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

6 months to
3 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 91 81 97
Rank change year-on-year -10 +16 -63
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,806 1,568 2,700
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.94% 3.60% 2.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.63% 3.87% 3.16%
Number of salaries quoted 1,129 799 1,737
10th Percentile £42,125 £40,000 £36,250
25th Percentile £48,750 £48,000 £44,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £62,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year - +8.70% -11.54%
75th Percentile £82,500 £82,500 £72,500
90th Percentile £97,500 £99,600 £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 68,780 40,561 85,340
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.82% 93.18% 83.19%
Number of salaries quoted 44,959 21,364 61,218
10th Percentile £30,000 £29,500 £29,250
25th Percentile £41,000 £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 £77,750 £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 3 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 3 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 -1 1,583 £62,500 - 786
UK excluding London -37 985 £60,000 +4.35% 587
Work from Home +12 739 £65,000 +8.33% 755
London +28 656 £80,000 +10.34% 303
North of England -33 270 £61,250 +2.48% 159
South East -29 203 £60,000 +9.09% 134
South West -25 178 £55,000 -8.33% 71
Midlands -24 165 £60,000 +4.35% 83
North West -19 140 £60,000 -7.69% 97
West Midlands -45 84 £61,000 -6.15% 55
East Midlands -11 80 £55,000 +19.57% 28
Yorkshire -42 67 £75,000 +49.34% 36
East of England -24 64 £50,000 -12.28% 63
North East -11 63 £52,500 -11.02% 27
Scotland -37 57 £60,000 - 38
Wales -5 50 £56,250 -2.17% 21
Northern Ireland -36 11 £80,000 +45.45% 32

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 38 (2.10%) Confluence
2 27 (1.50%) Apache Airflow
3 20 (1.11%) Apache Spark
4 19 (1.05%) Jupyter
5 18 (1.00%) Apache
6 15 (0.83%) SharePoint
7 11 (0.61%) CMS
8 10 (0.55%) Palantir Foundry
9 9 (0.50%) IIS
10 8 (0.44%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 8 (0.44%) Appian
11 5 (0.28%) Anypoint
11 5 (0.28%) Umbraco
12 4 (0.22%) Mule
12 4 (0.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
12 4 (0.22%) SAS
13 3 (0.17%) nginx
13 3 (0.17%) WordPress
14 2 (0.11%) JBoss
14 2 (0.11%) Microsoft Exchange
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 11 (0.61%) 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
1 603 (33.39%) AWS
2 559 (30.95%) Azure
3 251 (13.90%) Azure DevOps
4 214 (11.85%) GCP
5 165 (9.14%) Serverless
6 156 (8.64%) GitHub
7 130 (7.20%) SaaS
8 75 (4.15%) Amazon EKS
8 75 (4.15%) GitHub Actions
9 72 (3.99%) AWS Lambda
10 70 (3.88%) Amazon S3
11 63 (3.49%) AWS CloudFormation
12 57 (3.16%) PaaS
13 48 (2.66%) Power Platform
14 45 (2.49%) Azure Service Bus
15 42 (2.33%) dbt
16 41 (2.27%) Azure Data Factory
16 41 (2.27%) Azure Monitor
17 39 (2.16%) Azure Logic Apps
18 38 (2.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
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 8 (0.44%) HTTP
8 7 (0.39%) DMARC
9 6 (0.33%) Bluetooth
9 6 (0.33%) Wireless
10 5 (0.28%) MQTT
10 5 (0.28%) SMS
10 5 (0.28%) VPN
10 5 (0.28%) Wi-Fi
10 5 (0.28%) ZigBee
11 4 (0.22%) DHCP
11 4 (0.22%) LTE
11 4 (0.22%) SSL
11 4 (0.22%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 127 (7.03%) NoSQL
2 110 (6.09%) PostgreSQL
3 88 (4.87%) MongoDB
4 72 (3.99%) SQL Server
5 38 (2.10%) DynamoDB
6 29 (1.61%) MySQL
6 29 (1.61%) Relational Database
7 28 (1.55%) Data Warehouse
8 26 (1.44%) Power BI
9 20 (1.11%) Amazon RDS
10 18 (1.00%) BigQuery
10 18 (1.00%) Metadata
10 18 (1.00%) Spark SQL
11 17 (0.94%) Redis
12 15 (0.83%) Oracle Database
13 11 (0.61%) 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
1 209 (11.57%) Git
2 155 (8.58%) Jenkins
3 145 (8.03%) Selenium
4 140 (7.75%) GitLab
5 116 (6.42%) JIRA
6 82 (4.54%) Cypress.io
7 72 (3.99%) Cucumber
8 63 (3.49%) Postman
9 62 (3.43%) TeamCity
10 42 (2.33%) JMeter
11 35 (1.94%) REST Assured
12 30 (1.66%) JUnit
13 29 (1.61%) SpecFlow
14 26 (1.44%) CircleCI
15 23 (1.27%) LabVIEW
15 23 (1.27%) TestRail
16 21 (1.16%) Zephyr
17 19 (1.05%) Crashlytics
18 18 (1.00%) Gatling
18 18 (1.00%) MLflow
General
1 461 (25.53%) Social Skills
2 423 (23.42%) Finance
3 187 (10.35%) Banking
4 183 (10.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 152 (8.42%) Public Sector
6 149 (8.25%) Analytical Skills
7 119 (6.59%) Law
8 98 (5.43%) Retail
9 63 (3.49%) Financial Institution
10 59 (3.27%) Manufacturing
11 57 (3.16%) Electronics
12 49 (2.71%) Back Office
13 43 (2.38%) Games
14 33 (1.83%) Front Office
14 33 (1.83%) Legal
15 31 (1.72%) Marketing
16 19 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
17 18 (1.00%) Documentation Skills
17 18 (1.00%) Influencing Skills
18 17 (0.94%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 480 (26.58%) Senior
2 300 (16.61%) Lead
3 264 (14.62%) Software Engineer
4 254 (14.06%) Developer
5 210 (11.63%) Test Engineer
6 116 (6.42%) Senior Developer
7 104 (5.76%) Java Engineer
8 89 (4.93%) QA Engineer
9 87 (4.82%) Test Automation Engineer
10 81 (4.49%) Tester
11 78 (4.32%) Senior Software Engineer
12 76 (4.21%) Test Leader
13 63 (3.49%) Full-Stack Engineer
14 60 (3.32%) Data Engineer
15 58 (3.21%) Architect
16 56 (3.10%) Senior Test Engineer
17 54 (2.99%) DevOps Engineer
18 50 (2.77%) Analyst
19 48 (2.66%) Python Developer
20 47 (2.60%) Automation Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 194 (10.74%) .NET
2 189 (10.47%) React
3 157 (8.69%) REST
4 155 (8.58%) Playwright
5 151 (8.36%) RESTful
6 131 (7.25%) Spring
7 128 (7.09%) Node.js
8 95 (5.26%) Kafka
9 93 (5.15%) Spring Boot
10 65 (3.60%) AngularJS
11 64 (3.54%) HTML
12 63 (3.49%) CSS
13 55 (3.05%) OAuth
14 46 (2.55%) OAuth2
15 45 (2.49%) RabbitMQ
16 43 (2.38%) JSON
17 37 (2.05%) .NET Framework
18 36 (1.99%) ASP.NET
18 36 (1.99%) pytest
19 35 (1.94%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 314 (17.39%) Cloud Native
2 187 (10.35%) Product Ownership
3 122 (6.76%) Distributed Systems
4 94 (5.20%) Mobile App
5 59 (3.27%) Management Information System
6 50 (2.77%) Algorithms
6 50 (2.77%) Enterprise Software
6 50 (2.77%) Public Cloud
7 47 (2.60%) Onboarding
8 44 (2.44%) Low-Code
9 40 (2.21%) Data Structures
10 37 (2.05%) Legacy Systems
11 36 (1.99%) Greenfield Project
12 33 (1.83%) Self-Motivation
13 25 (1.38%) Blog
13 25 (1.38%) Embedded Systems
13 25 (1.38%) Video\Live Streaming
14 24 (1.33%) Hedge funds
14 24 (1.33%) Hybrid Cloud
15 22 (1.22%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 158 (8.75%) Linux
2 77 (4.26%) Windows
3 71 (3.93%) Apple iOS
4 60 (3.32%) Android
5 50 (2.77%) Unix
6 9 (0.50%) CentOS
6 9 (0.50%) Windows Server
7 4 (0.22%) Kali Linux
7 4 (0.22%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 3 (0.17%) FreeRTOS
8 3 (0.17%) Ubuntu
8 3 (0.17%) Windows Server 2019
9 2 (0.11%) AIX
9 2 (0.11%) Debian
10 1 (0.055%) ThreadX
10 1 (0.055%) VxWorks
10 1 (0.055%) Windows 10
10 1 (0.055%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 984 (54.49%) CI/CD
2 747 (41.36%) Agile
3 621 (34.39%) DevOps
4 487 (26.97%) Software Engineering
5 444 (24.58%) Continuous Improvement
6 442 (24.47%) Mentoring
7 362 (20.04%) Problem-Solving
8 325 (18.00%) Microservices
9 318 (17.61%) Infrastructure as Code
10 291 (16.11%) AI
11 277 (15.34%) Software Testing
12 245 (13.57%) Observability
13 235 (13.01%) Containerisation
14 233 (12.90%) Coaching
15 220 (12.18%) Full-Stack Development
16 219 (12.13%) Test Strategy
17 199 (11.02%) Validation
18 198 (10.96%) Clean Code
19 175 (9.69%) Technical Leadership
20 171 (9.47%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 560 (31.01%) Python
2 491 (27.19%) Java
3 307 (17.00%) SQL
4 267 (14.78%) JavaScript
5 232 (12.85%) C#
6 224 (12.40%) TypeScript
7 96 (5.32%) C++
8 80 (4.43%) Bash
9 74 (4.10%) Go
10 68 (3.77%) PowerShell
11 57 (3.16%) 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 (13.01%) Degree
2 205 (11.35%) Security Cleared
3 123 (6.81%) SC Cleared
4 93 (5.15%) Computer Science Degree
5 78 (4.32%) ISTQB
6 43 (2.38%) DV Cleared
7 30 (1.66%) Master's Degree
8 27 (1.50%) AWS Certification
9 21 (1.16%) CISSP
10 19 (1.05%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 18 (1.00%) DBS Check
11 18 (1.00%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 15 (0.83%) HND
13 13 (0.72%) CGEIT
13 13 (0.72%) CISA
13 13 (0.72%) CISM
13 13 (0.72%) FFIEC
13 13 (0.72%) PhD
13 13 (0.72%) SANS
14 11 (0.61%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 411 (22.76%) QA
2 155 (8.58%) Accessibility
3 81 (4.49%) 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 (0.78%) 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%) IEC 61508
18 3 (0.17%) ISO/IEC 12207
System Software
1 250 (13.84%) Docker
2 25 (1.38%) VMware Infrastructure
3 20 (1.11%) Firmware
4 18 (1.00%) Hyper-V
5 17 (0.94%) Active Directory
6 15 (0.83%) Virtual Machines
7 14 (0.78%) KVM
8 8 (0.44%) Embedded Firmware
9 3 (0.17%) Terminal Server
10 2 (0.11%) vSphere
11 1 (0.055%) IAG
11 1 (0.055%) Oracle RAC
11 1 (0.055%) Xen
Systems Management
1 305 (16.89%) Terraform
2 288 (15.95%) Kubernetes
3 138 (7.64%) Grafana
4 75 (4.15%) Ansible
5 66 (3.65%) Prometheus
6 25 (1.38%) Argo
7 17 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
8 13 (0.72%) Kibana
9 8 (0.44%) logstash
10 6 (0.33%) SCCM
10 6 (0.33%) SCOM
11 5 (0.28%) HP Fortify
12 4 (0.22%) CloudHub
12 4 (0.22%) Microsoft Intune
12 4 (0.22%) Packer
12 4 (0.22%) vCenter Server
13 3 (0.17%) HP ALM
13 3 (0.17%) Puppet
13 3 (0.17%) Rancher
13 3 (0.17%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 139 (7.70%) Microsoft
2 57 (3.16%) Oracle
3 54 (2.99%) Databricks
4 49 (2.71%) Salesforce
5 41 (2.27%) VMware
6 35 (1.94%) Google
7 24 (1.33%) ServiceNow
8 23 (1.27%) Splunk
9 21 (1.16%) OpenAI
10 19 (1.05%) SAP
11 18 (1.00%) Dynatrace
12 16 (0.89%) Braze
13 14 (0.78%) Amplitude
14 13 (0.72%) CrowdStrike
14 13 (0.72%) IFS
14 13 (0.72%) MuleSoft
15 12 (0.66%) AppDynamics
15 12 (0.66%) Commvault
15 12 (0.66%) Foundry
16 11 (0.61%) Atlassian