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

6 months to
17 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 88 82 100
Rank change year-on-year -6 +18 -47
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 1,974 1,711 2,480
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.00% 3.48% 2.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.71% 3.87% 3.08%
Number of salaries quoted 1,160 838 1,582
10th Percentile £42,500 £37,500 £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 £72,322
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 72,896 44,261 80,626
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.68% 90.09% 82.12%
Number of salaries quoted 50,426 24,863 55,989
10th Percentile £30,250 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £38,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £57,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.26% +3.64% -8.84%
75th Percentile £78,750 £77,500 £72,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £98,750 £92,500
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 17 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 17 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 1,662 £66,500 +5.98% 500
UK excluding London -5 1,176 £60,000 +5.26% 393
Work from Home +16 853 £67,500 +12.50% 246
London +4 634 £80,000 +3.23% 186
North of England +8 328 £57,500 -3.85% 104
South East -38 221 £60,000 +9.09% 136
South West -20 190 £55,000 -8.33% 47
Midlands -16 174 £63,250 +10.00% 50
North West -6 171 £65,000 - 54
Northern Ireland +1 101 £80,000 +45.45% 6
West Midlands -22 94 £62,500 -1.96% 27
North East -5 86 £52,500 +7.35% 19
East Midlands -14 79 £64,000 +34.74% 23
Yorkshire -24 71 £69,310 +41.45% 32
Wales -7 64 £55,000 - 12
East of England -23 63 £55,000 -3.51% 46
Scotland -47 48 £62,500 -5.66% 10

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 (1.93%) Confluence
2 28 (1.42%) Apache Spark
3 26 (1.32%) Apache Airflow
4 23 (1.17%) Apache
5 16 (0.81%) SharePoint
6 15 (0.76%) Jupyter
7 13 (0.66%) CMS
8 11 (0.56%) Anypoint
8 11 (0.56%) Mule
9 10 (0.51%) Adobe Experience Manager
10 7 (0.35%) IIS
11 5 (0.25%) Palantir Foundry
11 5 (0.25%) Umbraco
11 5 (0.25%) WordPress
12 3 (0.15%) Headless CMS
12 3 (0.15%) nginx
12 3 (0.15%) SAS
13 2 (0.10%) Cloud Foundry
13 2 (0.10%) JBoss
13 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 (1.17%) 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%) Elite 3E
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 EBS
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle ERP
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle Financials
7 1 (0.051%) Oracle SCM
Cloud Services
1 744 (37.69%) AWS
2 625 (31.66%) Azure
3 238 (12.06%) Azure DevOps
4 231 (11.70%) GCP
5 215 (10.89%) SaaS
6 181 (9.17%) Serverless
7 163 (8.26%) GitHub
8 85 (4.31%) GitHub Actions
9 82 (4.15%) AWS CloudFormation
10 77 (3.90%) AWS Lambda
11 74 (3.75%) Amazon EKS
12 73 (3.70%) Amazon S3
13 52 (2.63%) Azure Service Bus
13 52 (2.63%) PaaS
14 49 (2.48%) Power Platform
15 44 (2.23%) Azure Logic Apps
15 44 (2.23%) Azure Monitor
16 40 (2.03%) Amazon EC2
17 39 (1.98%) dbt
18 33 (1.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 71 (3.60%) Broadband
2 23 (1.17%) Firewall
3 13 (0.66%) DMARC
4 12 (0.61%) MQTT
5 11 (0.56%) SSL
5 11 (0.56%) Wireless
6 10 (0.51%) DNS
7 9 (0.46%) CHAP
8 8 (0.41%) Wi-Fi
9 7 (0.35%) LTE
9 7 (0.35%) TCP/IP
9 7 (0.35%) WAN
9 7 (0.35%) ZigBee
10 6 (0.30%) Bluetooth
10 6 (0.30%) HTTP
11 5 (0.25%) 5G
11 5 (0.25%) DHCP
11 5 (0.25%) Ethernet
11 5 (0.25%) SD-WAN
11 5 (0.25%) SMS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 134 (6.79%) NoSQL
2 127 (6.43%) PostgreSQL
3 103 (5.22%) MongoDB
4 67 (3.39%) SQL Server
5 45 (2.28%) DynamoDB
6 38 (1.93%) Relational Database
7 33 (1.67%) MySQL
8 26 (1.32%) Data Warehouse
8 26 (1.32%) Redis
9 22 (1.11%) Power BI
10 18 (0.91%) Amazon RDS
10 18 (0.91%) BigQuery
10 18 (0.91%) Spark SQL
11 16 (0.81%) Metadata
11 16 (0.81%) Semantic Layer
12 14 (0.71%) Amazon Athena
13 13 (0.66%) Oracle Database
14 12 (0.61%) Data Lake
15 11 (0.56%) Elasticsearch
16 9 (0.46%) Big Data
Development Applications
1 248 (12.56%) Git
2 173 (8.76%) GitLab
3 172 (8.71%) Jenkins
4 145 (7.35%) Selenium
5 119 (6.03%) JIRA
6 89 (4.51%) Cucumber
6 89 (4.51%) Cypress.io
7 73 (3.70%) Postman
8 62 (3.14%) TeamCity
9 50 (2.53%) JMeter
10 37 (1.87%) REST Assured
11 33 (1.67%) JUnit
12 31 (1.57%) Zephyr
13 25 (1.27%) SpecFlow
13 25 (1.27%) TestRail
14 23 (1.17%) Gatling
15 21 (1.06%) fastlane
16 20 (1.01%) Crashlytics
17 19 (0.96%) LabVIEW
18 18 (0.91%) CircleCI
General
1 498 (25.23%) Social Skills
2 435 (22.04%) Finance
3 202 (10.23%) Public Sector
4 194 (9.83%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 190 (9.63%) Analytical Skills
5 190 (9.63%) Banking
6 173 (8.76%) Law
7 98 (4.96%) Retail
8 86 (4.36%) Legal
9 67 (3.39%) Manufacturing
10 64 (3.24%) Financial Institution
11 56 (2.84%) Electronics
12 54 (2.74%) Games
13 53 (2.68%) Back Office
14 43 (2.18%) Marketing
15 32 (1.62%) Front Office
16 23 (1.17%) Documentation Skills
17 21 (1.06%) Influencing Skills
18 20 (1.01%) Telecoms
19 18 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 549 (27.81%) Senior
2 319 (16.16%) Lead
3 304 (15.40%) Software Engineer
4 280 (14.18%) Developer
5 210 (10.64%) Test Engineer
6 120 (6.08%) Java Engineer
7 116 (5.88%) Senior Developer
8 92 (4.66%) Senior Software Engineer
9 85 (4.31%) Test Automation Engineer
10 83 (4.20%) QA Engineer
11 81 (4.10%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 74 (3.75%) Test Leader
13 71 (3.60%) DevOps Engineer
14 67 (3.39%) Architect
15 66 (3.34%) Tester
16 58 (2.94%) Data Engineer
17 55 (2.79%) Software Developer
18 52 (2.63%) Analyst
19 50 (2.53%) Lead Software Engineer
19 50 (2.53%) Senior Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 202 (10.23%) React
2 201 (10.18%) .NET
3 171 (8.66%) Playwright
3 171 (8.66%) Spring
4 166 (8.41%) RESTful
5 165 (8.36%) Node.js
6 164 (8.31%) REST
7 126 (6.38%) Spring Boot
8 110 (5.57%) Kafka
9 91 (4.61%) AngularJS
10 75 (3.80%) CSS
10 75 (3.80%) HTML
11 63 (3.19%) Middleware
12 62 (3.14%) OAuth
13 55 (2.79%) OAuth2
14 43 (2.18%) JSON
14 43 (2.18%) RabbitMQ
15 41 (2.08%) Vue
16 39 (1.98%) ASP.NET
16 39 (1.98%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 368 (18.64%) Cloud Native
2 223 (11.30%) Product Ownership
3 164 (8.31%) Distributed Systems
4 97 (4.91%) Mobile App
5 67 (3.39%) Enterprise Software
6 64 (3.24%) Public Cloud
7 59 (2.99%) Legacy Systems
8 57 (2.89%) Virtual Team
9 55 (2.79%) Algorithms
9 55 (2.79%) Cyber Threat
10 52 (2.63%) Management Information System
11 51 (2.58%) Low-Code
12 44 (2.23%) Onboarding
13 41 (2.08%) Data Structures
14 40 (2.03%) Blog
15 39 (1.98%) Greenfield Project
16 35 (1.77%) Embedded Systems
17 34 (1.72%) Video\Live Streaming
18 32 (1.62%) Self-Motivation
19 27 (1.37%) e-Learning
Operating Systems
1 174 (8.81%) Linux
2 88 (4.46%) Windows
3 59 (2.99%) Apple iOS
4 54 (2.74%) Unix
5 49 (2.48%) Android
6 8 (0.41%) 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%) VxWorks
12 1 (0.051%) Windows 10
12 1 (0.051%) Windows Server 2016
12 1 (0.051%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,130 (57.24%) CI/CD
2 879 (44.53%) Agile
3 750 (37.99%) DevOps
4 621 (31.46%) Software Engineering
5 562 (28.47%) Mentoring
6 538 (27.25%) Continuous Improvement
7 395 (20.01%) Problem-Solving
8 392 (19.86%) Microservices
9 356 (18.03%) AI
9 356 (18.03%) Infrastructure as Code
10 325 (16.46%) Software Testing
11 273 (13.83%) Test Strategy
12 259 (13.12%) Containerisation
13 258 (13.07%) Coaching
14 254 (12.87%) Full-Stack Development
15 252 (12.77%) Observability
16 224 (11.35%) Validation
17 213 (10.79%) Code Quality
18 200 (10.13%) Scrum
19 199 (10.08%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 625 (31.66%) Python
2 548 (27.76%) Java
3 338 (17.12%) JavaScript
4 312 (15.81%) SQL
5 282 (14.29%) C#
6 274 (13.88%) TypeScript
7 110 (5.57%) C++
8 95 (4.81%) PowerShell
9 83 (4.20%) Go
10 76 (3.85%) Bash
11 71 (3.60%) C
12 38 (1.93%) Kotlin
13 34 (1.72%) Rust
14 29 (1.47%) Swift
15 27 (1.37%) PHP
16 23 (1.17%) 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 (12.01%) Security Cleared
2 232 (11.75%) Degree
3 145 (7.35%) SC Cleared
4 100 (5.07%) Computer Science Degree
5 80 (4.05%) ISTQB
6 61 (3.09%) CISSP
7 56 (2.84%) ITIL Certification
8 53 (2.68%) CISM
9 45 (2.28%) DV Cleared
10 38 (1.93%) Master's Degree
11 37 (1.87%) AWS Certification
12 27 (1.37%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 20 (1.01%) 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
1 453 (22.95%) QA
2 166 (8.41%) Accessibility
3 76 (3.85%) Data Quality
4 61 (3.09%) NIST
5 50 (2.53%) ISO 22301
6 48 (2.43%) GDPR
7 44 (2.23%) 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%) ECSS
14 4 (0.20%) ISO 9001
15 3 (0.15%) ISO/IEC 12207
System Software
1 259 (13.12%) Docker
2 29 (1.47%) Firmware
3 23 (1.17%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.81%) Virtual Machines
5 15 (0.76%) Hyper-V
6 12 (0.61%) KVM
7 11 (0.56%) Active Directory
8 10 (0.51%) Embedded Firmware
9 2 (0.10%) vSphere
10 1 (0.051%) IAG
10 1 (0.051%) Oracle RAC
10 1 (0.051%) Terminal Server
10 1 (0.051%) Xen
Systems Management
1 310 (15.70%) Terraform
2 300 (15.20%) Kubernetes
3 137 (6.94%) Grafana
4 77 (3.90%) Ansible
5 60 (3.04%) Prometheus
6 24 (1.22%) Argo
7 15 (0.76%) Kibana
8 11 (0.56%) CloudHub
9 9 (0.46%) logstash
10 8 (0.41%) 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 (7.40%) Microsoft
2 55 (2.79%) Databricks
3 48 (2.43%) Google
4 46 (2.33%) Salesforce
5 43 (2.18%) Oracle
6 40 (2.03%) ServiceNow
7 36 (1.82%) VMware
8 26 (1.32%) Splunk
9 24 (1.22%) Dynatrace
9 24 (1.22%) SAP
10 20 (1.01%) Pega
11 16 (0.81%) AppDynamics
11 16 (0.81%) Braze
11 16 (0.81%) OpenAI
12 14 (0.71%) Amplitude
12 14 (0.71%) MuleSoft
13 13 (0.66%) IFS
13 13 (0.66%) SendGrid
14 12 (0.61%) Adobe
14 12 (0.61%) Atlassian