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 3 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 97 96 91
Rank change year-on-year -1 -5 -57
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,583 1,291 2,696
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 1.98% 3.16% 2.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.58% 3.39% 3.46%
Number of salaries quoted 992 891 1,812
10th Percentile £42,500 £38,750 £36,250
25th Percentile £50,000 £47,000 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £62,788 £61,250 £57,965
Median % change year-on-year +2.51% +5.67% -10.82%
75th Percentile £84,125 £82,500 £73,750
90th Percentile £105,000 £98,474 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £57,500 £56,659 £52,500
% change year-on-year +1.48% +7.92% -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 61,258 38,052 77,913
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 76.49% 93.03% 86.40%
Number of salaries quoted 37,754 22,305 57,991
10th Percentile £30,000 £31,250 £29,079
25th Percentile £40,000 £43,750 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% +9.09% -10.57%
75th Percentile £77,500 £80,000 £73,410
90th Percentile £97,500 £102,500 £92,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £50,000 £55,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year -9.09% +10.00% -8.26%

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 3 April 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 3 April 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 -6 1,323 £63,288 +3.75% 674
UK excluding London -28 843 £57,500 +1.48% 573
Work from Home +13 669 £65,000 +4.00% 333
London +35 590 £80,000 +10.34% 183
North of England -48 186 £60,000 +9.09% 162
South East -42 176 £55,000 - 145
South West -23 148 £55,000 -8.33% 72
Midlands -22 121 £60,000 +2.13% 83
Scotland +3 117 £62,500 +4.17% 30
North West -11 99 £60,000 +11.63% 82
East Midlands -15 61 £55,000 +4.76% 26
West Midlands -35 60 £61,500 -1.60% 57
East of England -1 58 £50,000 -28.57% 65
Yorkshire -62 56 £65,000 +30.00% 41
Wales -3 36 £55,000 +8.37% 27
North East -19 31 £55,000 -9.10% 39
Northern Ireland -38 8 £80,000 +30.61% 7

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 35 (2.21%) Confluence
2 23 (1.45%) Apache Airflow
3 17 (1.07%) Apache Spark
4 13 (0.82%) Appian
5 11 (0.69%) Apache
6 10 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
7 9 (0.57%) Jupyter
7 9 (0.57%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 9 (0.57%) SharePoint
8 8 (0.51%) CMS
8 8 (0.51%) IIS
9 6 (0.38%) WordPress
10 3 (0.19%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.19%) nginx
10 3 (0.19%) Oracle Workflow
11 2 (0.13%) Camunda
11 2 (0.13%) JBoss
11 2 (0.13%) Oracle Application Server
11 2 (0.13%) SAS
12 1 (0.063%) Headless CMS
Applications
1 16 (1.01%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.88%) Microsoft Office
3 9 (0.57%) MS Visio
4 8 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 4 (0.25%) Fusion 360
5 4 (0.25%) PlantUML
6 3 (0.19%) CANalyzer
7 2 (0.13%) Adobe Creative Suite
7 2 (0.13%) Chatbot
7 2 (0.13%) Microsoft Project
7 2 (0.13%) Photoshop
8 1 (0.063%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 18 (1.14%) Oracle ERP
2 13 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.25%) Dynamics AX
3 4 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
3 4 (0.25%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 4 (0.25%) Shopify
4 2 (0.13%) SAP CX
4 2 (0.13%) Visualfiles
5 1 (0.063%) Elite 3E
5 1 (0.063%) Endur
5 1 (0.063%) Findur
5 1 (0.063%) NEC Housing
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Applications
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle Financials
5 1 (0.063%) Oracle SCM
5 1 (0.063%) Postilion
5 1 (0.063%) SAP S/4HANA
5 1 (0.063%) Siebel CRM
5 1 (0.063%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 529 (33.42%) Azure
2 494 (31.21%) AWS
3 249 (15.73%) Azure DevOps
4 201 (12.70%) GCP
4 201 (12.70%) GitHub
5 125 (7.90%) SaaS
6 124 (7.83%) Serverless
7 77 (4.86%) Amazon EKS
8 71 (4.49%) GitHub Actions
9 64 (4.04%) PaaS
10 58 (3.66%) GitHub Copilot
11 55 (3.47%) Azure Data Factory
12 53 (3.35%) AWS Lambda
12 53 (3.35%) dbt
12 53 (3.35%) Power Platform
13 45 (2.84%) Amazon S3
14 44 (2.78%) AWS CloudFormation
15 43 (2.72%) Datadog
16 35 (2.21%) Entra ID
17 34 (2.15%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 23 (1.45%) DNS
2 18 (1.14%) Broadband
3 14 (0.88%) HTTP
3 14 (0.88%) WAN
4 13 (0.82%) SD-WAN
5 12 (0.76%) CHAP
6 11 (0.69%) Firewall
7 10 (0.63%) 5G
7 10 (0.63%) TCP/IP
8 9 (0.57%) VPN
9 4 (0.25%) SMTP
9 4 (0.25%) Wi-Fi
10 3 (0.19%) Cisco ISE
10 3 (0.19%) Multicast
10 3 (0.19%) VLAN
11 2 (0.13%) LTE
11 2 (0.13%) Network Security
11 2 (0.13%) PuTTY
11 2 (0.13%) VSAN
11 2 (0.13%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 99 (6.25%) PostgreSQL
2 98 (6.19%) NoSQL
3 85 (5.37%) SQL Server
4 50 (3.16%) MongoDB
5 46 (2.91%) Relational Database
6 41 (2.59%) MySQL
7 35 (2.21%) Data Warehouse
7 35 (2.21%) Power BI
8 25 (1.58%) DynamoDB
9 18 (1.14%) Amazon RDS
10 15 (0.95%) Metadata
11 13 (0.82%) DB2
11 13 (0.82%) Pinecone
11 13 (0.82%) Redis
12 12 (0.76%) Data Lake
13 11 (0.69%) BigQuery
13 11 (0.69%) Tableau
14 10 (0.63%) Elasticsearch
15 9 (0.57%) Spark SQL
16 8 (0.51%) InfluxDB
Development Applications
1 184 (11.62%) Selenium
2 172 (10.87%) Git
3 135 (8.53%) Jenkins
4 128 (8.09%) JIRA
5 90 (5.69%) Cypress.io
6 82 (5.18%) GitLab
7 79 (4.99%) Cucumber
8 68 (4.30%) TeamCity
9 61 (3.85%) Postman
10 51 (3.22%) JMeter
11 36 (2.27%) SpecFlow
12 29 (1.83%) REST Assured
13 28 (1.77%) CircleCI
14 25 (1.58%) Robot Framework
15 24 (1.52%) MLflow
16 23 (1.45%) JUnit
17 22 (1.39%) TestRail
18 19 (1.20%) Bitbucket
18 19 (1.20%) WebDriver
19 18 (1.14%) Appium
General
1 449 (28.36%) Social Skills
2 444 (28.05%) Finance
3 182 (11.50%) Banking
4 148 (9.35%) Analytical Skills
5 132 (8.34%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 126 (7.96%) Law
7 95 (6.00%) Retail
8 92 (5.81%) Public Sector
9 65 (4.11%) Financial Institution
10 47 (2.97%) Back Office
11 41 (2.59%) Electronics
12 39 (2.46%) Legal
12 39 (2.46%) Marketing
13 35 (2.21%) Front Office
13 35 (2.21%) Manufacturing
14 30 (1.90%) Games
15 20 (1.26%) Documentation Skills
16 16 (1.01%) Organisational Skills
17 14 (0.88%) Telecoms
18 13 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 410 (25.90%) Senior
2 244 (15.41%) Lead
3 231 (14.59%) Developer
4 209 (13.20%) Software Engineer
5 166 (10.49%) Test Engineer
6 107 (6.76%) Senior Developer
7 95 (6.00%) QA Engineer
8 82 (5.18%) Java Engineer
9 81 (5.12%) Tester
10 75 (4.74%) Test Automation Engineer
11 70 (4.42%) Senior Software Engineer
12 69 (4.36%) Test Leader
13 65 (4.11%) Analyst
14 59 (3.73%) Automation Engineer
15 52 (3.28%) Automation Tester
15 52 (3.28%) Python Developer
16 51 (3.22%) Full-Stack Engineer
16 51 (3.22%) QA Automation Engineer
17 45 (2.84%) Java Software Engineer
17 45 (2.84%) Senior Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 201 (12.70%) React
2 151 (9.54%) .NET
3 147 (9.29%) RESTful
4 142 (8.97%) Playwright
5 129 (8.15%) REST
6 92 (5.81%) Spring
7 85 (5.37%) Node.js
8 70 (4.42%) HTML
9 69 (4.36%) CSS
10 66 (4.17%) Spring Boot
11 61 (3.85%) Kafka
12 56 (3.54%) JSON
13 52 (3.28%) pytest
14 51 (3.22%) OAuth
15 42 (2.65%) Django
15 42 (2.65%) Elastic Stack
16 41 (2.59%) Web Services
17 40 (2.53%) AngularJS
18 37 (2.34%) OAuth2
18 37 (2.34%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 258 (16.30%) Cloud Native
2 134 (8.46%) Product Ownership
3 79 (4.99%) Mobile App
4 62 (3.92%) Distributed Systems
5 55 (3.47%) Management Information System
6 48 (3.03%) Self-Motivation
7 44 (2.78%) Enterprise Software
7 44 (2.78%) Legacy Systems
8 40 (2.53%) Onboarding
9 36 (2.27%) Algorithms
10 33 (2.08%) Greenfield Project
10 33 (2.08%) Low-Code
11 31 (1.96%) Data Structures
12 26 (1.64%) Hybrid Cloud
13 25 (1.58%) Hedge funds
14 24 (1.52%) Equities
15 23 (1.45%) Public Cloud
16 21 (1.33%) Blog
17 19 (1.20%) Client/Server
17 19 (1.20%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
Operating Systems
1 151 (9.54%) Linux
2 80 (5.05%) Windows
3 62 (3.92%) Apple iOS
4 52 (3.28%) Android
5 34 (2.15%) Unix
6 10 (0.63%) CentOS
7 8 (0.51%) Windows Server
8 5 (0.32%) Debian
8 5 (0.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 4 (0.25%) Windows 10
9 4 (0.25%) Windows Server 2019
10 3 (0.19%) Ubuntu
11 2 (0.13%) Kali Linux
11 2 (0.13%) Mac OS
11 2 (0.13%) VxWorks
12 1 (0.063%) AIX
12 1 (0.063%) FreeRTOS
12 1 (0.063%) Windows Server 2016
Processes & Methodologies
1 813 (51.36%) CI/CD
2 649 (41.00%) Agile
3 546 (34.49%) DevOps
4 390 (24.64%) Continuous Improvement
5 378 (23.88%) Software Engineering
6 348 (21.98%) Mentoring
7 337 (21.29%) Problem-Solving
8 262 (16.55%) AI
9 255 (16.11%) Microservices
10 240 (15.16%) Infrastructure as Code
11 223 (14.09%) Coaching
12 221 (13.96%) Software Testing
13 210 (13.27%) Observability
14 197 (12.44%) Clean Code
15 186 (11.75%) Test Strategy
16 184 (11.62%) Full-Stack Development
17 182 (11.50%) Containerisation
18 151 (9.54%) Validation
19 150 (9.48%) Analytics
19 150 (9.48%) Deployment Automation
Programming Languages
1 486 (30.70%) Python
2 406 (25.65%) Java
3 307 (19.39%) SQL
4 245 (15.48%) JavaScript
5 206 (13.01%) TypeScript
6 164 (10.36%) C#
7 80 (5.05%) PowerShell
8 66 (4.17%) C++
9 56 (3.54%) Bash
10 50 (3.16%) Go
11 33 (2.08%) C
12 30 (1.90%) Bicep
13 27 (1.71%) Kotlin
14 26 (1.64%) PL/SQL
15 25 (1.58%) Apex Code
15 25 (1.58%) Shell Script
16 24 (1.52%) Rust
17 23 (1.45%) PHP
18 18 (1.14%) Swift
19 12 (0.76%) MATLAB
Qualifications
1 210 (13.27%) Degree
2 147 (9.29%) Security Cleared
3 96 (6.06%) SC Cleared
4 82 (5.18%) Computer Science Degree
5 74 (4.67%) ISTQB
6 32 (2.02%) Master's Degree
7 30 (1.90%) DV Cleared
7 30 (1.90%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 22 (1.39%) AWS Certification
9 19 (1.20%) ISEB
10 18 (1.14%) CISSP
11 15 (0.95%) CEH
12 14 (0.88%) HND
13 13 (0.82%) Azure Certification
13 13 (0.82%) CISA
13 13 (0.82%) PhD
14 12 (0.76%) CGEIT
14 12 (0.76%) CISM
14 12 (0.76%) DBS Check
14 12 (0.76%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 375 (23.69%) QA
2 123 (7.77%) Accessibility
3 63 (3.98%) Data Quality
4 48 (3.03%) GDPR
5 46 (2.91%) NIST
6 36 (2.27%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 26 (1.64%) WCAG
8 15 (0.95%) ISO 22301
9 13 (0.82%) SLA
10 12 (0.76%) COBIT
11 11 (0.69%) NCSC
12 10 (0.63%) ISO 9001
13 7 (0.44%) GRC
13 7 (0.44%) Software Quality Assurance
14 6 (0.38%) IEC 61508
15 5 (0.32%) ISO 26262
15 5 (0.32%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 5 (0.32%) SOC 2
16 4 (0.25%) ISO 13485
16 4 (0.25%) PMO
System Software
1 227 (14.34%) Docker
2 29 (1.83%) Active Directory
3 21 (1.33%) VMware Infrastructure
4 15 (0.95%) Hyper-V
5 14 (0.88%) Virtual Machines
6 13 (0.82%) KVM
7 12 (0.76%) Firmware
8 7 (0.44%) Embedded Firmware
9 3 (0.19%) Terminal Server
10 2 (0.13%) vSphere
11 1 (0.063%) Xen
Systems Management
1 280 (17.69%) Kubernetes
2 278 (17.56%) Terraform
3 133 (8.40%) Grafana
4 69 (4.36%) Ansible
5 45 (2.84%) Prometheus
6 27 (1.71%) Single Sign-On
7 9 (0.57%) Argo
8 7 (0.44%) logstash
9 6 (0.38%) Microsoft Intune
10 4 (0.25%) HP ALM
10 4 (0.25%) HP Fortify
10 4 (0.25%) Kibana
10 4 (0.25%) Packer
10 4 (0.25%) SCCM
10 4 (0.25%) SCOM
11 3 (0.19%) Rancher
11 3 (0.19%) vCenter Server
12 2 (0.13%) Functional Safety
12 2 (0.13%) MIIS
12 2 (0.13%) VxRail
Vendors
1 123 (7.77%) Microsoft
2 68 (4.30%) Oracle
3 53 (3.35%) Salesforce
4 49 (3.10%) Databricks
5 46 (2.91%) VMware
6 35 (2.21%) Google
7 21 (1.33%) Commvault
8 20 (1.26%) OpenAI
9 18 (1.14%) SAP
9 18 (1.14%) ServiceNow
10 17 (1.07%) Splunk
11 14 (0.88%) Atlassian
11 14 (0.88%) Black Duck
11 14 (0.88%) Coverity
11 14 (0.88%) Palantir
12 13 (0.82%) Foundry
12 13 (0.82%) Pega
12 13 (0.82%) UiPath
13 12 (0.76%) Automation Anywhere
14 11 (0.69%) Blue Prism