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 5 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 83 86 100
Rank change year-on-year +3 +14 -42
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,156 1,675 2,072
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.07% 3.38% 2.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.81% 3.77% 3.05%
Number of salaries quoted 1,219 821 1,263
10th Percentile £42,398 £37,500 £37,500
25th Percentile £49,313 £47,500 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £62,500 £58,500
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +6.84% -10.00%
75th Percentile £81,250 £82,500 £71,991
90th Percentile £96,250 £97,500 £87,297
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £56,000 £53,500
% change year-on-year +7.14% +4.67% -6.96%

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 76,763 44,374 67,952
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.58% 89.45% 81.06%
Number of salaries quoted 52,880 25,244 44,456
10th Percentile £30,750 £28,500 £31,246
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,500 £41,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.71%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,246 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £49,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +12.24% -2.00% -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 5 August 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 5 August 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 0 1,782 £66,000 +5.60% 1,302
UK excluding London +1 1,336 £60,000 +7.14% 771
Work from Home +21 897 £67,500 +12.50% 577
London +3 660 £80,000 +2.89% 646
North of England +13 354 £57,500 -1.71% 188
South East -19 249 £62,000 +12.73% 202
South West -9 220 £60,000 +14.29% 121
Midlands -14 191 £62,500 +4.17% 111
North West +1 185 £61,250 -5.77% 104
Northern Ireland +3 140 £80,000 +45.45% 22
West Midlands -27 97 £62,500 -1.96% 68
North East +6 94 £53,750 +34.38% 27
East Midlands -11 93 £60,000 +26.32% 43
Wales +4 78 £55,000 - 20
Yorkshire -19 75 £69,310 +41.45% 57
East of England -44 64 £52,500 -7.89% 66
Scotland -32 53 £62,500 +2.04% 57

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 47 (2.18%) Confluence
2 30 (1.39%) Apache Spark
3 29 (1.35%) Apache Airflow
4 25 (1.16%) Apache
5 24 (1.11%) SharePoint
6 16 (0.74%) Jupyter
7 14 (0.65%) Anypoint
7 14 (0.65%) Mule
8 13 (0.60%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 11 (0.51%) CMS
10 5 (0.23%) Cloud Foundry
10 5 (0.23%) IIS
10 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
10 5 (0.23%) Umbraco
11 4 (0.19%) Camunda
11 4 (0.19%) nginx
11 4 (0.19%) SAS
11 4 (0.19%) WordPress
12 3 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
13 2 (0.093%) Headless CMS
Applications
1 29 (1.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.65%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.56%) Simulink
4 7 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 6 (0.28%) PlantUML
6 5 (0.23%) Lightworks
7 3 (0.14%) CANalyzer
7 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.14%) Moqups
7 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.046%) Adobe Creative Suite
8 1 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 44 (2.04%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.25%) Dynamics GP
3 6 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
4 5 (0.23%) Visualfiles
5 4 (0.19%) Dynamics AX
6 3 (0.14%) Oracle Applications
6 3 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.093%) FLEXCUBE
7 2 (0.093%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.093%) Towers Watson Igloo
7 2 (0.093%) Workday HCM
8 1 (0.046%) Elite 3E
8 1 (0.046%) Magento
8 1 (0.046%) Misys Equation
8 1 (0.046%) Misys Midas
8 1 (0.046%) NetSuite
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle ERP
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
8 1 (0.046%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 791 (36.69%) AWS
2 672 (31.17%) Azure
3 252 (11.69%) SaaS
4 249 (11.55%) Azure DevOps
5 243 (11.27%) GCP
6 185 (8.58%) Serverless
7 182 (8.44%) GitHub
8 93 (4.31%) GitHub Actions
9 92 (4.27%) AWS CloudFormation
10 78 (3.62%) AWS Lambda
11 73 (3.39%) Amazon EKS
11 73 (3.39%) Amazon S3
12 58 (2.69%) Power Platform
13 52 (2.41%) Azure Service Bus
14 49 (2.27%) PaaS
15 46 (2.13%) Azure Logic Apps
16 45 (2.09%) dbt
17 44 (2.04%) Azure Monitor
18 42 (1.95%) Amazon EC2
19 35 (1.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (3.29%) Broadband
2 26 (1.21%) Firewall
3 15 (0.70%) DNS
3 15 (0.70%) SSL
3 15 (0.70%) Wireless
4 13 (0.60%) DMARC
4 13 (0.60%) TCP/IP
5 12 (0.56%) MQTT
5 12 (0.56%) Wi-Fi
6 10 (0.46%) LTE
7 9 (0.42%) 3GPP
7 9 (0.42%) WAN
8 8 (0.37%) DHCP
8 8 (0.37%) HTTP
9 7 (0.32%) GSM
9 7 (0.32%) Radio Access Network
9 7 (0.32%) RANAP
9 7 (0.32%) UMTS
9 7 (0.32%) Wireshark
9 7 (0.32%) ZigBee
Database & Business Intelligence
1 134 (6.22%) PostgreSQL
2 133 (6.17%) NoSQL
3 103 (4.78%) MongoDB
4 72 (3.34%) SQL Server
5 52 (2.41%) Relational Database
6 47 (2.18%) DynamoDB
7 42 (1.95%) MySQL
8 32 (1.48%) Data Warehouse
9 30 (1.39%) Redis
10 28 (1.30%) Power BI
11 26 (1.21%) BigQuery
12 18 (0.83%) Amazon RDS
12 18 (0.83%) Data Lake
12 18 (0.83%) Spark SQL
13 17 (0.79%) Metadata
14 16 (0.74%) Semantic Layer
15 15 (0.70%) Amazon Athena
16 13 (0.60%) Elasticsearch
17 12 (0.56%) Oracle Database
18 10 (0.46%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 286 (13.27%) Git
2 196 (9.09%) GitLab
3 195 (9.04%) Jenkins
4 160 (7.42%) Selenium
5 137 (6.35%) JIRA
6 97 (4.50%) Cucumber
7 93 (4.31%) Cypress.io
8 87 (4.04%) Postman
9 59 (2.74%) TeamCity
10 51 (2.37%) JMeter
11 44 (2.04%) JUnit
12 40 (1.86%) REST Assured
13 34 (1.58%) Zephyr
14 27 (1.25%) Gatling
15 26 (1.21%) SpecFlow
15 26 (1.21%) TestRail
16 23 (1.07%) SonarQube
17 22 (1.02%) Bitbucket
18 21 (0.97%) fastlane
19 20 (0.93%) Crashlytics
General
1 583 (27.04%) Social Skills
2 492 (22.82%) Finance
3 251 (11.64%) Analytical Skills
4 226 (10.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 219 (10.16%) Public Sector
6 196 (9.09%) Law
7 190 (8.81%) Banking
8 122 (5.66%) Legal
9 97 (4.50%) Retail
10 82 (3.80%) Marketing
11 79 (3.66%) Manufacturing
12 65 (3.01%) Financial Institution
13 62 (2.88%) Electronics
14 53 (2.46%) Games
15 51 (2.37%) Back Office
16 32 (1.48%) Telecoms
17 29 (1.35%) Aerospace
18 28 (1.30%) Front Office
19 25 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
20 20 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
Job Titles
1 610 (28.29%) Senior
2 342 (15.86%) Lead
3 337 (15.63%) Software Engineer
4 301 (13.96%) Developer
5 224 (10.39%) Test Engineer
6 121 (5.61%) Senior Developer
7 120 (5.57%) Java Engineer
8 102 (4.73%) Senior Software Engineer
9 88 (4.08%) QA Engineer
10 87 (4.04%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 84 (3.90%) Test Automation Engineer
12 82 (3.80%) DevOps Engineer
13 71 (3.29%) Architect
14 68 (3.15%) Test Leader
15 66 (3.06%) Data Engineer
15 66 (3.06%) Lead Software Engineer
16 65 (3.01%) Tester
17 62 (2.88%) Senior Manager
18 59 (2.74%) Analyst
19 58 (2.69%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (10.30%) React
2 211 (9.79%) .NET
3 192 (8.91%) REST
4 187 (8.67%) Playwright
5 186 (8.63%) Spring
6 182 (8.44%) RESTful
7 180 (8.35%) Node.js
8 137 (6.35%) Spring Boot
9 124 (5.75%) Kafka
10 111 (5.15%) AngularJS
11 88 (4.08%) CSS
12 85 (3.94%) HTML
13 67 (3.11%) OAuth
14 64 (2.97%) Middleware
15 61 (2.83%) OAuth2
16 53 (2.46%) JSON
17 47 (2.18%) Vue
18 46 (2.13%) RabbitMQ
19 43 (1.99%) Next.js
20 42 (1.95%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 388 (18.00%) Cloud Native
2 243 (11.27%) Product Ownership
3 183 (8.49%) Distributed Systems
4 110 (5.10%) Mobile App
5 86 (3.99%) Enterprise Software
6 73 (3.39%) Virtual Team
7 72 (3.34%) Legacy Systems
8 71 (3.29%) Public Cloud
9 61 (2.83%) Algorithms
10 60 (2.78%) Cyber Threat
11 57 (2.64%) Blog
12 51 (2.37%) Low-Code
13 50 (2.32%) Management Information System
14 48 (2.23%) Onboarding
15 44 (2.04%) Data Structures
16 42 (1.95%) Self-Motivation
17 40 (1.86%) Greenfield Project
17 40 (1.86%) Marketing Technology
18 35 (1.62%) Embedded Systems
19 34 (1.58%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 187 (8.67%) Linux
2 97 (4.50%) Windows
3 65 (3.01%) Apple iOS
4 56 (2.60%) Android
5 53 (2.46%) Unix
6 12 (0.56%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.32%) CentOS
7 7 (0.32%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.28%) FreeRTOS
9 4 (0.19%) Debian
9 4 (0.19%) Kali Linux
10 3 (0.14%) AIX
11 2 (0.093%) VMS
11 2 (0.093%) VxWorks
12 1 (0.046%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 1 (0.046%) ThreadX
12 1 (0.046%) Ubuntu
12 1 (0.046%) Windows 10
12 1 (0.046%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,236 (57.33%) CI/CD
2 962 (44.62%) Agile
3 824 (38.22%) DevOps
4 707 (32.79%) Software Engineering
5 630 (29.22%) Continuous Improvement
6 603 (27.97%) Mentoring
7 447 (20.73%) AI
8 441 (20.45%) Problem-Solving
9 414 (19.20%) Microservices
10 381 (17.67%) Infrastructure as Code
11 364 (16.88%) Software Testing
12 303 (14.05%) Test Strategy
13 276 (12.80%) Containerisation
13 276 (12.80%) Observability
14 274 (12.71%) Coaching
15 273 (12.66%) Full-Stack Development
16 255 (11.83%) Code Quality
17 241 (11.18%) Validation
18 224 (10.39%) Decision-Making
19 221 (10.25%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 678 (31.45%) Python
2 575 (26.67%) Java
3 384 (17.81%) JavaScript
4 346 (16.05%) SQL
5 319 (14.80%) TypeScript
6 313 (14.52%) C#
7 124 (5.75%) C++
8 106 (4.92%) PowerShell
9 90 (4.17%) Go
10 77 (3.57%) C
11 74 (3.43%) Bash
12 42 (1.95%) Kotlin
13 35 (1.62%) Rust
14 32 (1.48%) Swift
15 30 (1.39%) PHP
16 26 (1.21%) Ruby
17 22 (1.02%) Bicep
18 21 (0.97%) MATLAB
19 19 (0.88%) Groovy
20 16 (0.74%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 285 (13.22%) Security Cleared
2 243 (11.27%) Degree
3 177 (8.21%) SC Cleared
4 108 (5.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 79 (3.66%) ISTQB
6 62 (2.88%) CISSP
7 60 (2.78%) ITIL Certification
8 56 (2.60%) CISM
8 56 (2.60%) DV Cleared
9 44 (2.04%) AWS Certification
10 36 (1.67%) Master's Degree
11 31 (1.44%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 20 (0.93%) BPSS Clearance
13 19 (0.88%) HNC
14 17 (0.79%) DBS Check
14 17 (0.79%) ISEB
15 14 (0.65%) HND
16 13 (0.60%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
17 12 (0.56%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
18 8 (0.37%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 500 (23.19%) QA
2 196 (9.09%) Accessibility
3 74 (3.43%) Data Quality
4 63 (2.92%) NIST
5 58 (2.69%) WCAG
6 52 (2.41%) ISO 22301
7 48 (2.23%) GDPR
8 15 (0.70%) SLA
9 13 (0.60%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 12 (0.56%) GRC
10 12 (0.56%) Software Quality Assurance
11 9 (0.42%) SOC 2
12 8 (0.37%) COBIT
12 8 (0.37%) MISRA
13 7 (0.32%) JTAG
14 6 (0.28%) PMO
15 5 (0.23%) ISO 9001
15 5 (0.23%) NCSC
16 4 (0.19%) Cyber Essentials
16 4 (0.19%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 299 (13.87%) Docker
2 31 (1.44%) Firmware
3 22 (1.02%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.74%) Virtual Machines
5 15 (0.70%) Active Directory
6 13 (0.60%) Hyper-V
7 11 (0.51%) KVM
8 10 (0.46%) Embedded Firmware
9 2 (0.093%) vSphere
10 1 (0.046%) IAG
10 1 (0.046%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.046%) ProxySG
10 1 (0.046%) Terminal Server
10 1 (0.046%) Virtual Desktop
10 1 (0.046%) Xen
Systems Management
1 325 (15.07%) Kubernetes
2 324 (15.03%) Terraform
3 137 (6.35%) Grafana
4 83 (3.85%) Ansible
5 63 (2.92%) Prometheus
6 26 (1.21%) Argo
7 16 (0.74%) Kibana
8 14 (0.65%) CloudHub
9 10 (0.46%) Puppet
10 9 (0.42%) logstash
11 8 (0.37%) Microsoft Intune
11 8 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
12 7 (0.32%) HP Fortify
13 6 (0.28%) Functional Safety
13 6 (0.28%) vCenter Server
14 5 (0.23%) Packer
15 4 (0.19%) SCCM
15 4 (0.19%) SCOM
16 3 (0.14%) Progress Chef
16 3 (0.14%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 180 (8.35%) Microsoft
2 66 (3.06%) Google
3 59 (2.74%) Databricks
4 55 (2.55%) Oracle
5 51 (2.37%) Salesforce
6 40 (1.86%) ServiceNow
7 36 (1.67%) VMware
8 33 (1.53%) Splunk
9 31 (1.44%) SAP
10 26 (1.21%) Dynatrace
11 21 (0.97%) Pega
12 19 (0.88%) AppDynamics
13 17 (0.79%) MuleSoft
14 16 (0.74%) Braze
15 15 (0.70%) Atlassian
16 14 (0.65%) Adobe
16 14 (0.65%) Amplitude
16 14 (0.65%) IBM
16 14 (0.65%) OpenAI
17 13 (0.60%) SendGrid