Test Automation Job Trends

Automated Testing
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Test Automation skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 95 96 72
Rank change year-on-year +1 -24 -36
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,559 2,058 2,534
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 3.16% 2.64% 4.15%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 3.56% 3.26% 4.40%
Number of salaries quoted 734 1,022 1,970
10th Percentile £38,773 £38,750 £41,250
25th Percentile £50,000 £46,250 £48,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £60,000 £62,734
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% -4.36% +4.56%
75th Percentile £82,751 £77,188 £80,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £55,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year +4.55% -4.35% +4.55%

All Process and 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 43,797 63,176 57,561
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 88.73% 81.14% 94.37%
Number of salaries quoted 24,693 35,881 43,260
10th Percentile £28,500 £32,000 £32,750
25th Percentile £36,250 £42,500 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £57,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year -4.35% -4.17% -
75th Percentile £75,000 £77,500 £80,000
90th Percentile £96,250 £95,000 £100,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £47,500 £52,500 £54,000
% change year-on-year -9.52% -2.78% +2.86%

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Test Automation as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Test Automation 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 2025.

Salary histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Top 18 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 2025. 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 1,331 £64,075 +2.52% 862
UK excluding London -11 962 £57,500 +4.55% 762
Work from Home +14 683 £62,500 +4.17% 517
London +33 498 £80,000 +6.67% 244
North of England -44 254 £60,000 +9.09% 191
South East -14 221 £57,500 +4.55% 195
North West -24 195 £60,000 +12.15% 99
Midlands +24 166 £61,500 +2.50% 135
Scotland +11 125 £70,000 +40.00% 48
South West +3 101 £53,391 -14.57% 93
East Midlands +64 84 £62,500 +4.17% 57
West Midlands +6 84 £56,250 -4.63% 73
East of England +9 82 £58,500 +14.15% 71
Yorkshire -37 44 £55,000 +10.55% 71
Wales +14 18 £52,500 -2.33% 27
North East +9 15 £35,000 -39.62% 23
Northern Ireland +6 11 £55,000 +7.32% 12
Isle of Man - 1 £52,500 -

Test Automation
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 189 (12.12%) Confluence
2 38 (2.44%) Apache Spark
3 23 (1.48%) SharePoint
4 22 (1.41%) Apache Airflow
5 20 (1.28%) Apache
6 15 (0.96%) nginx
7 11 (0.71%) Appian
7 11 (0.71%) CMS
8 9 (0.58%) Headless CMS
8 9 (0.58%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 9 (0.58%) Tomcat
9 7 (0.45%) Jupyter
10 6 (0.38%) Apache Solr
11 5 (0.32%) IIS
12 4 (0.26%) Liferay
13 3 (0.19%) Umbraco
14 2 (0.13%) JBoss
14 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Exchange
14 2 (0.13%) WinCC
15 1 (0.064%) WordPress
Applications
1 12 (0.77%) Microsoft Office
2 10 (0.64%) Chatbot
3 8 (0.51%) Blender
4 7 (0.45%) Microsoft Excel
5 5 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 4 (0.26%) MS Visio
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle Smart View
6 4 (0.26%) SOLIDWORKS
7 3 (0.19%) Simulink
8 2 (0.13%) Adobe XD
8 2 (0.13%) Sketch
9 1 (0.064%) Doxygen
9 1 (0.064%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.064%) Trello
Business Applications
1 25 (1.60%) Dynamics CRM
2 16 (1.03%) Oracle ERP
3 12 (0.77%) Dynamics NAV
4 9 (0.58%) Elite 3E
5 8 (0.51%) Shopify
6 4 (0.26%) Hyperion Planning
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle Assets
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle Financials
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle General Ledger
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle Payables
6 4 (0.26%) Oracle Receivables
6 4 (0.26%) Payment Gateway
6 4 (0.26%) Salesforce CRM
6 4 (0.26%) SAP S/4HANA
7 3 (0.19%) Remedy ITSM
7 3 (0.19%) Unit4 Business World
8 2 (0.13%) Aladdin
9 1 (0.064%) Loan IQ
9 1 (0.064%) SAP CX
9 1 (0.064%) Siebel CRM
Cloud Services
1 651 (41.76%) Azure
2 592 (37.97%) AWS
3 268 (17.19%) GCP
4 194 (12.44%) Azure DevOps
5 115 (7.38%) GitHub
6 76 (4.87%) Serverless
7 73 (4.68%) SaaS
8 59 (3.78%) PaaS
9 52 (3.34%) Amazon S3
10 51 (3.27%) GitHub Actions
11 48 (3.08%) AWS Lambda
12 47 (3.01%) Power Platform
13 41 (2.63%) Dynamics 365
14 33 (2.12%) Datadog
15 30 (1.92%) Azure Logic Apps
16 28 (1.80%) Amazon SQS
17 27 (1.73%) Microsoft 365
18 26 (1.67%) Power Automate
19 25 (1.60%) Entra ID
20 24 (1.54%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 74 (4.75%) TCP/IP
2 70 (4.49%) VPN
3 21 (1.35%) 5G
4 20 (1.28%) SD-WAN
4 20 (1.28%) WAN
5 14 (0.90%) DNS
5 14 (0.90%) Firewall
5 14 (0.90%) VLAN
6 12 (0.77%) Network Security
7 8 (0.51%) HTTP
8 6 (0.38%) DHCP
8 6 (0.38%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
8 6 (0.38%) SSL
8 6 (0.38%) Wi-Fi
8 6 (0.38%) Wireless
9 5 (0.32%) BGP
9 5 (0.32%) Multicast
10 4 (0.26%) Broadband
10 4 (0.26%) Cisco ISE
10 4 (0.26%) FTP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 316 (20.27%) SQL Server
2 95 (6.09%) NoSQL
3 85 (5.45%) Relational Database
4 77 (4.94%) PostgreSQL
5 49 (3.14%) MySQL
6 33 (2.12%) Data Warehouse
6 33 (2.12%) MongoDB
7 30 (1.92%) Amazon RDS
8 29 (1.86%) DynamoDB
9 28 (1.80%) Big Data
10 21 (1.35%) Power BI
11 19 (1.22%) Elasticsearch
12 16 (1.03%) RDBMS
13 15 (0.96%) Amazon Aurora
14 12 (0.77%) Amazon Athena
14 12 (0.77%) Redis
15 9 (0.58%) DB2
16 8 (0.51%) Electronic Patient Records
16 8 (0.51%) Hadoop
16 8 (0.51%) QGIS
Development Applications
1 433 (27.77%) Selenium
2 382 (24.50%) JIRA
3 351 (22.51%) Cucumber
4 297 (19.05%) GitLab
5 290 (18.60%) Maven
6 275 (17.64%) SonarQube
7 267 (17.13%) Bitbucket
8 259 (16.61%) Sonatype Nexus
9 179 (11.48%) Git
10 123 (7.89%) Jenkins
11 81 (5.20%) Robot Framework
12 73 (4.68%) Cypress.io
13 71 (4.55%) Postman
14 52 (3.34%) JUnit
15 43 (2.76%) JMeter
16 33 (2.12%) Appium
17 20 (1.28%) Mockito
18 19 (1.22%) TestNG
19 18 (1.15%) TeamCity
20 16 (1.03%) Oracle Forms
General
1 635 (40.73%) Finance
2 478 (30.66%) Inclusion and Diversity
3 426 (27.33%) Social Skills
4 340 (21.81%) Banking
5 171 (10.97%) Law
6 140 (8.98%) Analytical Skills
7 107 (6.86%) Retail
8 102 (6.54%) Marketing
9 99 (6.35%) Investment Banking
10 90 (5.77%) Corporate Banking
11 83 (5.32%) Public Sector
12 79 (5.07%) Telecoms
13 57 (3.66%) Manufacturing
14 40 (2.57%) Legal
15 36 (2.31%) Electronics
16 35 (2.25%) Back Office
16 35 (2.25%) Front Office
17 27 (1.73%) Games
18 25 (1.60%) Presentation Skills
19 24 (1.54%) Documentation Skills
Job Titles
1 397 (25.47%) Software Engineer
2 313 (20.08%) Senior
3 309 (19.82%) Developer
4 224 (14.37%) Lead
5 174 (11.16%) Test Engineer
6 116 (7.44%) Test Automation Engineer
7 115 (7.38%) Senior Developer
8 67 (4.30%) DevOps Engineer
9 61 (3.91%) QA Engineer
10 55 (3.53%) Java Engineer
11 52 (3.34%) Python Developer
12 51 (3.27%) Full-Stack Developer
13 47 (3.01%) Java Developer
14 44 (2.82%) Analyst
15 40 (2.57%) Senior Software Engineer
15 40 (2.57%) Tester
16 39 (2.50%) Python Engineer
17 38 (2.44%) Lead Developer
18 34 (2.18%) Quality Engineer
19 33 (2.12%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 388 (24.89%) React
2 353 (22.64%) HTML
3 347 (22.26%) CSS
4 342 (21.94%) Kafka
5 322 (20.65%) Spring
6 311 (19.95%) Spring Boot
7 260 (16.68%) JPA
8 253 (16.23%) Redux
9 210 (13.47%) RESTful
10 193 (12.38%) REST
11 177 (11.35%) Hibernate
12 137 (8.79%) .NET
13 111 (7.12%) Playwright
14 109 (6.99%) HTML5
15 107 (6.86%) Jest
16 102 (6.54%) CSS3
17 96 (6.16%) Sass
18 72 (4.62%) Node.js
19 50 (3.21%) .NET Framework
20 43 (2.76%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 300 (19.24%) Product Ownership
2 277 (17.77%) Enterprise Software
3 141 (9.04%) Cloud Native
4 73 (4.68%) Linux Command Line
5 56 (3.59%) Onboarding
6 48 (3.08%) e-Learning
6 48 (3.08%) Management Information System
7 45 (2.89%) Mobile App
7 45 (2.89%) Self-Motivation
8 44 (2.82%) Algorithms
9 42 (2.69%) Data Structures
10 40 (2.57%) Hybrid Cloud
11 34 (2.18%) Public Cloud
12 29 (1.86%) Distributed Systems
13 27 (1.73%) Hedge funds
14 26 (1.67%) Security Posture
15 24 (1.54%) Client/Server
15 24 (1.54%) Equities
16 20 (1.28%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 20 (1.28%) Self-Driving Car
Operating Systems
1 163 (10.46%) Linux
2 109 (6.99%) Windows
3 35 (2.25%) Unix
4 20 (1.28%) Windows Server
5 14 (0.90%) Apple iOS
6 9 (0.58%) Android
7 7 (0.45%) Windows Server 2019
8 3 (0.19%) VMS
9 2 (0.13%) Solaris
9 2 (0.13%) Windows 10
9 2 (0.13%) Windows Server 2012
9 2 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
10 1 (0.064%) Debian
10 1 (0.064%) FreeRTOS
10 1 (0.064%) Kali Linux
10 1 (0.064%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
10 1 (0.064%) Ubuntu
10 1 (0.064%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 946 (60.68%) Agile
2 804 (51.57%) CI/CD
3 782 (50.16%) DevOps
4 520 (33.35%) Software Engineering
5 462 (29.63%) SDLC
6 408 (26.17%) Mentoring
6 408 (26.17%) Microservices
7 403 (25.85%) Problem-Solving
8 400 (25.66%) Containerisation
9 359 (23.03%) Full-Stack Development
10 313 (20.08%) Front End Development
11 311 (19.95%) Continuous Improvement
12 296 (18.99%) TDD
13 263 (16.87%) Performance Optimisation
14 252 (16.16%) Clean Code
15 220 (14.11%) User Experience
16 207 (13.28%) Coaching
17 170 (10.90%) Artificial Intelligence
18 156 (10.01%) Computer Science
19 152 (9.75%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 553 (35.47%) SQL
2 550 (35.28%) JavaScript
3 538 (34.51%) Java
4 434 (27.84%) Python
5 208 (13.34%) TypeScript
6 192 (12.32%) C#
7 134 (8.60%) PowerShell
8 90 (5.77%) C++
9 77 (4.94%) Bash
10 57 (3.66%) Go
11 44 (2.82%) C
12 34 (2.18%) PHP
13 32 (2.05%) Shell Script
14 21 (1.35%) Bicep
15 20 (1.28%) MATLAB
16 19 (1.22%) Kotlin
17 17 (1.09%) PL/SQL
18 15 (0.96%) Groovy
19 13 (0.83%) Scala
20 9 (0.58%) Swift
Qualifications
1 266 (17.06%) Degree
2 101 (6.48%) Computer Science Degree
3 93 (5.97%) Security Cleared
4 83 (5.32%) ISTQB
5 70 (4.49%) SC Cleared
6 40 (2.57%) Master's Degree
7 26 (1.67%) AWS Certification
7 26 (1.67%) DV Cleared
8 19 (1.22%) DBS Check
8 19 (1.22%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 13 (0.83%) HND
10 11 (0.71%) BPSS Clearance
11 8 (0.51%) Azure Certification
11 8 (0.51%) CCNP
11 8 (0.51%) Cisco Certification
11 8 (0.51%) ISEB
11 8 (0.51%) ITIL Certification
12 7 (0.45%) HNC
13 6 (0.38%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 6 (0.38%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 567 (36.37%) QA
2 141 (9.04%) Accessibility
3 59 (3.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 33 (2.12%) NIST
5 28 (1.80%) NCSC
6 25 (1.60%) Data Quality
7 14 (0.90%) ISO 9001
8 9 (0.58%) GDPR
9 8 (0.51%) WCAG
10 7 (0.45%) SLA
11 5 (0.32%) Software Quality Assurance
12 4 (0.26%) Cyber Essentials
12 4 (0.26%) PMO
13 3 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 12207
13 3 (0.19%) PCI DSS
13 3 (0.19%) PMBOK
13 3 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
13 3 (0.19%) SEPA
14 2 (0.13%) GRC
14 2 (0.13%) GxP
System Software
1 423 (27.13%) Docker
2 39 (2.50%) Active Directory
3 20 (1.28%) VMware Infrastructure
4 7 (0.45%) Virtual Machines
4 7 (0.45%) vSphere
5 6 (0.38%) Firmware
6 5 (0.32%) HDFS
6 5 (0.32%) zsh
7 4 (0.26%) Embedded Firmware
7 4 (0.26%) Terminal Server
8 2 (0.13%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.13%) KVM
8 2 (0.13%) Xen
9 1 (0.064%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 426 (27.33%) Kubernetes
2 149 (9.56%) Terraform
3 46 (2.95%) Ansible
4 23 (1.48%) Grafana
5 22 (1.41%) Prometheus
6 18 (1.15%) Single Sign-On
7 12 (0.77%) Microsoft Intune
8 9 (0.58%) Istio
8 9 (0.58%) Packer
9 8 (0.51%) Kustomize
10 6 (0.38%) Jamf Pro
10 6 (0.38%) Mesos
11 5 (0.32%) SCCM
11 5 (0.32%) SCOM
12 4 (0.26%) HP Quality Center
12 4 (0.26%) Progress Chef
12 4 (0.26%) Puppet
13 3 (0.19%) Kubeflow
14 2 (0.13%) CFEngine
14 2 (0.13%) Functional Safety
Vendors
1 247 (15.84%) Solace
2 150 (9.62%) Microsoft
3 63 (4.04%) Oracle
4 53 (3.40%) Google
4 53 (3.40%) IBM
5 49 (3.14%) Red Hat
6 48 (3.08%) Salesforce
7 40 (2.57%) Databricks
8 29 (1.86%) VMware
9 21 (1.35%) Guidewire
10 18 (1.15%) SAP
11 17 (1.09%) Siebel
12 16 (1.03%) Apple
13 14 (0.90%) Cisco
14 13 (0.83%) Splunk
15 12 (0.77%) UiPath
16 9 (0.58%) Atlassian
16 9 (0.58%) BiZZdesign
16 9 (0.58%) Black Duck
17 8 (0.51%) ServiceNow