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 16 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 76 96 85
Rank change year-on-year +20 -11 -15
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,590 1,549 2,023
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.17% 3.17% 2.87%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.96% 3.57% 3.49%
Number of salaries quoted 1,396 746 913
10th Percentile £40,000 £39,934 £40,000
25th Percentile £46,939 £51,250 £47,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,130 £65,000 £60,500
Median % change year-on-year -7.49% +7.44% -3.20%
75th Percentile £80,000 £85,000 £78,750
90th Percentile £95,000 £105,000 £102,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £60,000 £56,500
% change year-on-year -4.17% +6.19% -1.16%

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 87,497 43,445 57,940
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.45% 88.84% 82.20%
Number of salaries quoted 59,802 24,607 31,056
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,250 £33,099
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,250 £44,541
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -8.33% -
75th Percentile £78,000 £75,000 £78,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,000 £53,000
% change year-on-year +17.02% -11.32% -1.85%

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 16 October 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 16 October 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 +13 2,130 £62,500 -3.85% 531
UK excluding London +17 1,658 £57,500 -4.17% 417
Work from Home +19 928 £66,250 +3.52% 293
London -1 760 £80,000 -3.03% 180
North of England +33 444 £57,500 -4.17% 119
South East -8 295 £60,000 +4.35% 85
South West +19 254 £60,000 +14.29% 74
Midlands +1 218 £52,500 -14.63% 65
North West -13 200 £60,000 -3.23% 70
Northern Ireland +11 160 - - 3
Wales +8 138 £53,171 -7.53% 7
North East +21 136 £55,000 +78.86% 17
West Midlands -18 119 £50,000 -15.97% 41
Yorkshire +34 117 £69,305 +26.01% 32
East of England -5 113 £46,000 -23.33% 48
East Midlands -14 99 £52,500 -16.00% 24
Scotland -57 47 £60,000 -14.29% 22

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 58 (2.24%) Confluence
2 42 (1.62%) Apache Spark
3 37 (1.43%) Apache
4 26 (1.00%) Apache Airflow
5 25 (0.97%) SharePoint
6 20 (0.77%) Jupyter
7 18 (0.69%) Adobe Experience Manager
8 14 (0.54%) Anypoint
8 14 (0.54%) CMS
8 14 (0.54%) Mule
9 11 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
10 9 (0.35%) Microsoft Exchange
10 9 (0.35%) nginx
11 7 (0.27%) Headless CMS
11 7 (0.27%) WebLogic
12 6 (0.23%) SAS
13 5 (0.19%) Camunda
13 5 (0.19%) Cloud Foundry
13 5 (0.19%) WinCC
14 4 (0.15%) WordPress
Applications
1 94 (3.63%) Microsoft Excel
2 19 (0.73%) Microsoft Office
3 14 (0.54%) Simulink
4 9 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 7 (0.27%) Chatbot
5 7 (0.27%) Moqups
6 6 (0.23%) Lightworks
7 5 (0.19%) MS Visio
8 4 (0.15%) EPLAN
8 4 (0.15%) SOLIDWORKS
9 1 (0.039%) AutoCAD
9 1 (0.039%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 72 (2.78%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.04%) Dynamics GP
3 11 (0.42%) SAP S/4HANA
4 4 (0.15%) Payment Gateway
5 3 (0.12%) Magento
5 3 (0.12%) SAP ERP
6 2 (0.077%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.077%) Oracle Applications
6 2 (0.077%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.077%) Visualfiles
6 2 (0.077%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.039%) Academy Revenues and Benefits
7 1 (0.039%) Adobe Campaign
7 1 (0.039%) Bloomberg TOMS
7 1 (0.039%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.039%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.039%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Assets
7 1 (0.039%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
7 1 (0.039%) Sage 200
Cloud Services
1 850 (32.82%) AWS
2 692 (26.72%) Azure
3 334 (12.90%) SaaS
4 264 (10.19%) GCP
5 257 (9.92%) GitHub
6 220 (8.49%) Azure DevOps
7 187 (7.22%) Serverless
8 129 (4.98%) GitHub Actions
9 108 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
10 102 (3.94%) Amazon EKS
11 100 (3.86%) Amazon S3
12 93 (3.59%) AWS Lambda
13 82 (3.17%) Power Platform
14 66 (2.55%) Google Ads
14 66 (2.55%) Meta Ads
15 55 (2.12%) GitHub Copilot
16 53 (2.05%) Azure Service Bus
17 49 (1.89%) Azure Logic Apps
17 49 (1.89%) Azure Monitor
18 46 (1.78%) Amazon ECS
Communications & Networking
1 56 (2.16%) Broadband
2 36 (1.39%) TCP/IP
3 28 (1.08%) DNS
4 25 (0.97%) Firewall
5 19 (0.73%) Modbus
6 18 (0.69%) Wireless
7 17 (0.66%) Ethernet
7 17 (0.66%) SSL
8 15 (0.58%) DMARC
9 14 (0.54%) HTTP
9 14 (0.54%) MQTT
10 13 (0.50%) 5G
10 13 (0.50%) Wi-Fi
11 12 (0.46%) DHCP
11 12 (0.46%) Network Security
12 11 (0.42%) WAN
13 9 (0.35%) 3GPP
13 9 (0.35%) LTE
14 8 (0.31%) Internet
14 8 (0.31%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 159 (6.14%) PostgreSQL
2 121 (4.67%) NoSQL
3 90 (3.47%) MongoDB
4 87 (3.36%) SQL Server
5 78 (3.01%) Relational Database
6 52 (2.01%) MySQL
6 52 (2.01%) Redis
7 51 (1.97%) Power BI
8 43 (1.66%) DynamoDB
9 36 (1.39%) Data Lake
9 36 (1.39%) Data Warehouse
9 36 (1.39%) Metadata
10 30 (1.16%) Amazon Athena
10 30 (1.16%) BigQuery
11 29 (1.12%) Amazon RDS
12 27 (1.04%) Semantic Layer
13 23 (0.89%) Azure SQL Database
14 18 (0.69%) Amazon Aurora
15 17 (0.66%) Amazon Redshift
16 16 (0.62%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 366 (14.13%) Git
2 269 (10.39%) GitLab
3 210 (8.11%) Jenkins
4 164 (6.33%) Selenium
5 148 (5.71%) JIRA
6 118 (4.56%) Cypress.io
7 108 (4.17%) Cucumber
8 85 (3.28%) Postman
9 75 (2.90%) TeamCity
10 51 (1.97%) JUnit
11 49 (1.89%) JMeter
12 46 (1.78%) REST Assured
13 44 (1.70%) LabVIEW
14 33 (1.27%) Gatling
15 29 (1.12%) Claude Code
16 25 (0.97%) Zephyr
17 22 (0.85%) Robot Framework
17 22 (0.85%) SonarQube
18 21 (0.81%) Bitbucket
18 21 (0.81%) Maven
General
1 722 (27.88%) Social Skills
2 625 (24.13%) Finance
3 418 (16.14%) Analytical Skills
4 284 (10.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 276 (10.66%) Public Sector
6 214 (8.26%) Banking
7 202 (7.80%) Law
8 185 (7.14%) Marketing
9 138 (5.33%) Manufacturing
10 136 (5.25%) Legal
11 131 (5.06%) Retail
12 118 (4.56%) Electronics
13 85 (3.28%) Financial Institution
14 65 (2.51%) Aerospace
15 63 (2.43%) Back Office
16 48 (1.85%) Telecoms
17 40 (1.54%) Automotive
18 39 (1.51%) Games
19 36 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
20 25 (0.97%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 736 (28.42%) Senior
2 397 (15.33%) Software Engineer
3 352 (13.59%) Developer
4 296 (11.43%) Lead
5 284 (10.97%) Test Engineer
6 136 (5.25%) Senior Developer
7 121 (4.67%) QA Engineer
8 119 (4.59%) Java Engineer
9 116 (4.48%) Senior Software Engineer
10 114 (4.40%) DevOps Engineer
11 88 (3.40%) Analyst
11 88 (3.40%) Test Automation Engineer
12 86 (3.32%) Data Engineer
13 84 (3.24%) Tester
14 82 (3.17%) Principal Engineer
15 76 (2.93%) Automation Engineer
16 74 (2.86%) Full-Stack Engineer
17 72 (2.78%) Software Developer
18 70 (2.70%) Lead Software Engineer
19 65 (2.51%) Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 343 (13.24%) Terraform
2 281 (10.85%) REST
3 238 (9.19%) .NET
4 224 (8.65%) React
5 213 (8.22%) Node.js
6 210 (8.11%) Playwright
7 209 (8.07%) RESTful
8 206 (7.95%) Spring
9 160 (6.18%) Spring Boot
10 150 (5.79%) Kafka
11 134 (5.17%) CSS
12 125 (4.83%) HTML
13 114 (4.40%) AngularJS
14 73 (2.82%) Middleware
14 73 (2.82%) OAuth
15 65 (2.51%) OAuth2
16 60 (2.32%) JSON
17 56 (2.16%) Next.js
18 54 (2.08%) GraphQL
18 54 (2.08%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 447 (17.26%) Cloud Native
2 293 (11.31%) Product Ownership
3 225 (8.69%) Distributed Systems
4 124 (4.79%) Onboarding
5 120 (4.63%) Enterprise Software
6 95 (3.67%) Mobile App
7 92 (3.55%) Public Cloud
8 86 (3.32%) Blog
9 75 (2.90%) Virtual Team
10 73 (2.82%) Legacy Systems
11 64 (2.47%) Marketing Technology
12 54 (2.08%) Self-Motivation
13 53 (2.05%) Cyber Threat
14 52 (2.01%) Algorithms
15 50 (1.93%) Low-Code
16 49 (1.89%) Embedded Systems
17 47 (1.81%) AI Agents
17 47 (1.81%) e-Learning
18 39 (1.51%) Data Structures
19 37 (1.43%) Robotics
Operating Systems
1 178 (6.87%) Linux
2 92 (3.55%) Windows
3 63 (2.43%) Android
4 59 (2.28%) Unix
5 52 (2.01%) Apple iOS
6 10 (0.39%) Embedded Linux
7 7 (0.27%) Windows Server
8 6 (0.23%) CentOS
9 5 (0.19%) Debian
9 5 (0.19%) FreeRTOS
10 4 (0.15%) AIX
10 4 (0.15%) VMS
10 4 (0.15%) VxWorks
11 3 (0.12%) Kali Linux
12 2 (0.077%) OpenWrt
12 2 (0.077%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 1 (0.039%) macOS
13 1 (0.039%) Robot Operating System
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,427 (55.10%) CI/CD
2 1,034 (39.92%) Agile
3 881 (34.02%) DevOps
4 827 (31.93%) Software Engineering
5 763 (29.46%) Continuous Improvement
6 665 (25.68%) Mentoring
7 664 (25.64%) AI
8 613 (23.67%) Problem-Solving
9 467 (18.03%) Microservices
10 440 (16.99%) Software Testing
11 402 (15.52%) Infrastructure as Code
12 348 (13.44%) Validation
13 334 (12.90%) Test Strategy
14 316 (12.20%) Observability
15 311 (12.01%) Code Quality
16 308 (11.89%) Coaching
17 301 (11.62%) Technical Leadership
18 276 (10.66%) Event-Driven
19 272 (10.50%) Containerisation
20 266 (10.27%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 715 (27.61%) Python
2 602 (23.24%) Java
3 523 (20.19%) SQL
4 440 (16.99%) JavaScript
5 365 (14.09%) TypeScript
6 337 (13.01%) C#
7 126 (4.86%) C++
8 114 (4.40%) Go
9 100 (3.86%) PowerShell
10 97 (3.75%) Bash
11 83 (3.20%) C
12 49 (1.89%) Kotlin
13 44 (1.70%) Rust
14 40 (1.54%) PHP
15 31 (1.20%) Ruby
16 24 (0.93%) MATLAB
17 23 (0.89%) Groovy
18 22 (0.85%) Bicep
19 20 (0.77%) Swift
20 18 (0.69%) Scala
Qualifications
1 427 (16.49%) Security Cleared
2 273 (10.54%) Degree
3 266 (10.27%) SC Cleared
4 97 (3.75%) Computer Science Degree
5 82 (3.17%) DV Cleared
6 74 (2.86%) AWS Certification
6 74 (2.86%) ISTQB
7 54 (2.08%) CISSP
7 54 (2.08%) ITIL Certification
8 52 (2.01%) Master's Degree
9 51 (1.97%) CISM
9 51 (1.97%) HNC
10 47 (1.81%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 43 (1.66%) HND
12 42 (1.62%) BPSS Clearance
13 29 (1.12%) Azure Certification
14 17 (0.66%) ISEB
15 15 (0.58%) DBS Check
16 11 (0.42%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 11 (0.42%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 578 (22.32%) QA
2 209 (8.07%) Accessibility
3 109 (4.21%) Data Quality
4 66 (2.55%) WCAG
5 53 (2.05%) NIST
6 48 (1.85%) ISO 22301
7 33 (1.27%) GDPR
8 12 (0.46%) GRC
9 9 (0.35%) SLA
10 8 (0.31%) MISRA
11 7 (0.27%) JTAG
12 6 (0.23%) SOC 2
12 6 (0.23%) Software Quality Assurance
13 5 (0.19%) ISO 9001
13 5 (0.19%) ISO/IEC 27001
13 5 (0.19%) NCSC
14 4 (0.15%) ECSS
14 4 (0.15%) ISO 20022
14 4 (0.15%) ISO 26262
14 4 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 373 (14.40%) Docker
2 57 (2.20%) Firmware
3 15 (0.58%) Active Directory
4 10 (0.39%) Embedded Firmware
4 10 (0.39%) VMware Infrastructure
5 8 (0.31%) Virtual Machines
6 3 (0.12%) Hyper-V
7 2 (0.077%) KVM
7 2 (0.077%) ProxySG
8 1 (0.039%) IAG
8 1 (0.039%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.039%) QEMU
8 1 (0.039%) Virtual Desktop
8 1 (0.039%) Virtual Servers
8 1 (0.039%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 369 (14.25%) Kubernetes
2 170 (6.56%) Grafana
3 72 (2.78%) Ansible
4 68 (2.63%) Prometheus
5 27 (1.04%) Argo
6 16 (0.62%) Puppet
7 15 (0.58%) Kibana
8 14 (0.54%) CloudHub
9 11 (0.42%) Rancher
10 10 (0.39%) Microsoft Intune
10 10 (0.39%) Single Sign-On
11 9 (0.35%) logstash
12 7 (0.27%) HP Fortify
13 6 (0.23%) Functional Safety
13 6 (0.23%) Progress Chef
14 5 (0.19%) vCenter Server
15 3 (0.12%) Active Directory Federation Services
15 3 (0.12%) Bosun
16 2 (0.077%) kaniko
17 1 (0.039%) Podman
Vendors
1 284 (10.97%) Microsoft
2 145 (5.60%) Google
3 70 (2.70%) Databricks
4 62 (2.39%) Salesforce
5 54 (2.08%) Oracle
6 51 (1.97%) ServiceNow
7 50 (1.93%) SAP
8 39 (1.51%) Dynatrace
9 35 (1.35%) Splunk
10 22 (0.85%) Pega
11 20 (0.77%) Adobe
11 20 (0.77%) Foundry
12 19 (0.73%) Allen-Bradley
12 19 (0.73%) MuleSoft
12 19 (0.73%) OpenAI
13 17 (0.66%) VMware
14 16 (0.62%) Siemens
15 15 (0.58%) AppDynamics
15 15 (0.58%) SendGrid
16 14 (0.54%) Atlassian