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

6 months to
27 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 96 84
Rank change year-on-year +16 -12 -14
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,448 1,564 2,185
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.08% 3.15% 2.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.85% 3.55% 3.52%
Number of salaries quoted 1,327 729 972
10th Percentile £41,250 £39,000 £39,723
25th Percentile £47,500 £50,500 £46,292
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,500 £62,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year - +4.17% -4.76%
75th Percentile £80,000 £85,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £93,750 £105,000 £96,125
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 85,859 44,048 62,135
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.06% 88.76% 81.73%
Number of salaries quoted 59,233 24,687 33,999
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,500
25th Percentile £41,500 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £58,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -5.17% -3.33%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,090
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 27 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 27 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 2,002 £62,500 -2.46% 2,685
UK excluding London +19 1,557 £57,500 - 1,697
Work from Home +16 869 £67,500 +8.00% 1,159
London +5 724 £77,750 -2.81% 1,198
North of England +32 398 £57,500 -4.17% 441
South East -12 273 £60,000 +4.35% 351
South West +13 261 £60,000 +14.29% 239
Midlands -10 208 £54,000 -6.09% 203
North West -3 192 £60,000 - 236
Northern Ireland +8 164 £80,000 +45.45% 76
Wales +7 133 £53,171 -3.33% 42
North East +22 118 £55,000 +78.86% 68
West Midlands -14 117 £52,500 -1.87% 141
Yorkshire +21 94 £69,310 +26.02% 137
East of England -24 91 £47,500 -19.83% 165
East Midlands -25 91 £54,000 -13.60% 61
Scotland -49 44 £62,500 -5.66% 194

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 60 (2.45%) Confluence
2 35 (1.43%) Apache Spark
3 29 (1.18%) Apache
4 24 (0.98%) SharePoint
5 21 (0.86%) Apache Airflow
6 19 (0.78%) Jupyter
7 15 (0.61%) CMS
8 14 (0.57%) Anypoint
8 14 (0.57%) Mule
9 13 (0.53%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 8 (0.33%) Microsoft Exchange
11 7 (0.29%) nginx
12 6 (0.25%) Headless CMS
12 6 (0.25%) Umbraco
13 5 (0.20%) Camunda
13 5 (0.20%) Cloud Foundry
13 5 (0.20%) SAS
13 5 (0.20%) WinCC
14 4 (0.16%) Palantir Foundry
14 4 (0.16%) WebLogic
Applications
1 82 (3.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 15 (0.61%) Microsoft Office
3 14 (0.57%) Simulink
4 9 (0.37%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 7 (0.29%) Moqups
6 6 (0.25%) Chatbot
6 6 (0.25%) Lightworks
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 (2.78%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.10%) Dynamics GP
3 11 (0.45%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.16%) 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
1 812 (33.17%) AWS
2 675 (27.57%) Azure
3 324 (13.24%) SaaS
4 255 (10.42%) GCP
5 240 (9.80%) Azure DevOps
6 211 (8.62%) GitHub
7 196 (8.01%) Serverless
8 116 (4.74%) GitHub Actions
9 103 (4.21%) AWS CloudFormation
10 102 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
11 94 (3.84%) AWS Lambda
12 89 (3.64%) Amazon S3
13 69 (2.82%) Power Platform
14 59 (2.41%) Google Ads
14 59 (2.41%) Meta Ads
15 58 (2.37%) Azure Service Bus
16 54 (2.21%) Azure Logic Apps
17 52 (2.12%) Azure Monitor
18 47 (1.92%) Azure Functions
19 42 (1.72%) GitHub Copilot
Communications & Networking
1 56 (2.29%) Broadband
2 30 (1.23%) TCP/IP
3 25 (1.02%) DNS
3 25 (1.02%) Firewall
4 17 (0.69%) SSL
5 16 (0.65%) Wireless
6 15 (0.61%) DMARC
6 15 (0.61%) Modbus
7 14 (0.57%) MQTT
8 13 (0.53%) HTTP
8 13 (0.53%) Wi-Fi
9 12 (0.49%) DHCP
10 11 (0.45%) 5G
10 11 (0.45%) Ethernet
10 11 (0.45%) WAN
11 10 (0.41%) LTE
11 10 (0.41%) Network Security
12 9 (0.37%) 3GPP
13 8 (0.33%) Internet
14 7 (0.29%) UMTS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 147 (6.00%) PostgreSQL
2 122 (4.98%) NoSQL
3 92 (3.76%) MongoDB
4 83 (3.39%) SQL Server
5 71 (2.90%) Relational Database
6 48 (1.96%) Redis
7 45 (1.84%) DynamoDB
8 42 (1.72%) Power BI
9 41 (1.67%) MySQL
10 36 (1.47%) Data Warehouse
11 35 (1.43%) Data Lake
12 31 (1.27%) BigQuery
13 26 (1.06%) Amazon Athena
13 26 (1.06%) Amazon RDS
14 23 (0.94%) Metadata
14 23 (0.94%) Semantic Layer
15 15 (0.61%) Elasticsearch
16 14 (0.57%) Amazon Aurora
16 14 (0.57%) Azure SQL Database
17 13 (0.53%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 370 (15.11%) Git
2 253 (10.33%) GitLab
3 217 (8.86%) Jenkins
4 167 (6.82%) Selenium
5 152 (6.21%) JIRA
6 111 (4.53%) Cucumber
6 111 (4.53%) Cypress.io
7 92 (3.76%) Postman
8 71 (2.90%) TeamCity
9 49 (2.00%) JMeter
9 49 (2.00%) JUnit
10 42 (1.72%) REST Assured
11 32 (1.31%) Gatling
12 31 (1.27%) LabVIEW
12 31 (1.27%) Zephyr
13 30 (1.23%) SonarQube
14 25 (1.02%) Bitbucket
15 24 (0.98%) Maven
15 24 (0.98%) Robot Framework
15 24 (0.98%) TestRail
General
1 680 (27.78%) Social Skills
2 593 (24.22%) Finance
3 387 (15.81%) Analytical Skills
4 277 (11.32%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 242 (9.89%) Public Sector
6 203 (8.29%) Banking
6 203 (8.29%) Law
7 174 (7.11%) Marketing
8 140 (5.72%) Legal
9 129 (5.27%) Retail
10 118 (4.82%) Manufacturing
11 94 (3.84%) Electronics
12 82 (3.35%) Financial Institution
13 61 (2.49%) Back Office
14 53 (2.17%) Aerospace
15 44 (1.80%) Telecoms
16 37 (1.51%) Games
17 35 (1.43%) Documentation Skills
18 30 (1.23%) Automotive
19 25 (1.02%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 670 (27.37%) Senior
2 357 (14.58%) Software Engineer
3 336 (13.73%) Developer
4 324 (13.24%) Lead
5 258 (10.54%) Test Engineer
6 121 (4.94%) Senior Developer
7 115 (4.70%) Java Engineer
8 111 (4.53%) DevOps Engineer
9 106 (4.33%) QA Engineer
10 102 (4.17%) Senior Software Engineer
11 89 (3.64%) Test Automation Engineer
12 84 (3.43%) Analyst
13 79 (3.23%) Full-Stack Engineer
14 76 (3.10%) Data Engineer
15 69 (2.82%) Lead Software Engineer
15 69 (2.82%) Principal Engineer
16 67 (2.74%) Architect
17 66 (2.70%) Tester
18 64 (2.61%) Software Developer
19 61 (2.49%) Marketing Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 337 (13.77%) Terraform
2 260 (10.62%) REST
3 232 (9.48%) React
4 228 (9.31%) .NET
5 213 (8.70%) Playwright
6 207 (8.46%) Node.js
7 201 (8.21%) RESTful
7 201 (8.21%) Spring
8 152 (6.21%) Spring Boot
9 142 (5.80%) Kafka
10 124 (5.07%) CSS
11 116 (4.74%) AngularJS
11 116 (4.74%) HTML
12 75 (3.06%) OAuth
13 72 (2.94%) Middleware
14 66 (2.70%) OAuth2
15 63 (2.57%) JSON
16 55 (2.25%) Next.js
17 52 (2.12%) PySpark
18 48 (1.96%) RabbitMQ
Miscellaneous
1 421 (17.20%) Cloud Native
2 290 (11.85%) Product Ownership
3 209 (8.54%) Distributed Systems
4 106 (4.33%) Onboarding
5 101 (4.13%) Enterprise Software
5 101 (4.13%) Mobile App
6 89 (3.64%) Public Cloud
7 84 (3.43%) Blog
8 78 (3.19%) Virtual Team
9 68 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
10 64 (2.61%) Marketing Technology
11 54 (2.21%) Self-Motivation
12 53 (2.17%) Cyber Threat
13 52 (2.12%) Algorithms
14 51 (2.08%) Low-Code
15 48 (1.96%) Embedded Systems
16 43 (1.76%) e-Learning
17 42 (1.72%) Data Structures
18 39 (1.59%) Management Information System
19 38 (1.55%) AI Agents
Operating Systems
1 182 (7.43%) Linux
2 103 (4.21%) Windows
3 64 (2.61%) Android
4 57 (2.33%) Unix
5 56 (2.29%) Apple iOS
6 9 (0.37%) Embedded Linux
6 9 (0.37%) Windows Server
7 8 (0.33%) CentOS
8 7 (0.29%) FreeRTOS
9 5 (0.20%) AIX
10 4 (0.16%) Debian
10 4 (0.16%) Kali Linux
10 4 (0.16%) VMS
11 3 (0.12%) VxWorks
12 2 (0.082%) OpenWrt
13 1 (0.041%) Mac OS
13 1 (0.041%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 1 (0.041%) ThreadX
13 1 (0.041%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,372 (56.05%) CI/CD
2 1,016 (41.50%) Agile
3 867 (35.42%) DevOps
4 783 (31.99%) Software Engineering
5 716 (29.25%) Continuous Improvement
6 635 (25.94%) Mentoring
7 602 (24.59%) AI
8 571 (23.33%) Problem-Solving
9 456 (18.63%) Microservices
10 430 (17.57%) Software Testing
11 389 (15.89%) Infrastructure as Code
12 323 (13.19%) Test Strategy
13 314 (12.83%) Validation
14 297 (12.13%) Observability
15 295 (12.05%) Coaching
15 295 (12.05%) Code Quality
16 273 (11.15%) Containerisation
17 268 (10.95%) Technical Leadership
18 262 (10.70%) Full-Stack Development
19 258 (10.54%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 692 (28.27%) Python
2 589 (24.06%) Java
3 464 (18.95%) SQL
4 429 (17.52%) JavaScript
5 352 (14.38%) TypeScript
6 339 (13.85%) C#
7 126 (5.15%) C++
8 103 (4.21%) PowerShell
9 98 (4.00%) Go
10 93 (3.80%) Bash
11 79 (3.23%) C
12 36 (1.47%) Kotlin
13 33 (1.35%) PHP
13 33 (1.35%) Rust
14 32 (1.31%) Ruby
15 30 (1.23%) Groovy
16 26 (1.06%) MATLAB
17 25 (1.02%) Bicep
18 21 (0.86%) Swift
19 16 (0.65%) Scala
Qualifications
1 385 (15.73%) Security Cleared
2 256 (10.46%) Degree
3 237 (9.68%) SC Cleared
4 100 (4.08%) Computer Science Degree
5 80 (3.27%) ISTQB
6 69 (2.82%) DV Cleared
7 62 (2.53%) AWS Certification
8 56 (2.29%) CISSP
9 54 (2.21%) ITIL Certification
10 53 (2.17%) CISM
11 48 (1.96%) Master's Degree
12 43 (1.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 42 (1.72%) HNC
14 36 (1.47%) BPSS Clearance
15 34 (1.39%) HND
16 17 (0.69%) DBS Check
17 16 (0.65%) ISEB
18 15 (0.61%) Azure Certification
19 13 (0.53%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
20 11 (0.45%) NVQ Level 4
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 569 (23.24%) QA
2 205 (8.37%) Accessibility
3 89 (3.64%) Data Quality
4 68 (2.78%) WCAG
5 55 (2.25%) NIST
6 48 (1.96%) ISO 22301
7 37 (1.51%) GDPR
8 12 (0.49%) SLA
9 10 (0.41%) MISRA
10 9 (0.37%) GRC
10 9 (0.37%) Software Quality Assurance
11 7 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 27001
11 7 (0.29%) SOC 2
12 6 (0.25%) JTAG
13 5 (0.20%) COBIT
13 5 (0.20%) NCSC
14 4 (0.16%) ECSS
14 4 (0.16%) ISO 20022
14 4 (0.16%) PCI DSS
14 4 (0.16%) PMO
System Software
1 345 (14.09%) Docker
2 48 (1.96%) Firmware
3 14 (0.57%) Active Directory
4 11 (0.45%) Embedded Firmware
5 10 (0.41%) VMware Infrastructure
6 8 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
7 3 (0.12%) Hyper-V
8 2 (0.082%) KVM
8 2 (0.082%) ProxySG
9 1 (0.041%) IAG
9 1 (0.041%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.041%) QEMU
9 1 (0.041%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 353 (14.42%) Kubernetes
2 161 (6.58%) Grafana
3 79 (3.23%) Ansible
4 68 (2.78%) Prometheus
5 31 (1.27%) Argo
6 17 (0.69%) Kibana
7 16 (0.65%) Puppet
8 14 (0.57%) CloudHub
9 12 (0.49%) Rancher
10 11 (0.45%) Microsoft Intune
11 9 (0.37%) logstash
12 8 (0.33%) HP Fortify
12 8 (0.33%) Single Sign-On
13 7 (0.29%) Functional Safety
14 6 (0.25%) Progress Chef
14 6 (0.25%) vCenter Server
15 5 (0.20%) Packer
16 3 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
16 3 (0.12%) SCCM
16 3 (0.12%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 261 (10.66%) Microsoft
2 126 (5.15%) Google
3 65 (2.66%) Databricks
4 62 (2.53%) Salesforce
5 57 (2.33%) Oracle
6 50 (2.04%) SAP
7 46 (1.88%) ServiceNow
8 36 (1.47%) Dynatrace
8 36 (1.47%) Splunk
9 23 (0.94%) Pega
10 20 (0.82%) MuleSoft
11 19 (0.78%) AppDynamics
12 17 (0.69%) IBM
12 17 (0.69%) VMware
13 16 (0.65%) OpenAI
14 15 (0.61%) Adobe
14 15 (0.61%) Allen-Bradley
14 15 (0.61%) Red Hat
14 15 (0.61%) SendGrid
15 14 (0.57%) Atlassian