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

6 months to
20 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 83 100
Rank change year-on-year -5 +17 -46
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,978 1,712 2,412
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.98% 3.47% 2.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.69% 3.85% 3.06%
Number of salaries quoted 1,165 842 1,533
10th Percentile £42,500 £38,525 £37,180
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 £57,000 £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 73,502 44,419 78,905
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.60% 90.05% 82.05%
Number of salaries quoted 50,918 25,002 54,550
10th Percentile £30,250 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £38,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £56,500 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +6.19% +2.73% -8.79%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £73,250
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 20 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 20 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 -7 1,664 £67,249 +7.17% 635
UK excluding London -7 1,183 £60,000 +5.26% 445
Work from Home +17 850 £67,500 +12.50% 282
London +2 631 £80,000 +3.23% 270
North of England +9 330 £57,500 -4.01% 119
South East -26 221 £60,000 +9.09% 146
South West -24 193 £55,000 -8.33% 58
Midlands -19 175 £62,500 +8.70% 51
North West -3 172 £65,000 - 69
Northern Ireland -1 101 £80,000 +45.45% 12
West Midlands -19 94 £62,500 - 26
North East +8 86 £52,500 +7.35% 15
East Midlands -19 80 £64,000 +34.74% 25
Yorkshire -11 72 £69,310 +41.45% 36
Wales -7 65 £55,000 - 12
East of England -31 63 £55,000 -3.51% 51
Scotland -45 48 £62,500 -10.71% 15

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 (1.92%) Confluence
2 28 (1.42%) Apache Airflow
2 28 (1.42%) Apache Spark
3 23 (1.16%) Apache
4 16 (0.81%) SharePoint
5 14 (0.71%) Jupyter
6 13 (0.66%) CMS
7 12 (0.61%) Anypoint
7 12 (0.61%) Mule
8 11 (0.56%) Adobe Experience Manager
9 7 (0.35%) IIS
10 5 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
10 5 (0.25%) Umbraco
10 5 (0.25%) WordPress
11 3 (0.15%) Headless CMS
11 3 (0.15%) nginx
11 3 (0.15%) SAS
12 2 (0.10%) Appian
12 2 (0.10%) Cloud Foundry
12 2 (0.10%) NServiceBus
Applications
1 21 (1.06%) Microsoft Excel
2 12 (0.61%) Simulink
3 10 (0.51%) 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 (0.051%) Chatbot
9 1 (0.051%) Microsoft Project
9 1 (0.051%) Moqups
Business Applications
1 23 (1.16%) Dynamics CRM
2 13 (0.66%) 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 (0.051%) Endur
7 1 (0.051%) Findur
7 1 (0.051%) Magento
7 1 (0.051%) Misys Equation
7 1 (0.051%) Misys Midas
7 1 (0.051%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle Applications
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle EBS
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle Financials
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle SCM
Cloud Services
1 747 (37.77%) AWS
2 624 (31.55%) Azure
3 238 (12.03%) Azure DevOps
4 233 (11.78%) GCP
5 215 (10.87%) SaaS
6 181 (9.15%) Serverless
7 164 (8.29%) GitHub
8 86 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
9 82 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
10 77 (3.89%) AWS Lambda
11 74 (3.74%) Amazon EKS
12 73 (3.69%) Amazon S3
13 52 (2.63%) Azure Service Bus
13 52 (2.63%) PaaS
14 49 (2.48%) Power Platform
15 44 (2.22%) Azure Logic Apps
15 44 (2.22%) Azure Monitor
16 42 (2.12%) dbt
17 40 (2.02%) Amazon EC2
18 33 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (3.59%) Broadband
2 23 (1.16%) Firewall
3 13 (0.66%) DMARC
3 13 (0.66%) Wireless
4 12 (0.61%) MQTT
4 12 (0.61%) SSL
5 10 (0.51%) DNS
6 9 (0.46%) CHAP
7 8 (0.40%) Wi-Fi
8 7 (0.35%) LTE
8 7 (0.35%) TCP/IP
8 7 (0.35%) WAN
8 7 (0.35%) ZigBee
9 6 (0.30%) Bluetooth
9 6 (0.30%) HTTP
10 5 (0.25%) DHCP
10 5 (0.25%) Ethernet
10 5 (0.25%) SD-WAN
10 5 (0.25%) SMS
10 5 (0.25%) Software-Defined Radio
Database & Business Intelligence
1 134 (6.77%) NoSQL
2 129 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
3 104 (5.26%) MongoDB
4 68 (3.44%) SQL Server
5 45 (2.28%) DynamoDB
6 39 (1.97%) Relational Database
7 33 (1.67%) MySQL
8 27 (1.37%) Data Warehouse
9 26 (1.31%) Redis
10 22 (1.11%) Power BI
11 21 (1.06%) BigQuery
12 18 (0.91%) Amazon RDS
12 18 (0.91%) Spark SQL
13 16 (0.81%) Metadata
13 16 (0.81%) Semantic Layer
14 14 (0.71%) Amazon Athena
15 13 (0.66%) Data Lake
15 13 (0.66%) Oracle Database
16 11 (0.56%) Elasticsearch
17 9 (0.46%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 250 (12.64%) Git
2 174 (8.80%) GitLab
2 174 (8.80%) Jenkins
3 148 (7.48%) Selenium
4 120 (6.07%) JIRA
5 89 (4.50%) Cucumber
6 88 (4.45%) Cypress.io
7 73 (3.69%) Postman
8 62 (3.13%) TeamCity
9 50 (2.53%) JMeter
10 37 (1.87%) REST Assured
11 33 (1.67%) JUnit
12 31 (1.57%) Zephyr
13 25 (1.26%) SpecFlow
13 25 (1.26%) TestRail
14 23 (1.16%) Gatling
15 21 (1.06%) fastlane
16 20 (1.01%) Crashlytics
17 19 (0.96%) LabVIEW
18 18 (0.91%) CircleCI
General
1 502 (25.38%) Social Skills
2 434 (21.94%) Finance
3 202 (10.21%) Public Sector
4 194 (9.81%) Analytical Skills
4 194 (9.81%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 190 (9.61%) Banking
6 174 (8.80%) Law
7 98 (4.95%) Retail
8 86 (4.35%) Legal
9 67 (3.39%) Manufacturing
10 63 (3.19%) Financial Institution
11 56 (2.83%) Electronics
12 53 (2.68%) Back Office
12 53 (2.68%) Games
13 43 (2.17%) Marketing
14 31 (1.57%) Front Office
15 23 (1.16%) Documentation Skills
16 21 (1.06%) Influencing Skills
17 20 (1.01%) Telecoms
18 19 (0.96%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 551 (27.86%) Senior
2 319 (16.13%) Lead
3 304 (15.37%) Software Engineer
4 282 (14.26%) Developer
5 211 (10.67%) Test Engineer
6 119 (6.02%) Java Engineer
7 116 (5.86%) Senior Developer
8 92 (4.65%) Senior Software Engineer
9 84 (4.25%) Test Automation Engineer
10 82 (4.15%) QA Engineer
11 81 (4.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 73 (3.69%) Test Leader
13 71 (3.59%) DevOps Engineer
14 68 (3.44%) Architect
15 67 (3.39%) Tester
16 60 (3.03%) Data Engineer
17 55 (2.78%) Software Developer
18 53 (2.68%) Analyst
18 53 (2.68%) Senior Test Engineer
19 50 (2.53%) Lead Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 202 (10.21%) React
2 200 (10.11%) .NET
3 172 (8.70%) Spring
4 171 (8.65%) Playwright
5 168 (8.49%) RESTful
6 167 (8.44%) Node.js
7 166 (8.39%) REST
8 127 (6.42%) Spring Boot
9 111 (5.61%) Kafka
10 92 (4.65%) AngularJS
11 75 (3.79%) CSS
11 75 (3.79%) HTML
12 63 (3.19%) Middleware
12 63 (3.19%) OAuth
13 56 (2.83%) OAuth2
14 44 (2.22%) JSON
15 43 (2.17%) RabbitMQ
16 41 (2.07%) Vue
17 39 (1.97%) ASP.NET
18 38 (1.92%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 366 (18.50%) Cloud Native
2 224 (11.32%) Product Ownership
3 163 (8.24%) Distributed Systems
4 97 (4.90%) Mobile App
5 68 (3.44%) Enterprise Software
6 64 (3.24%) Public Cloud
7 61 (3.08%) Legacy Systems
8 57 (2.88%) Virtual Team
9 56 (2.83%) Cyber Threat
10 54 (2.73%) Algorithms
11 52 (2.63%) Management Information System
12 51 (2.58%) Low-Code
13 43 (2.17%) Onboarding
14 41 (2.07%) Data Structures
15 40 (2.02%) Blog
16 39 (1.97%) Greenfield Project
17 34 (1.72%) Embedded Systems
17 34 (1.72%) Video\Live Streaming
18 33 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
19 27 (1.37%) e-Learning
Operating Systems
1 173 (8.75%) Linux
2 90 (4.55%) Windows
3 58 (2.93%) Apple iOS
4 54 (2.73%) Unix
5 48 (2.43%) Android
6 8 (0.40%) 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%) AIX
11 3 (0.15%) Debian
12 1 (0.051%) ThreadX
12 1 (0.051%) Ubuntu
12 1 (0.051%) VMS
12 1 (0.051%) Windows 10
12 1 (0.051%) Windows Server 2016
12 1 (0.051%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,134 (57.33%) CI/CD
2 880 (44.49%) Agile
3 751 (37.97%) DevOps
4 624 (31.55%) Software Engineering
5 564 (28.51%) Mentoring
6 540 (27.30%) Continuous Improvement
7 397 (20.07%) Problem-Solving
8 391 (19.77%) Microservices
9 356 (18.00%) AI
9 356 (18.00%) Infrastructure as Code
10 328 (16.58%) Software Testing
11 270 (13.65%) Test Strategy
12 258 (13.04%) Coaching
12 258 (13.04%) Containerisation
13 254 (12.84%) Full-Stack Development
14 252 (12.74%) Observability
15 223 (11.27%) Validation
16 215 (10.87%) Code Quality
17 201 (10.16%) Clean Code
17 201 (10.16%) Scrum
Programming Languages
1 623 (31.50%) Python
2 549 (27.76%) Java
3 337 (17.04%) JavaScript
4 312 (15.77%) SQL
5 282 (14.26%) C#
6 276 (13.95%) TypeScript
7 107 (5.41%) C++
8 95 (4.80%) PowerShell
9 83 (4.20%) Go
10 76 (3.84%) Bash
11 69 (3.49%) C
12 38 (1.92%) Kotlin
13 32 (1.62%) Rust
14 29 (1.47%) Swift
15 27 (1.37%) PHP
16 23 (1.16%) Ruby
17 22 (1.11%) Bicep
17 22 (1.11%) MATLAB
18 18 (0.91%) Groovy
19 16 (0.81%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 237 (11.98%) Security Cleared
2 229 (11.58%) Degree
3 145 (7.33%) SC Cleared
4 99 (5.01%) Computer Science Degree
5 81 (4.10%) ISTQB
6 61 (3.08%) CISSP
7 56 (2.83%) ITIL Certification
8 54 (2.73%) CISM
9 45 (2.28%) DV Cleared
10 38 (1.92%) Master's Degree
11 37 (1.87%) AWS Certification
12 27 (1.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 19 (0.96%) DBS Check
14 16 (0.81%) ISEB
15 13 (0.66%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
16 12 (0.61%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
17 11 (0.56%) BPSS Clearance
18 10 (0.51%) HNC
18 10 (0.51%) HND
19 9 (0.46%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 449 (22.70%) QA
2 168 (8.49%) Accessibility
3 76 (3.84%) Data Quality
4 61 (3.08%) NIST
5 50 (2.53%) ISO 22301
6 48 (2.43%) GDPR
7 45 (2.28%) WCAG
8 14 (0.71%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 12 (0.61%) SLA
9 12 (0.61%) Software Quality Assurance
10 11 (0.56%) GRC
11 10 (0.51%) 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
1 261 (13.20%) Docker
2 29 (1.47%) Firmware
3 22 (1.11%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
5 14 (0.71%) Hyper-V
6 11 (0.56%) Active Directory
6 11 (0.56%) KVM
7 10 (0.51%) Embedded Firmware
8 2 (0.10%) vSphere
9 1 (0.051%) IAG
9 1 (0.051%) Oracle RAC
9 1 (0.051%) Terminal Server
9 1 (0.051%) Xen
Systems Management
1 312 (15.77%) Terraform
2 302 (15.27%) Kubernetes
3 137 (6.93%) Grafana
4 77 (3.89%) Ansible
5 60 (3.03%) Prometheus
6 24 (1.21%) Argo
7 15 (0.76%) Kibana
8 12 (0.61%) CloudHub
9 9 (0.46%) 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%) Packer
14 4 (0.20%) Microsoft Intune
14 4 (0.20%) SCCM
14 4 (0.20%) SCOM
15 3 (0.15%) HP ALM
15 3 (0.15%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 146 (7.38%) Microsoft
2 55 (2.78%) Databricks
3 50 (2.53%) Google
4 47 (2.38%) Salesforce
5 44 (2.22%) Oracle
6 41 (2.07%) ServiceNow
7 35 (1.77%) VMware
8 26 (1.31%) Splunk
9 24 (1.21%) Dynatrace
9 24 (1.21%) SAP
10 20 (1.01%) Pega
11 16 (0.81%) AppDynamics
11 16 (0.81%) Braze
11 16 (0.81%) OpenAI
12 15 (0.76%) MuleSoft
13 14 (0.71%) Amplitude
14 13 (0.66%) Adobe
14 13 (0.66%) SendGrid
15 12 (0.61%) Atlassian
16 11 (0.56%) IBM