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

6 months to
21 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 87 81 101
Rank change year-on-year -6 +20 -47
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,000 1,704 2,331
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.00% 3.46% 2.49%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.72% 3.85% 3.04%
Number of salaries quoted 1,165 835 1,472
10th Percentile £42,500 £37,900 £37,500
25th Percentile £50,000 £47,500 £45,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £62,500 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +8.70% -11.54%
75th Percentile £82,500 £82,500 £71,991
90th Percentile £96,250 £98,474 £86,485
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £57,221 £52,500
% change year-on-year +4.86% +8.99% -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 73,631 44,290 76,685
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.59% 90.03% 81.87%
Number of salaries quoted 50,962 24,903 52,597
10th Percentile £30,500 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,750 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £56,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.14% +1.82% -8.84%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £98,474 £93,750
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 21 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 21 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 -3 1,667 £66,400 +3.63% 734
UK excluding London -5 1,204 £60,000 +4.86% 504
Work from Home +16 870 £67,500 +12.50% 327
London +7 634 £80,000 +3.23% 319
North of England +10 331 £57,500 -4.17% 132
South East -38 221 £60,000 +9.09% 157
South West -27 192 £55,000 -6.38% 70
Midlands -16 176 £62,500 +4.17% 60
North West +1 173 £63,750 -1.92% 74
Northern Ireland +4 122 £80,000 +45.45% 16
West Midlands -15 94 £62,500 -3.85% 29
North East +5 86 £52,500 +7.35% 19
East Midlands -21 81 £64,000 +34.74% 31
Yorkshire -24 72 £69,310 +41.45% 40
Wales -10 65 £55,000 - 13
East of England -24 63 £55,000 -3.51% 50
Scotland -42 47 £62,500 -5.66% 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 38 (1.90%) Confluence
2 28 (1.40%) Apache Airflow
2 28 (1.40%) Apache Spark
3 23 (1.15%) Apache
4 18 (0.90%) SharePoint
5 14 (0.70%) Jupyter
6 13 (0.65%) CMS
7 12 (0.60%) Adobe Experience Manager
7 12 (0.60%) Anypoint
7 12 (0.60%) Mule
8 7 (0.35%) IIS
9 5 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
9 5 (0.25%) Umbraco
9 5 (0.25%) WordPress
10 3 (0.15%) Headless CMS
10 3 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.15%) nginx
10 3 (0.15%) SAS
11 2 (0.10%) Cloud Foundry
11 2 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 21 (1.05%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.60%) Simulink
3 10 (0.50%) Microsoft Office
4 7 (0.35%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 6 (0.30%) PlantUML
6 5 (0.25%) Lightworks
7 3 (0.15%) CANalyzer
7 3 (0.15%) MS Visio
8 2 (0.10%) Adobe Creative Suite
9 1 (0.050%) Chatbot
9 1 (0.050%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.050%) Moqups
Business Applications
1 36 (1.80%) Dynamics CRM
2 26 (1.30%) Dynamics GP
3 5 (0.25%) Visualfiles
4 4 (0.20%) Dynamics AX
5 3 (0.15%) SAP S/4HANA
6 2 (0.10%) FLEXCUBE
6 2 (0.10%) Payment Gateway
6 2 (0.10%) Towers Watson Igloo
6 2 (0.10%) Workday HCM
7 1 (0.050%) Elite 3E
7 1 (0.050%) Endur
7 1 (0.050%) Findur
7 1 (0.050%) Magento
7 1 (0.050%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.050%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.050%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.050%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.050%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.050%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.050%) Oracle SCM
Cloud Services
1 750 (37.50%) AWS
2 626 (31.30%) Azure
3 238 (11.90%) Azure DevOps
4 233 (11.65%) GCP
5 223 (11.15%) SaaS
6 180 (9.00%) Serverless
7 163 (8.15%) GitHub
8 86 (4.30%) GitHub Actions
9 83 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
10 76 (3.80%) AWS Lambda
11 75 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
12 72 (3.60%) Amazon S3
13 52 (2.60%) Azure Service Bus
13 52 (2.60%) PaaS
14 50 (2.50%) Power Platform
15 44 (2.20%) Azure Logic Apps
15 44 (2.20%) Azure Monitor
16 42 (2.10%) dbt
17 39 (1.95%) Amazon EC2
18 32 (1.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (3.55%) Broadband
2 24 (1.20%) Firewall
3 15 (0.75%) Wireless
4 13 (0.65%) DMARC
5 12 (0.60%) MQTT
5 12 (0.60%) SSL
6 11 (0.55%) DNS
7 9 (0.45%) Wi-Fi
8 8 (0.40%) CHAP
8 8 (0.40%) LTE
8 8 (0.40%) TCP/IP
9 7 (0.35%) WAN
9 7 (0.35%) ZigBee
10 6 (0.30%) 3GPP
10 6 (0.30%) Bluetooth
10 6 (0.30%) DHCP
10 6 (0.30%) HTTP
11 5 (0.25%) GSM
11 5 (0.25%) SS7
11 5 (0.25%) UMTS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 135 (6.75%) NoSQL
2 129 (6.45%) PostgreSQL
3 103 (5.15%) MongoDB
4 69 (3.45%) SQL Server
5 44 (2.20%) DynamoDB
6 39 (1.95%) Relational Database
7 33 (1.65%) MySQL
8 26 (1.30%) Data Warehouse
8 26 (1.30%) Redis
9 23 (1.15%) Power BI
10 21 (1.05%) BigQuery
11 18 (0.90%) Spark SQL
12 17 (0.85%) Amazon RDS
13 16 (0.80%) Metadata
13 16 (0.80%) Semantic Layer
14 14 (0.70%) Amazon Athena
15 13 (0.65%) Data Lake
15 13 (0.65%) Oracle Database
16 11 (0.55%) Elasticsearch
17 9 (0.45%) Flink
Development Applications
1 250 (12.50%) Git
2 176 (8.80%) GitLab
3 174 (8.70%) Jenkins
4 147 (7.35%) Selenium
5 120 (6.00%) JIRA
6 91 (4.55%) Cucumber
7 87 (4.35%) Cypress.io
8 73 (3.65%) Postman
9 62 (3.10%) TeamCity
10 50 (2.50%) JMeter
11 37 (1.85%) REST Assured
12 33 (1.65%) JUnit
13 31 (1.55%) Zephyr
14 25 (1.25%) SpecFlow
14 25 (1.25%) TestRail
15 23 (1.15%) Gatling
16 21 (1.05%) fastlane
17 20 (1.00%) Crashlytics
18 18 (0.90%) LabVIEW
19 17 (0.85%) CircleCI
General
1 520 (26.00%) Social Skills
2 433 (21.65%) Finance
3 206 (10.30%) Analytical Skills
4 202 (10.10%) Public Sector
5 194 (9.70%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 190 (9.50%) Banking
7 175 (8.75%) Law
8 107 (5.35%) Legal
9 99 (4.95%) Retail
10 67 (3.35%) Manufacturing
11 63 (3.15%) Financial Institution
12 56 (2.80%) Electronics
12 56 (2.80%) Marketing
13 53 (2.65%) Back Office
13 53 (2.65%) Games
14 31 (1.55%) Front Office
15 24 (1.20%) Documentation Skills
16 23 (1.15%) Telecoms
17 21 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
18 19 (0.95%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 561 (28.05%) Senior
2 318 (15.90%) Lead
3 305 (15.25%) Software Engineer
4 282 (14.10%) Developer
5 213 (10.65%) Test Engineer
6 121 (6.05%) Java Engineer
7 115 (5.75%) Senior Developer
8 92 (4.60%) Senior Software Engineer
9 84 (4.20%) Test Automation Engineer
10 82 (4.10%) QA Engineer
11 81 (4.05%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 72 (3.60%) DevOps Engineer
12 72 (3.60%) Test Leader
13 68 (3.40%) Architect
14 67 (3.35%) Tester
15 60 (3.00%) Data Engineer
16 56 (2.80%) Software Developer
17 55 (2.75%) Senior Manager
17 55 (2.75%) Senior Test Engineer
18 52 (2.60%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 201 (10.05%) React
2 200 (10.00%) .NET
3 174 (8.70%) Spring
4 171 (8.55%) Playwright
5 167 (8.35%) Node.js
5 167 (8.35%) RESTful
6 166 (8.30%) REST
7 129 (6.45%) Spring Boot
8 113 (5.65%) Kafka
9 93 (4.65%) AngularJS
10 76 (3.80%) CSS
10 76 (3.80%) HTML
11 63 (3.15%) Middleware
11 63 (3.15%) OAuth
12 56 (2.80%) OAuth2
13 44 (2.20%) JSON
14 42 (2.10%) RabbitMQ
15 41 (2.05%) Vue
16 39 (1.95%) ASP.NET
17 38 (1.90%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 364 (18.20%) Cloud Native
2 224 (11.20%) Product Ownership
3 165 (8.25%) Distributed Systems
4 97 (4.85%) Mobile App
5 69 (3.45%) Enterprise Software
6 66 (3.30%) Public Cloud
7 63 (3.15%) Virtual Team
8 60 (3.00%) Legacy Systems
9 57 (2.85%) Cyber Threat
10 55 (2.75%) Algorithms
11 53 (2.65%) Blog
12 51 (2.55%) Management Information System
13 50 (2.50%) Low-Code
14 43 (2.15%) Onboarding
15 42 (2.10%) Data Structures
16 39 (1.95%) Greenfield Project
17 34 (1.70%) Embedded Systems
17 34 (1.70%) Video\Live Streaming
18 32 (1.60%) Marketing Technology
19 31 (1.55%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 174 (8.70%) Linux
2 89 (4.45%) Windows
3 58 (2.90%) Apple iOS
4 51 (2.55%) Unix
5 48 (2.40%) Android
6 9 (0.45%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.35%) CentOS
8 6 (0.30%) FreeRTOS
9 5 (0.25%) Embedded Linux
10 4 (0.20%) Kali Linux
11 3 (0.15%) Debian
12 2 (0.10%) AIX
13 1 (0.050%) ThreadX
13 1 (0.050%) Ubuntu
13 1 (0.050%) VMS
13 1 (0.050%) Windows 10
13 1 (0.050%) Windows Server 2016
13 1 (0.050%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,137 (56.85%) CI/CD
2 882 (44.10%) Agile
3 759 (37.95%) DevOps
4 631 (31.55%) Software Engineering
5 573 (28.65%) Mentoring
6 563 (28.15%) Continuous Improvement
7 396 (19.80%) Problem-Solving
8 392 (19.60%) Microservices
9 371 (18.55%) AI
10 358 (17.90%) Infrastructure as Code
11 335 (16.75%) Software Testing
12 276 (13.80%) Test Strategy
13 259 (12.95%) Containerisation
14 258 (12.90%) Coaching
15 254 (12.70%) Full-Stack Development
16 251 (12.55%) Observability
17 219 (10.95%) Validation
18 217 (10.85%) Code Quality
19 202 (10.10%) Scrum
20 201 (10.05%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 631 (31.55%) Python
2 552 (27.60%) Java
3 346 (17.30%) JavaScript
4 313 (15.65%) SQL
5 289 (14.45%) C#
6 284 (14.20%) TypeScript
7 109 (5.45%) C++
8 102 (5.10%) PowerShell
9 82 (4.10%) Go
10 76 (3.80%) Bash
11 70 (3.50%) C
12 38 (1.90%) Kotlin
13 32 (1.60%) Rust
14 29 (1.45%) Swift
15 26 (1.30%) PHP
16 23 (1.15%) Ruby
17 22 (1.10%) Bicep
18 21 (1.05%) MATLAB
19 18 (0.90%) Groovy
20 16 (0.80%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 237 (11.85%) Security Cleared
2 229 (11.45%) Degree
3 145 (7.25%) SC Cleared
4 99 (4.95%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (4.05%) ISTQB
6 61 (3.05%) CISSP
7 57 (2.85%) ITIL Certification
8 54 (2.70%) CISM
9 45 (2.25%) DV Cleared
10 39 (1.95%) AWS Certification
11 38 (1.90%) Master's Degree
12 29 (1.45%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 19 (0.95%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.80%) ISEB
15 13 (0.65%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.60%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 11 (0.55%) BPSS Clearance
17 11 (0.55%) HNC
18 9 (0.45%) HND
19 8 (0.40%) CGEIT
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 455 (22.75%) QA
2 170 (8.50%) Accessibility
3 76 (3.80%) Data Quality
4 61 (3.05%) NIST
5 51 (2.55%) ISO 22301
6 47 (2.35%) GDPR
7 46 (2.30%) WCAG
8 14 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 13 (0.65%) SLA
9 13 (0.65%) Software Quality Assurance
10 11 (0.55%) GRC
11 9 (0.45%) COBIT
12 7 (0.35%) JTAG
12 7 (0.35%) SOC 2
13 6 (0.30%) MISRA
13 6 (0.30%) PMO
14 4 (0.20%) Cyber Essentials
14 4 (0.20%) ISO 9001
15 3 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 12207
15 3 (0.15%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 262 (13.10%) Docker
2 29 (1.45%) Firmware
3 22 (1.10%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.80%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.70%) Hyper-V
6 12 (0.60%) Active Directory
7 11 (0.55%) KVM
8 10 (0.50%) Embedded Firmware
9 2 (0.10%) vSphere
10 1 (0.050%) IAG
10 1 (0.050%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.050%) Terminal Server
10 1 (0.050%) Xen
Systems Management
1 312 (15.60%) Terraform
2 303 (15.15%) Kubernetes
3 137 (6.85%) Grafana
4 78 (3.90%) Ansible
5 59 (2.95%) Prometheus
6 24 (1.20%) Argo
7 15 (0.75%) Kibana
8 12 (0.60%) CloudHub
9 9 (0.45%) logstash
10 8 (0.40%) Single Sign-On
11 7 (0.35%) HP Fortify
11 7 (0.35%) Puppet
12 6 (0.30%) Functional Safety
12 6 (0.30%) vCenter Server
13 5 (0.25%) Microsoft Intune
13 5 (0.25%) Packer
14 4 (0.20%) SCCM
14 4 (0.20%) SCOM
15 3 (0.15%) HP ALM
15 3 (0.15%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 149 (7.45%) Microsoft
2 55 (2.75%) Databricks
3 50 (2.50%) Google
4 47 (2.35%) Salesforce
5 43 (2.15%) Oracle
6 41 (2.05%) ServiceNow
7 36 (1.80%) VMware
8 26 (1.30%) Splunk
9 24 (1.20%) Dynatrace
10 23 (1.15%) SAP
11 20 (1.00%) Pega
12 16 (0.80%) AppDynamics
12 16 (0.80%) Braze
12 16 (0.80%) OpenAI
13 15 (0.75%) MuleSoft
14 14 (0.70%) Adobe
14 14 (0.70%) Amplitude
15 13 (0.65%) Atlassian
15 13 (0.65%) SendGrid
16 11 (0.55%) IBM