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 30 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 84 86 100
Rank change year-on-year +2 +14 -43
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,095 1,690 2,121
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.05% 3.43% 2.44%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.78% 3.82% 3.00%
Number of salaries quoted 1,198 827 1,319
10th Percentile £42,500 £37,500 £37,500
25th Percentile £50,000 £47,231 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £62,500 £57,965
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +7.82% -10.82%
75th Percentile £81,654 £82,500 £71,991
90th Percentile £96,250 £97,528 £86,688
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £57,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year +5.26% +8.57% -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 75,424 44,229 70,800
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.68% 89.64% 81.30%
Number of salaries quoted 51,991 25,065 47,390
10th Percentile £30,500 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +10.00% - -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 30 July 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 30 July 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 -2 1,738 £65,000 +3.17% 837
UK excluding London -1 1,287 £60,000 +5.26% 570
Work from Home +18 893 £67,500 +12.50% 333
London +2 649 £80,000 +3.23% 361
North of England +11 349 £57,500 -4.01% 152
South East -21 239 £60,000 +9.09% 160
South West -16 211 £59,750 +6.28% 96
Midlands -17 182 £62,500 +4.17% 69
North West +2 181 £61,250 -5.77% 86
Northern Ireland +6 131 £80,000 +45.45% 16
West Midlands -23 96 £62,500 - 46
North East +5 91 £52,500 +31.25% 28
East Midlands -19 85 £60,000 +26.32% 23
Yorkshire -11 77 £69,310 +41.45% 39
Wales -8 75 £55,000 - 8
East of England -42 63 £55,000 -3.51% 52
Scotland -41 50 £62,500 -5.66% 31

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 45 (2.15%) Confluence
2 30 (1.43%) Apache Spark
3 29 (1.38%) Apache Airflow
4 24 (1.15%) Apache
5 22 (1.05%) SharePoint
6 14 (0.67%) Jupyter
7 13 (0.62%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 13 (0.62%) Anypoint
7 13 (0.62%) Mule
8 12 (0.57%) CMS
9 5 (0.24%) IIS
9 5 (0.24%) Umbraco
9 5 (0.24%) WordPress
10 4 (0.19%) Cloud Foundry
10 4 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 4 (0.19%) nginx
10 4 (0.19%) Palantir Foundry
11 3 (0.14%) Camunda
11 3 (0.14%) JBoss
11 3 (0.14%) SAS
Applications
1 28 (1.34%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.57%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (0.57%) Simulink
3 7 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 6 (0.29%) PlantUML
5 5 (0.24%) Lightworks
6 3 (0.14%) CANalyzer
6 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
7 2 (0.095%) Adobe Creative Suite
7 2 (0.095%) Chatbot
7 2 (0.095%) Moqups
8 1 (0.048%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 38 (1.81%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.29%) Dynamics GP
3 5 (0.24%) SAP S/4HANA
3 5 (0.24%) Visualfiles
4 4 (0.19%) Dynamics AX
5 2 (0.095%) FLEXCUBE
5 2 (0.095%) Oracle Applications
5 2 (0.095%) Oracle EBS
5 2 (0.095%) Payment Gateway
5 2 (0.095%) Towers Watson Igloo
5 2 (0.095%) Workday HCM
6 1 (0.048%) Elite 3E
6 1 (0.048%) Endur
6 1 (0.048%) Findur
6 1 (0.048%) Magento
6 1 (0.048%) Misys Equation
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle Assets
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle ERP
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
6 1 (0.048%) Oracle SCM
Cloud Services
1 771 (36.80%) AWS
2 658 (31.41%) Azure
3 248 (11.84%) Azure DevOps
4 238 (11.36%) SaaS
5 234 (11.17%) GCP
6 183 (8.74%) Serverless
7 178 (8.50%) GitHub
8 90 (4.30%) GitHub Actions
9 88 (4.20%) AWS CloudFormation
10 78 (3.72%) AWS Lambda
11 72 (3.44%) Amazon S3
12 69 (3.29%) Amazon EKS
13 57 (2.72%) Power Platform
14 52 (2.48%) Azure Service Bus
15 50 (2.39%) PaaS
16 45 (2.15%) Azure Logic Apps
16 45 (2.15%) dbt
17 44 (2.10%) Azure Monitor
18 41 (1.96%) Amazon EC2
19 34 (1.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (3.39%) Broadband
2 25 (1.19%) Firewall
3 15 (0.72%) Wireless
4 14 (0.67%) DNS
4 14 (0.67%) SSL
5 13 (0.62%) DMARC
6 12 (0.57%) MQTT
6 12 (0.57%) TCP/IP
7 11 (0.53%) Wi-Fi
8 10 (0.48%) LTE
9 9 (0.43%) 3GPP
10 8 (0.38%) HTTP
10 8 (0.38%) WAN
11 7 (0.33%) CHAP
11 7 (0.33%) DHCP
11 7 (0.33%) GSM
11 7 (0.33%) Network Security
11 7 (0.33%) SS7
11 7 (0.33%) UMTS
11 7 (0.33%) ZigBee
Database & Business Intelligence
1 133 (6.35%) NoSQL
2 132 (6.30%) PostgreSQL
3 103 (4.92%) MongoDB
4 71 (3.39%) SQL Server
5 48 (2.29%) Relational Database
6 46 (2.20%) DynamoDB
7 38 (1.81%) MySQL
8 30 (1.43%) Data Warehouse
9 27 (1.29%) Power BI
9 27 (1.29%) Redis
10 26 (1.24%) BigQuery
11 18 (0.86%) Amazon RDS
11 18 (0.86%) Spark SQL
12 16 (0.76%) Data Lake
12 16 (0.76%) Metadata
12 16 (0.76%) Semantic Layer
13 14 (0.67%) Amazon Athena
14 13 (0.62%) Oracle Database
15 12 (0.57%) Elasticsearch
16 10 (0.48%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 272 (12.98%) Git
2 187 (8.93%) GitLab
2 187 (8.93%) Jenkins
3 156 (7.45%) Selenium
4 132 (6.30%) JIRA
5 94 (4.49%) Cucumber
6 92 (4.39%) Cypress.io
7 82 (3.91%) Postman
8 56 (2.67%) TeamCity
9 52 (2.48%) JMeter
10 38 (1.81%) JUnit
10 38 (1.81%) REST Assured
11 32 (1.53%) Zephyr
12 26 (1.24%) SpecFlow
13 25 (1.19%) Gatling
13 25 (1.19%) TestRail
14 21 (1.00%) Bitbucket
14 21 (1.00%) fastlane
15 20 (0.95%) Crashlytics
16 19 (0.91%) SonarQube
General
1 555 (26.49%) Social Skills
2 473 (22.58%) Finance
3 229 (10.93%) Analytical Skills
4 210 (10.02%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 210 (10.02%) Public Sector
5 188 (8.97%) Banking
6 182 (8.69%) Law
7 113 (5.39%) Legal
8 94 (4.49%) Retail
9 71 (3.39%) Manufacturing
10 69 (3.29%) Marketing
11 62 (2.96%) Financial Institution
12 60 (2.86%) Electronics
13 54 (2.58%) Games
14 49 (2.34%) Back Office
15 30 (1.43%) Telecoms
16 29 (1.38%) Front Office
17 24 (1.15%) Aerospace
17 24 (1.15%) Documentation Skills
18 20 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 593 (28.31%) Senior
2 332 (15.85%) Lead
3 321 (15.32%) Software Engineer
4 293 (13.99%) Developer
5 221 (10.55%) Test Engineer
6 120 (5.73%) Java Engineer
7 119 (5.68%) Senior Developer
8 98 (4.68%) Senior Software Engineer
9 86 (4.11%) QA Engineer
9 86 (4.11%) Test Automation Engineer
10 84 (4.01%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 78 (3.72%) DevOps Engineer
12 69 (3.29%) Architect
12 69 (3.29%) Test Leader
13 66 (3.15%) Data Engineer
14 65 (3.10%) Tester
15 59 (2.82%) Senior Manager
16 58 (2.77%) Lead Software Engineer
17 57 (2.72%) Analyst
18 54 (2.58%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 217 (10.36%) React
2 204 (9.74%) .NET
3 184 (8.78%) Playwright
4 182 (8.69%) Spring
5 181 (8.64%) REST
6 176 (8.40%) RESTful
7 173 (8.26%) Node.js
8 136 (6.49%) Spring Boot
9 120 (5.73%) Kafka
10 106 (5.06%) AngularJS
11 84 (4.01%) CSS
12 81 (3.87%) HTML
13 67 (3.20%) OAuth
14 65 (3.10%) Middleware
15 60 (2.86%) OAuth2
16 50 (2.39%) JSON
17 46 (2.20%) RabbitMQ
18 43 (2.05%) Next.js
18 43 (2.05%) Vue
19 39 (1.86%) ASP.NET
Miscellaneous
1 373 (17.80%) Cloud Native
2 236 (11.26%) Product Ownership
3 175 (8.35%) Distributed Systems
4 108 (5.16%) Mobile App
5 81 (3.87%) Enterprise Software
6 70 (3.34%) Virtual Team
7 69 (3.29%) Public Cloud
8 68 (3.25%) Legacy Systems
9 60 (2.86%) Cyber Threat
10 57 (2.72%) Algorithms
11 52 (2.48%) Blog
12 51 (2.43%) Low-Code
13 48 (2.29%) Management Information System
14 47 (2.24%) Onboarding
15 43 (2.05%) Data Structures
16 41 (1.96%) Greenfield Project
17 39 (1.86%) Self-Motivation
18 35 (1.67%) Embedded Systems
19 34 (1.62%) Marketing Technology
19 34 (1.62%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 181 (8.64%) Linux
2 94 (4.49%) Windows
3 65 (3.10%) Apple iOS
4 56 (2.67%) Android
5 53 (2.53%) Unix
6 11 (0.53%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.33%) CentOS
8 6 (0.29%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.29%) FreeRTOS
9 4 (0.19%) Kali Linux
10 3 (0.14%) AIX
10 3 (0.14%) Debian
11 1 (0.048%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
11 1 (0.048%) ThreadX
11 1 (0.048%) Ubuntu
11 1 (0.048%) VMS
11 1 (0.048%) VxWorks
11 1 (0.048%) Windows 10
11 1 (0.048%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,199 (57.23%) CI/CD
2 933 (44.53%) Agile
3 796 (38.00%) DevOps
4 672 (32.08%) Software Engineering
5 600 (28.64%) Continuous Improvement
6 593 (28.31%) Mentoring
7 424 (20.24%) Problem-Solving
8 419 (20.00%) AI
9 405 (19.33%) Microservices
10 371 (17.71%) Infrastructure as Code
11 352 (16.80%) Software Testing
12 297 (14.18%) Test Strategy
13 269 (12.84%) Observability
14 268 (12.79%) Coaching
14 268 (12.79%) Full-Stack Development
15 267 (12.74%) Containerisation
16 241 (11.50%) Code Quality
17 233 (11.12%) Validation
18 217 (10.36%) Scrum
19 213 (10.17%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 660 (31.50%) Python
2 565 (26.97%) Java
3 366 (17.47%) JavaScript
4 338 (16.13%) SQL
5 307 (14.65%) TypeScript
6 303 (14.46%) C#
7 119 (5.68%) C++
8 102 (4.87%) PowerShell
9 85 (4.06%) Go
10 75 (3.58%) Bash
10 75 (3.58%) C
11 43 (2.05%) Kotlin
12 33 (1.58%) Rust
13 32 (1.53%) Swift
14 28 (1.34%) PHP
15 25 (1.19%) Ruby
16 21 (1.00%) Bicep
16 21 (1.00%) MATLAB
17 18 (0.86%) Groovy
18 16 (0.76%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 263 (12.55%) Security Cleared
2 241 (11.50%) Degree
3 163 (7.78%) SC Cleared
4 108 (5.16%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (3.87%) ISTQB
6 62 (2.96%) CISSP
7 60 (2.86%) ITIL Certification
8 56 (2.67%) CISM
9 51 (2.43%) DV Cleared
10 42 (2.00%) AWS Certification
11 36 (1.72%) Master's Degree
12 30 (1.43%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 18 (0.86%) BPSS Clearance
14 17 (0.81%) DBS Check
14 17 (0.81%) ISEB
15 13 (0.62%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.57%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 12 (0.57%) HNC
17 9 (0.43%) HND
18 8 (0.38%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 488 (23.29%) QA
2 187 (8.93%) Accessibility
3 75 (3.58%) Data Quality
4 61 (2.91%) NIST
5 54 (2.58%) WCAG
6 52 (2.48%) ISO 22301
7 46 (2.20%) GDPR
8 14 (0.67%) SLA
9 13 (0.62%) Software Quality Assurance
10 12 (0.57%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 11 (0.53%) GRC
12 9 (0.43%) SOC 2
13 8 (0.38%) COBIT
14 7 (0.33%) JTAG
14 7 (0.33%) MISRA
15 6 (0.29%) PMO
16 4 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 4 (0.19%) ISO 9001
16 4 (0.19%) NCSC
17 3 (0.14%) ISO/IEC 12207
System Software
1 284 (13.56%) Docker
2 30 (1.43%) Firmware
3 22 (1.05%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.76%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.67%) Active Directory
6 13 (0.62%) Hyper-V
7 11 (0.53%) KVM
8 10 (0.48%) Embedded Firmware
9 2 (0.095%) vSphere
10 1 (0.048%) IAG
10 1 (0.048%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.048%) ProxySG
10 1 (0.048%) Terminal Server
10 1 (0.048%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.048%) Xen
Systems Management
1 314 (14.99%) Terraform
2 310 (14.80%) Kubernetes
3 132 (6.30%) Grafana
4 80 (3.82%) Ansible
5 61 (2.91%) Prometheus
6 26 (1.24%) Argo
7 16 (0.76%) Kibana
8 13 (0.62%) CloudHub
9 9 (0.43%) logstash
9 9 (0.43%) Puppet
9 9 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.33%) HP Fortify
10 7 (0.33%) Microsoft Intune
11 6 (0.29%) Functional Safety
11 6 (0.29%) vCenter Server
12 5 (0.24%) Packer
13 4 (0.19%) SCCM
13 4 (0.19%) SCOM
14 3 (0.14%) Progress Chef
14 3 (0.14%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 170 (8.11%) Microsoft
2 60 (2.86%) Google
3 59 (2.82%) Databricks
4 51 (2.43%) Oracle
5 49 (2.34%) Salesforce
6 43 (2.05%) ServiceNow
7 35 (1.67%) VMware
8 30 (1.43%) Splunk
9 28 (1.34%) SAP
10 25 (1.19%) Dynatrace
11 21 (1.00%) Pega
12 17 (0.81%) AppDynamics
13 16 (0.76%) Braze
13 16 (0.76%) MuleSoft
14 15 (0.72%) Adobe
14 15 (0.72%) Atlassian
14 15 (0.72%) OpenAI
15 14 (0.67%) Amplitude
15 14 (0.67%) IBM
16 13 (0.62%) SendGrid