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 15 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
15 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 100 91 92
Rank change year-on-year -9 +1 -58
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,612 1,355 2,689
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.89% 3.29% 2.88%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.50% 3.54% 3.35%
Number of salaries quoted 1,007 889 1,786
10th Percentile £42,500 £38,750 £36,250
25th Percentile £50,000 £46,672 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £60,000 £57,965
Median % change year-on-year +4.17% +3.51% -10.82%
75th Percentile £83,750 £80,000 £73,750
90th Percentile £105,000 £98,474 £91,934
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £55,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year +4.55% +4.76% -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 64,523 38,250 80,347
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 75.56% 92.93% 86.07%
Number of salaries quoted 39,734 22,522 59,066
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £29,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £42,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £57,500 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -4.17% +9.09% -10.54%
75th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £72,500
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,500 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £53,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -5.66% +6.00% -8.26%

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 15 April 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 15 April 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 -14 1,352 £63,500 +5.83% 654
UK excluding London -42 866 £57,500 +4.55% 560
Work from Home +12 675 £65,000 +7.43% 299
London +31 600 £80,000 +14.29% 186
North of England -50 193 £61,500 +11.82% 140
South East -66 170 £56,250 +7.14% 147
South West -28 162 £55,000 -8.33% 70
Midlands -33 129 £60,500 +5.22% 76
Scotland +7 116 £62,500 +4.17% 37
North West -11 101 £60,000 +9.09% 60
West Midlands -30 66 £61,250 -2.00% 48
East Midlands -29 63 £55,200 +10.40% 28
Yorkshire -70 57 £68,076 +36.15% 37
East of England -12 56 £50,000 -27.27% 71
Wales -4 38 £55,000 +4.67% 22
North East -22 35 £55,000 -9.10% 43
Northern Ireland -41 10 £80,000 +45.45% 10

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 40 (2.48%) Confluence
2 23 (1.43%) Apache Airflow
3 18 (1.12%) Apache Spark
4 12 (0.74%) Appian
5 11 (0.68%) Apache
6 10 (0.62%) CMS
6 10 (0.62%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.56%) IIS
7 9 (0.56%) Jupyter
7 9 (0.56%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 9 (0.56%) SharePoint
8 6 (0.37%) WordPress
9 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.19%) nginx
9 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
10 2 (0.12%) Camunda
10 2 (0.12%) JBoss
10 2 (0.12%) Oracle Application Server
10 2 (0.12%) SAS
10 2 (0.12%) Umbraco
Applications
1 14 (0.87%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.74%) Microsoft Excel
3 9 (0.56%) MS Visio
4 8 (0.50%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 6 (0.37%) PlantUML
6 4 (0.25%) Fusion 360
7 3 (0.19%) CANalyzer
8 2 (0.12%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 2 (0.12%) Chatbot
8 2 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.062%) Photoshop
9 1 (0.062%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 17 (1.05%) Oracle ERP
2 12 (0.74%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.31%) Oracle EBS
4 4 (0.25%) Dynamics AX
4 4 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 4 (0.25%) Shopify
5 3 (0.19%) Visualfiles
6 2 (0.12%) SAP CX
7 1 (0.062%) Elite 3E
7 1 (0.062%) Endur
7 1 (0.062%) Findur
7 1 (0.062%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.062%) Oracle Financials
7 1 (0.062%) Oracle SCM
7 1 (0.062%) SAP S/4HANA
7 1 (0.062%) Siebel CRM
7 1 (0.062%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 537 (33.31%) Azure
2 490 (30.40%) AWS
3 253 (15.69%) Azure DevOps
4 198 (12.28%) GCP
5 195 (12.10%) GitHub
6 131 (8.13%) Serverless
7 130 (8.06%) SaaS
8 78 (4.84%) Amazon EKS
9 71 (4.40%) PaaS
10 69 (4.28%) GitHub Actions
11 59 (3.66%) dbt
12 57 (3.54%) Azure Data Factory
12 57 (3.54%) GitHub Copilot
13 54 (3.35%) AWS Lambda
14 49 (3.04%) Power Platform
15 45 (2.79%) Amazon S3
15 45 (2.79%) AWS CloudFormation
16 41 (2.54%) Datadog
17 34 (2.11%) Entra ID
17 34 (2.11%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 19 (1.18%) DNS
2 18 (1.12%) Broadband
3 14 (0.87%) CHAP
4 13 (0.81%) HTTP
5 12 (0.74%) Firewall
5 12 (0.74%) WAN
6 11 (0.68%) SD-WAN
7 10 (0.62%) TCP/IP
8 8 (0.50%) 5G
8 8 (0.50%) VPN
9 4 (0.25%) SMTP
10 3 (0.19%) Cisco ISE
10 3 (0.19%) Ethernet
10 3 (0.19%) VLAN
10 3 (0.19%) Wi-Fi
11 2 (0.12%) LTE
11 2 (0.12%) Modbus
11 2 (0.12%) Multicast
11 2 (0.12%) Network Security
11 2 (0.12%) PuTTY
Database & Business Intelligence
1 103 (6.39%) NoSQL
2 100 (6.20%) PostgreSQL
3 88 (5.46%) SQL Server
4 56 (3.47%) MongoDB
5 41 (2.54%) Relational Database
6 37 (2.30%) Data Warehouse
6 37 (2.30%) MySQL
7 33 (2.05%) Power BI
8 27 (1.67%) DynamoDB
9 18 (1.12%) Amazon RDS
10 15 (0.93%) Metadata
11 14 (0.87%) Data Lake
11 14 (0.87%) Redis
12 13 (0.81%) DB2
12 13 (0.81%) Pinecone
13 12 (0.74%) BigQuery
14 11 (0.68%) Spark SQL
15 10 (0.62%) Elasticsearch
15 10 (0.62%) Oracle Database
15 10 (0.62%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 183 (11.35%) Selenium
2 181 (11.23%) Git
3 137 (8.50%) Jenkins
3 137 (8.50%) JIRA
4 91 (5.65%) Cypress.io
5 85 (5.27%) GitLab
6 77 (4.78%) Cucumber
7 68 (4.22%) TeamCity
8 63 (3.91%) Postman
9 51 (3.16%) JMeter
10 37 (2.30%) SpecFlow
11 31 (1.92%) REST Assured
12 27 (1.67%) CircleCI
13 25 (1.55%) JUnit
13 25 (1.55%) TestRail
14 24 (1.49%) MLflow
15 22 (1.36%) Bitbucket
16 19 (1.18%) Robot Framework
16 19 (1.18%) Zephyr
17 18 (1.12%) WebDriver
General
1 455 (28.23%) Social Skills
2 440 (27.30%) Finance
3 187 (11.60%) Banking
4 153 (9.49%) Analytical Skills
5 139 (8.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 127 (7.88%) Law
7 99 (6.14%) Retail
8 96 (5.96%) Public Sector
9 63 (3.91%) Financial Institution
10 48 (2.98%) Back Office
11 43 (2.67%) Electronics
12 40 (2.48%) Manufacturing
13 39 (2.42%) Legal
14 37 (2.30%) Marketing
15 35 (2.17%) Front Office
16 26 (1.61%) Games
17 19 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
18 17 (1.05%) Organisational Skills
19 14 (0.87%) Telecoms
20 13 (0.81%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 414 (25.68%) Senior
2 265 (16.44%) Lead
3 224 (13.90%) Developer
4 220 (13.65%) Software Engineer
5 162 (10.05%) Test Engineer
6 102 (6.33%) Senior Developer
7 94 (5.83%) QA Engineer
8 87 (5.40%) Tester
9 83 (5.15%) Java Engineer
10 80 (4.96%) Test Leader
11 72 (4.47%) Test Automation Engineer
12 71 (4.40%) Senior Software Engineer
13 65 (4.03%) Analyst
14 57 (3.54%) Automation Engineer
15 53 (3.29%) Automation Tester
15 53 (3.29%) Full-Stack Engineer
16 49 (3.04%) QA Automation Engineer
17 48 (2.98%) Python Developer
18 47 (2.92%) Data Engineer
19 46 (2.85%) QA Leader
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 200 (12.41%) React
2 163 (10.11%) .NET
3 146 (9.06%) Playwright
4 145 (9.00%) RESTful
5 139 (8.62%) REST
6 96 (5.96%) Spring
7 90 (5.58%) Node.js
8 68 (4.22%) Spring Boot
9 67 (4.16%) HTML
10 66 (4.09%) CSS
10 66 (4.09%) Kafka
11 56 (3.47%) JSON
12 52 (3.23%) OAuth
13 47 (2.92%) pytest
14 41 (2.54%) Web Services
15 40 (2.48%) AngularJS
15 40 (2.48%) Elastic Stack
16 39 (2.42%) OAuth2
17 38 (2.36%) .NET Framework
17 38 (2.36%) Django
Miscellaneous
1 263 (16.32%) Cloud Native
2 137 (8.50%) Product Ownership
3 80 (4.96%) Mobile App
4 66 (4.09%) Distributed Systems
5 60 (3.72%) Management Information System
6 45 (2.79%) Enterprise Software
6 45 (2.79%) Self-Motivation
7 43 (2.67%) Legacy Systems
8 40 (2.48%) Onboarding
9 37 (2.30%) Algorithms
10 35 (2.17%) Greenfield Project
11 32 (1.99%) Low-Code
12 31 (1.92%) Data Structures
13 27 (1.67%) Public Cloud
14 26 (1.61%) Hybrid Cloud
15 25 (1.55%) Equities
15 25 (1.55%) Hedge funds
16 21 (1.30%) Blog
17 20 (1.24%) Client/Server
18 19 (1.18%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 155 (9.62%) Linux
2 84 (5.21%) Windows
3 66 (4.09%) Apple iOS
4 56 (3.47%) Android
5 36 (2.23%) Unix
6 10 (0.62%) CentOS
7 9 (0.56%) Windows Server
8 5 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 4 (0.25%) Debian
9 4 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
10 3 (0.19%) FreeRTOS
10 3 (0.19%) Ubuntu
10 3 (0.19%) Windows 10
11 2 (0.12%) AIX
11 2 (0.12%) Kali Linux
11 2 (0.12%) Mac OS
11 2 (0.12%) VxWorks
12 1 (0.062%) ThreadX
12 1 (0.062%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 825 (51.18%) CI/CD
2 653 (40.51%) Agile
3 557 (34.55%) DevOps
4 396 (24.57%) Continuous Improvement
5 394 (24.44%) Software Engineering
6 345 (21.40%) Mentoring
7 343 (21.28%) Problem-Solving
8 264 (16.38%) Microservices
9 260 (16.13%) AI
10 247 (15.32%) Infrastructure as Code
11 236 (14.64%) Software Testing
12 229 (14.21%) Coaching
13 221 (13.71%) Observability
14 202 (12.53%) Clean Code
15 197 (12.22%) Test Strategy
16 194 (12.03%) Containerisation
17 185 (11.48%) Full-Stack Development
18 161 (9.99%) Deployment Automation
19 157 (9.74%) Analytics
19 157 (9.74%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 492 (30.52%) Python
2 417 (25.87%) Java
3 306 (18.98%) SQL
4 239 (14.83%) JavaScript
5 208 (12.90%) TypeScript
6 181 (11.23%) C#
7 77 (4.78%) PowerShell
8 72 (4.47%) C++
9 56 (3.47%) Bash
10 49 (3.04%) Go
11 38 (2.36%) C
12 33 (2.05%) Bicep
13 28 (1.74%) Kotlin
14 25 (1.55%) Apex Code
14 25 (1.55%) Rust
14 25 (1.55%) Shell Script
15 24 (1.49%) PL/SQL
16 19 (1.18%) PHP
16 19 (1.18%) Swift
17 12 (0.74%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 215 (13.34%) Degree
2 149 (9.24%) Security Cleared
3 100 (6.20%) SC Cleared
4 85 (5.27%) Computer Science Degree
5 82 (5.09%) ISTQB
6 30 (1.86%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 30 (1.86%) Master's Degree
7 26 (1.61%) DV Cleared
8 20 (1.24%) CISSP
9 19 (1.18%) AWS Certification
10 17 (1.05%) ISEB
11 15 (0.93%) CISA
12 14 (0.87%) Azure Certification
12 14 (0.87%) CGEIT
12 14 (0.87%) CISM
12 14 (0.87%) FFIEC
12 14 (0.87%) SANS
13 13 (0.81%) CEH
13 13 (0.81%) HND
13 13 (0.81%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 381 (23.64%) QA
2 126 (7.82%) Accessibility
3 67 (4.16%) Data Quality
4 49 (3.04%) GDPR
5 43 (2.67%) NIST
6 32 (1.99%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 26 (1.61%) WCAG
8 14 (0.87%) COBIT
8 14 (0.87%) SLA
9 13 (0.81%) ISO 22301
10 10 (0.62%) Software Quality Assurance
11 9 (0.56%) ISO 9001
12 8 (0.50%) NCSC
13 7 (0.43%) GRC
13 7 (0.43%) IEC 61508
14 5 (0.31%) ISO 26262
14 5 (0.31%) PMO
14 5 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 5 (0.31%) SOC 2
15 4 (0.25%) Cyber Essentials
System Software
1 231 (14.33%) Docker
2 28 (1.74%) Active Directory
3 21 (1.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 15 (0.93%) Hyper-V
5 14 (0.87%) Firmware
5 14 (0.87%) Virtual Machines
6 13 (0.81%) KVM
7 8 (0.50%) Embedded Firmware
8 3 (0.19%) Terminal Server
9 2 (0.12%) vSphere
10 1 (0.062%) Xen
Systems Management
1 287 (17.80%) Kubernetes
2 284 (17.62%) Terraform
3 134 (8.31%) Grafana
4 65 (4.03%) Ansible
5 45 (2.79%) Prometheus
6 27 (1.67%) Single Sign-On
7 12 (0.74%) Argo
8 8 (0.50%) logstash
9 7 (0.43%) Microsoft Intune
10 6 (0.37%) HP ALM
10 6 (0.37%) Kibana
10 6 (0.37%) SCCM
10 6 (0.37%) SCOM
11 4 (0.25%) Packer
11 4 (0.25%) Rancher
12 3 (0.19%) Functional Safety
12 3 (0.19%) HP Fortify
12 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
13 2 (0.12%) SCOrch
13 2 (0.12%) VxRail
Vendors
1 126 (7.82%) Microsoft
2 74 (4.59%) Oracle
3 53 (3.29%) Databricks
4 52 (3.23%) Salesforce
5 44 (2.73%) VMware
6 38 (2.36%) Google
7 20 (1.24%) OpenAI
8 19 (1.18%) Commvault
9 18 (1.12%) SAP
9 18 (1.12%) ServiceNow
10 17 (1.05%) Splunk
11 14 (0.87%) Atlassian
11 14 (0.87%) Palantir
12 13 (0.81%) Foundry
12 13 (0.81%) Pega
13 12 (0.74%) Automation Anywhere
13 12 (0.74%) UiPath
14 11 (0.68%) IBM
15 10 (0.62%) Ab Initio
15 10 (0.62%) Blue Prism