%) Braze
16 14 (0.62%) Red Hat
17 13 (0.58%) SendGrid