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

6 months to
23 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 93 83
Rank change year-on-year +13 -10 -12
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,430 1,532 2,149
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.08% 3.13% 2.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.85% 3.53% 3.51%
Number of salaries quoted 1,315 717 969
10th Percentile £41,250 £38,930 £39,228
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 £93,750 £102,500 £95,250
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 85,252 43,434 61,296
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.68% 81.27%
Number of salaries quoted 58,899 24,470 34,327
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,500
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 23 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 23 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 +10 1,982 £62,500 -0.79% 3,078
UK excluding London +21 1,546 £57,500 - 1,915
Work from Home +14 868 £67,500 +8.00% 1,268
London +2 715 £80,000 - 1,474
North of England +21 391 £57,500 -4.17% 463
South East +5 277 £60,000 +4.35% 426
South West +13 260 £60,000 +14.29% 281
Midlands -18 208 £54,000 -10.00% 216
North West -10 191 £60,000 - 251
Northern Ireland +8 164 £80,000 +45.45% 63
Wales +4 131 £55,000 - 48
West Midlands -4 118 £52,500 -3.23% 147
North East +14 108 £55,000 +78.86% 73
Yorkshire +19 95 £69,310 +26.02% 139
East Midlands -26 90 £54,000 -13.60% 68
East of England -31 85 £50,000 -14.53% 188
Scotland -50 45 £61,250 -7.55% 243

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 (2.35%) Confluence
2 33 (1.36%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.07%) Apache
4 24 (0.99%) SharePoint
5 19 (0.78%) Apache Airflow
6 18 (0.74%) Jupyter
7 14 (0.58%) Anypoint
7 14 (0.58%) CMS
7 14 (0.58%) Mule
8 13 (0.53%) 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 (0.16%) Camunda
12 4 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
13 3 (0.12%) WordPress
Applications
1 82 (3.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.62%) Microsoft Office
3 14 (0.58%) Simulink
4 9 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 6 (0.25%) Lightworks
5 6 (0.25%) Moqups
6 5 (0.21%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.12%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.082%) EPLAN
8 2 (0.082%) PlantUML
8 2 (0.082%) SOLIDWORKS
9 1 (0.041%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.041%) CANalyzer
9 1 (0.041%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 68 (2.80%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.11%) Dynamics GP
3 11 (0.45%) 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 (0.082%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.082%) Oracle EBS
6 2 (0.082%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.082%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.041%) Adobe Campaign
7 1 (0.041%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.041%) Endur
7 1 (0.041%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.041%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.041%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.041%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.041%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 811 (33.37%) AWS
2 682 (28.07%) Azure
3 323 (13.29%) SaaS
4 255 (10.49%) GCP
5 247 (10.16%) Azure DevOps
6 206 (8.48%) GitHub
7 198 (8.15%) Serverless
8 111 (4.57%) GitHub Actions
9 101 (4.16%) AWS CloudFormation
10 99 (4.07%) Amazon EKS
11 90 (3.70%) AWS Lambda
12 84 (3.46%) Amazon S3
13 67 (2.76%) Power Platform
14 59 (2.43%) Google Ads
14 59 (2.43%) Meta Ads
15 58 (2.39%) Azure Service Bus
16 56 (2.30%) Azure Logic Apps
17 53 (2.18%) Azure Monitor
18 49 (2.02%) Azure Functions
19 42 (1.73%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 56 (2.30%) Broadband
2 30 (1.23%) TCP/IP
3 26 (1.07%) DNS
3 26 (1.07%) Firewall
4 17 (0.70%) SSL
5 16 (0.66%) Wireless
6 15 (0.62%) Modbus
7 14 (0.58%) DMARC
7 14 (0.58%) MQTT
8 13 (0.53%) DHCP
8 13 (0.53%) HTTP
8 13 (0.53%) Wi-Fi
9 11 (0.45%) 5G
9 11 (0.45%) WAN
10 10 (0.41%) Ethernet
10 10 (0.41%) LTE
10 10 (0.41%) Network Security
11 9 (0.37%) 3GPP
12 7 (0.29%) Internet
12 7 (0.29%) UMTS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 144 (5.93%) PostgreSQL
2 126 (5.19%) NoSQL
3 90 (3.70%) MongoDB
4 82 (3.37%) SQL Server
5 69 (2.84%) Relational Database
6 47 (1.93%) Redis
7 45 (1.85%) DynamoDB
8 41 (1.69%) MySQL
9 40 (1.65%) Power BI
10 35 (1.44%) Data Warehouse
11 34 (1.40%) Data Lake
12 30 (1.23%) BigQuery
13 25 (1.03%) Amazon Athena
14 24 (0.99%) 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 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 371 (15.27%) Git
2 241 (9.92%) GitLab
3 218 (8.97%) Jenkins
4 168 (6.91%) Selenium
5 151 (6.21%) JIRA
6 110 (4.53%) Cucumber
7 109 (4.49%) Cypress.io
8 93 (3.83%) Postman
9 71 (2.92%) TeamCity
10 50 (2.06%) JMeter
11 49 (2.02%) JUnit
12 43 (1.77%) REST Assured
13 33 (1.36%) Zephyr
14 31 (1.28%) Gatling
15 30 (1.23%) SonarQube
16 29 (1.19%) LabVIEW
17 25 (1.03%) Bitbucket
18 24 (0.99%) Maven
18 24 (0.99%) Robot Framework
18 24 (0.99%) TestRail
General
1 673 (27.70%) Social Skills
2 591 (24.32%) Finance
3 375 (15.43%) Analytical Skills
4 272 (11.19%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 228 (9.38%) Public Sector
6 205 (8.44%) Banking
7 204 (8.40%) Law
8 170 (7.00%) Marketing
9 141 (5.80%) Legal
10 127 (5.23%) Retail
11 117 (4.81%) Manufacturing
12 92 (3.79%) Electronics
13 82 (3.37%) Financial Institution
14 61 (2.51%) Back Office
15 53 (2.18%) Aerospace
16 43 (1.77%) Telecoms
17 38 (1.56%) Games
18 34 (1.40%) Documentation Skills
19 30 (1.23%) Automotive
20 24 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 667 (27.45%) Senior
2 355 (14.61%) Software Engineer
3 335 (13.79%) Developer
4 329 (13.54%) Lead
5 255 (10.49%) Test Engineer
6 120 (4.94%) Senior Developer
7 115 (4.73%) Java Engineer
8 109 (4.49%) DevOps Engineer
9 108 (4.44%) QA Engineer
10 103 (4.24%) Senior Software Engineer
11 87 (3.58%) Test Automation Engineer
12 81 (3.33%) Analyst
13 80 (3.29%) Full-Stack Engineer
14 73 (3.00%) Data Engineer
15 69 (2.84%) Lead Software Engineer
16 66 (2.72%) Architect
17 65 (2.67%) Principal Engineer
18 63 (2.59%) Tester
19 62 (2.55%) Software Developer
20 61 (2.51%) Marketing Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 339 (13.95%) Terraform
2 253 (10.41%) REST
3 233 (9.59%) React
4 227 (9.34%) .NET
5 213 (8.77%) Playwright
6 201 (8.27%) Node.js
7 197 (8.11%) RESTful
7 197 (8.11%) Spring
8 146 (6.01%) Spring Boot
9 139 (5.72%) Kafka
10 126 (5.19%) CSS
11 118 (4.86%) HTML
12 116 (4.77%) AngularJS
13 78 (3.21%) OAuth
14 70 (2.88%) Middleware
14 70 (2.88%) OAuth2
15 63 (2.59%) JSON
16 53 (2.18%) Next.js
16 53 (2.18%) PySpark
17 51 (2.10%) Vue
Miscellaneous
1 425 (17.49%) Cloud Native
2 290 (11.93%) Product Ownership
3 210 (8.64%) Distributed Systems
4 107 (4.40%) Onboarding
5 102 (4.20%) Mobile App
6 99 (4.07%) Enterprise Software
7 92 (3.79%) Public Cloud
8 84 (3.46%) Blog
9 79 (3.25%) Virtual Team
10 66 (2.72%) Legacy Systems
11 64 (2.63%) Marketing Technology
12 53 (2.18%) Cyber Threat
13 52 (2.14%) Algorithms
13 52 (2.14%) Self-Motivation
14 50 (2.06%) Low-Code
15 46 (1.89%) Embedded Systems
16 45 (1.85%) Data Structures
17 43 (1.77%) e-Learning
18 41 (1.69%) Management Information System
19 37 (1.52%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 183 (7.53%) Linux
2 103 (4.24%) Windows
3 65 (2.67%) Android
4 57 (2.35%) Apple iOS
4 57 (2.35%) 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 (0.16%) AIX
8 4 (0.16%) Debian
8 4 (0.16%) Kali Linux
8 4 (0.16%) VMS
9 3 (0.12%) VxWorks
10 2 (0.082%) OpenWrt
11 1 (0.041%) Mac OS
11 1 (0.041%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
11 1 (0.041%) ThreadX
11 1 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,363 (56.09%) CI/CD
2 1,010 (41.56%) Agile
3 869 (35.76%) DevOps
4 784 (32.26%) Software Engineering
5 710 (29.22%) Continuous Improvement
6 629 (25.88%) Mentoring
7 600 (24.69%) AI
8 562 (23.13%) Problem-Solving
9 453 (18.64%) Microservices
10 426 (17.53%) Software Testing
11 394 (16.21%) Infrastructure as Code
12 325 (13.37%) Test Strategy
13 310 (12.76%) Validation
14 297 (12.22%) Observability
15 296 (12.18%) Coaching
16 294 (12.10%) Code Quality
17 269 (11.07%) Containerisation
18 268 (11.03%) Full-Stack Development
19 266 (10.95%) Technical Leadership
20 259 (10.66%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 692 (28.48%) Python
2 584 (24.03%) Java
3 464 (19.09%) SQL
4 433 (17.82%) JavaScript
5 350 (14.40%) TypeScript
6 337 (13.87%) C#
7 124 (5.10%) C++
8 103 (4.24%) PowerShell
9 97 (3.99%) Go
10 93 (3.83%) Bash
11 78 (3.21%) C
12 36 (1.48%) Kotlin
13 35 (1.44%) PHP
14 32 (1.32%) Rust
15 30 (1.23%) Groovy
15 30 (1.23%) Ruby
16 26 (1.07%) Bicep
16 26 (1.07%) MATLAB
17 21 (0.86%) Swift
18 16 (0.66%) Scala
Qualifications
1 370 (15.23%) Security Cleared
2 253 (10.41%) Degree
3 226 (9.30%) SC Cleared
4 104 (4.28%) Computer Science Degree
5 80 (3.29%) ISTQB
6 68 (2.80%) DV Cleared
7 59 (2.43%) AWS Certification
8 56 (2.30%) CISSP
9 54 (2.22%) ITIL Certification
10 53 (2.18%) CISM
11 48 (1.98%) Master's Degree
12 43 (1.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 40 (1.65%) HNC
14 34 (1.40%) BPSS Clearance
15 33 (1.36%) HND
16 17 (0.70%) DBS Check
17 16 (0.66%) ISEB
18 15 (0.62%) Azure Certification
19 13 (0.53%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 11 (0.45%) NVQ Level 4
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 563 (23.17%) QA
2 205 (8.44%) Accessibility
3 86 (3.54%) Data Quality
4 68 (2.80%) WCAG
5 55 (2.26%) NIST
6 48 (1.98%) ISO 22301
7 39 (1.60%) GDPR
8 13 (0.53%) SLA
9 10 (0.41%) 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 (0.16%) ECSS
14 4 (0.16%) ISO 20022
14 4 (0.16%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 337 (13.87%) Docker
2 45 (1.85%) Firmware
3 15 (0.62%) Active Directory
4 11 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
4 11 (0.45%) VMware Infrastructure
5 8 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
6 4 (0.16%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.082%) KVM
7 2 (0.082%) ProxySG
8 1 (0.041%) IAG
8 1 (0.041%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.041%) QEMU
8 1 (0.041%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 349 (14.36%) Kubernetes
2 159 (6.54%) Grafana
3 80 (3.29%) Ansible
4 67 (2.76%) Prometheus
5 30 (1.23%) Argo
6 17 (0.70%) Kibana
7 16 (0.66%) Puppet
8 14 (0.58%) CloudHub
9 12 (0.49%) Rancher
10 11 (0.45%) 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%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (0.12%) SCCM
15 3 (0.12%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 264 (10.86%) Microsoft
2 126 (5.19%) Google
3 65 (2.67%) Databricks
4 62 (2.55%) Salesforce
5 54 (2.22%) Oracle
6 50 (2.06%) SAP
7 46 (1.89%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.48%) Splunk
9 35 (1.44%) Dynatrace
10 23 (0.95%) Pega
11 20 (0.82%) MuleSoft
12 19 (0.78%) AppDynamics
13 18 (0.74%) VMware
14 17 (0.70%) IBM
15 16 (0.66%) OpenAI
16 15 (0.62%) Adobe
16 15 (0.62%) Allen-Bradley
16 15 (0.62%) Red Hat
17 14 (0.58%) Atlassian
17 14 (0.58%) SendGrid