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

6 months to
11 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 80 90 101
Rank change year-on-year +10 +11 -41
Permanent jobs citing Test Automation 2,186 1,658 2,063
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 2.06% 3.33% 2.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.80% 3.73% 3.04%
Number of salaries quoted 1,228 812 1,240
10th Percentile £42,088 £37,500 £38,700
25th Percentile £48,750 £47,500 £45,938
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £65,000 £62,500 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +4.17% -7.69%
75th Percentile £81,000 £81,438 £71,991
90th Percentile £95,375 £97,500 £87,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% - -4.35%

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 78,019 44,452 67,790
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.52% 89.29% 81.16%
Number of salaries quoted 53,759 25,267 43,796
10th Percentile £30,750 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,000 £41,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -9.09%
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £48,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +14.58% -4.00% -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 11 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 11 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 +7 1,801 £65,000 +4.00% 1,353
UK excluding London +5 1,377 £60,000 +9.09% 781
Work from Home +15 888 £67,500 +12.50% 572
London +4 655 £80,000 +2.56% 672
North of England +14 360 £57,500 -0.86% 184
South East -20 251 £62,000 +12.73% 213
South West -3 231 £60,000 +14.29% 128
Midlands -13 192 £61,000 +3.83% 106
North West 0 186 £62,500 -3.85% 96
Northern Ireland +4 140 £80,000 +45.45% 16
West Midlands -27 99 £62,500 - 68
North East +3 98 £52,500 +31.25% 37
Wales +7 92 £55,000 - 19
East Midlands -14 92 £55,000 +4.76% 38
Yorkshire -16 76 £69,310 +41.45% 51
East of England -43 70 £50,000 -12.28% 72
Scotland -33 54 £62,500 - 58

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 49 (2.24%) Confluence
2 29 (1.33%) Apache Spark
3 25 (1.14%) Apache Airflow
3 25 (1.14%) SharePoint
4 24 (1.10%) Apache
5 16 (0.73%) Jupyter
6 14 (0.64%) Anypoint
6 14 (0.64%) Mule
7 13 (0.59%) Adobe Experience Manager
8 11 (0.50%) CMS
9 5 (0.23%) Cloud Foundry
9 5 (0.23%) IIS
9 5 (0.23%) Microsoft Exchange
9 5 (0.23%) nginx
9 5 (0.23%) Umbraco
10 4 (0.18%) Camunda
10 4 (0.18%) SAS
11 3 (0.14%) WordPress
12 2 (0.091%) Headless CMS
12 2 (0.091%) NServiceBus
Applications
1 42 (1.92%) Microsoft Excel
2 14 (0.64%) Microsoft Office
3 12 (0.55%) Simulink
4 7 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
5 5 (0.23%) Lightworks
5 5 (0.23%) PlantUML
6 4 (0.18%) Moqups
7 3 (0.14%) CANalyzer
7 3 (0.14%) Chatbot
7 3 (0.14%) MS Visio
8 1 (0.046%) AutoCAD
8 1 (0.046%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 43 (1.97%) Dynamics CRM
2 27 (1.24%) Dynamics GP
3 9 (0.41%) SAP S/4HANA
4 5 (0.23%) Visualfiles
5 4 (0.18%) Dynamics AX
6 3 (0.14%) Oracle Applications
6 3 (0.14%) Payment Gateway
7 2 (0.091%) FLEXCUBE
7 2 (0.091%) Magento
7 2 (0.091%) Oracle EBS
7 2 (0.091%) SAP ERP
7 2 (0.091%) Towers Watson Igloo
7 2 (0.091%) Workday HCM
8 1 (0.046%) Elite 3E
8 1 (0.046%) Endur
8 1 (0.046%) Findur
8 1 (0.046%) Misys Equation
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle Assets
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle ERP
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 784 (35.86%) AWS
2 669 (30.60%) Azure
3 264 (12.08%) SaaS
4 251 (11.48%) Azure DevOps
5 234 (10.70%) GCP
6 182 (8.33%) Serverless
7 181 (8.28%) GitHub
8 93 (4.25%) AWS CloudFormation
9 91 (4.16%) GitHub Actions
10 77 (3.52%) AWS Lambda
11 72 (3.29%) Amazon S3
12 67 (3.06%) Amazon EKS
13 62 (2.84%) Power Platform
14 53 (2.42%) Azure Service Bus
15 48 (2.20%) PaaS
16 47 (2.15%) Azure Logic Apps
17 44 (2.01%) Azure Monitor
18 42 (1.92%) dbt
19 41 (1.88%) Amazon EC2
20 35 (1.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
Communications & Networking
1 73 (3.34%) Broadband
2 25 (1.14%) Firewall
3 15 (0.69%) DNS
3 15 (0.69%) SSL
3 15 (0.69%) TCP/IP
3 15 (0.69%) Wireless
4 13 (0.59%) DMARC
5 12 (0.55%) MQTT
5 12 (0.55%) Wi-Fi
6 9 (0.41%) 3GPP
6 9 (0.41%) HTTP
6 9 (0.41%) LTE
6 9 (0.41%) WAN
7 8 (0.37%) DHCP
7 8 (0.37%) Network Security
8 7 (0.32%) GSM
8 7 (0.32%) Radio Access Network
8 7 (0.32%) RANAP
8 7 (0.32%) UMTS
8 7 (0.32%) Wireshark
Database & Business Intelligence
1 131 (5.99%) NoSQL
1 131 (5.99%) PostgreSQL
2 100 (4.57%) MongoDB
3 73 (3.34%) SQL Server
4 53 (2.42%) Relational Database
5 46 (2.10%) DynamoDB
6 41 (1.88%) MySQL
7 32 (1.46%) Data Warehouse
8 31 (1.42%) Power BI
9 29 (1.33%) Redis
10 26 (1.19%) BigQuery
11 20 (0.91%) Data Lake
12 18 (0.82%) Amazon RDS
12 18 (0.82%) Spark SQL
13 17 (0.78%) Metadata
13 17 (0.78%) Semantic Layer
14 15 (0.69%) Amazon Athena
15 12 (0.55%) Elasticsearch
15 12 (0.55%) Oracle Database
16 11 (0.50%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 293 (13.40%) Git
2 196 (8.97%) GitLab
3 193 (8.83%) Jenkins
4 161 (7.37%) Selenium
5 141 (6.45%) JIRA
6 98 (4.48%) Cucumber
7 95 (4.35%) Cypress.io
8 90 (4.12%) Postman
9 54 (2.47%) TeamCity
10 53 (2.42%) JMeter
11 44 (2.01%) JUnit
12 40 (1.83%) REST Assured
13 34 (1.56%) Zephyr
14 27 (1.24%) Gatling
15 26 (1.19%) TestRail
16 25 (1.14%) SpecFlow
17 23 (1.05%) Bitbucket
17 23 (1.05%) SonarQube
18 21 (0.96%) fastlane
19 19 (0.87%) Crashlytics
General
1 587 (26.85%) Social Skills
2 511 (23.38%) Finance
3 265 (12.12%) Analytical Skills
4 229 (10.48%) Inclusion and Diversity
5 217 (9.93%) Public Sector
6 195 (8.92%) Law
7 186 (8.51%) Banking
8 122 (5.58%) Legal
9 97 (4.44%) Marketing
10 93 (4.25%) Retail
11 86 (3.93%) Manufacturing
12 70 (3.20%) Electronics
13 65 (2.97%) Financial Institution
14 52 (2.38%) Games
15 49 (2.24%) Back Office
16 35 (1.60%) Aerospace
16 35 (1.60%) Telecoms
17 29 (1.33%) Front Office
18 26 (1.19%) Documentation Skills
19 21 (0.96%) Investment Banking
Job Titles
1 626 (28.64%) Senior
2 347 (15.87%) Lead
3 335 (15.32%) Software Engineer
4 308 (14.09%) Developer
5 234 (10.70%) Test Engineer
6 122 (5.58%) Senior Developer
7 116 (5.31%) Java Engineer
8 100 (4.57%) Senior Software Engineer
9 89 (4.07%) QA Engineer
10 85 (3.89%) DevOps Engineer
10 85 (3.89%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 84 (3.84%) Test Automation Engineer
12 71 (3.25%) Architect
13 69 (3.16%) Lead Software Engineer
14 68 (3.11%) Test Leader
15 64 (2.93%) Tester
16 63 (2.88%) Data Engineer
17 62 (2.84%) Senior Manager
18 60 (2.74%) Software Developer
19 58 (2.65%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (10.34%) React
2 214 (9.79%) .NET
3 196 (8.97%) REST
4 190 (8.69%) Playwright
5 187 (8.55%) Spring
6 184 (8.42%) Node.js
7 183 (8.37%) RESTful
8 137 (6.27%) Spring Boot
9 122 (5.58%) Kafka
10 109 (4.99%) AngularJS
11 88 (4.03%) CSS
12 85 (3.89%) HTML
13 69 (3.16%) OAuth
14 63 (2.88%) Middleware
14 63 (2.88%) OAuth2
15 53 (2.42%) JSON
16 48 (2.20%) Vue
17 46 (2.10%) RabbitMQ
18 44 (2.01%) Next.js
19 43 (1.97%) .NET Core
Miscellaneous
1 384 (17.57%) Cloud Native
2 247 (11.30%) Product Ownership
3 186 (8.51%) Distributed Systems
4 112 (5.12%) Mobile App
5 86 (3.93%) Enterprise Software
6 75 (3.43%) Public Cloud
7 73 (3.34%) Virtual Team
8 72 (3.29%) Legacy Systems
9 62 (2.84%) Algorithms
10 60 (2.74%) Cyber Threat
10 60 (2.74%) Onboarding
11 54 (2.47%) Blog
12 52 (2.38%) Low-Code
12 52 (2.38%) Management Information System
13 46 (2.10%) Data Structures
13 46 (2.10%) Self-Motivation
14 40 (1.83%) Marketing Technology
15 39 (1.78%) Greenfield Project
16 36 (1.65%) Embedded Systems
17 34 (1.56%) Video\Live Streaming
Operating Systems
1 189 (8.65%) Linux
2 99 (4.53%) Windows
3 66 (3.02%) Apple iOS
4 58 (2.65%) Android
5 53 (2.42%) Unix
6 12 (0.55%) Windows Server
7 7 (0.32%) CentOS
7 7 (0.32%) Embedded Linux
8 6 (0.27%) FreeRTOS
9 4 (0.18%) Debian
9 4 (0.18%) Kali Linux
10 3 (0.14%) AIX
10 3 (0.14%) VxWorks
11 2 (0.091%) VMS
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 1,230 (56.27%) CI/CD
2 963 (44.05%) Agile
3 819 (37.47%) DevOps
4 711 (32.53%) Software Engineering
5 630 (28.82%) Continuous Improvement
6 597 (27.31%) Mentoring
7 464 (21.23%) AI
8 458 (20.95%) Problem-Solving
9 411 (18.80%) Microservices
10 375 (17.15%) Infrastructure as Code
11 367 (16.79%) Software Testing
12 312 (14.27%) Test Strategy
13 275 (12.58%) Full-Stack Development
14 274 (12.53%) Containerisation
15 273 (12.49%) Observability
16 270 (12.35%) Coaching
17 262 (11.99%) Code Quality
18 249 (11.39%) Validation
19 225 (10.29%) Decision-Making
19 225 (10.29%) Event-Driven
Programming Languages
1 671 (30.70%) Python
2 573 (26.21%) Java
3 388 (17.75%) JavaScript
4 363 (16.61%) SQL
5 320 (14.64%) TypeScript
6 316 (14.46%) C#
7 130 (5.95%) C++
8 106 (4.85%) PowerShell
9 90 (4.12%) Go
10 79 (3.61%) C
11 73 (3.34%) Bash
12 42 (1.92%) Kotlin
13 36 (1.65%) Rust
14 32 (1.46%) Swift
15 31 (1.42%) PHP
16 25 (1.14%) Ruby
17 21 (0.96%) Bicep
17 21 (0.96%) MATLAB
18 19 (0.87%) Groovy
19 16 (0.73%) Embedded C
Qualifications
1 293 (13.40%) Security Cleared
2 246 (11.25%) Degree
3 182 (8.33%) SC Cleared
4 110 (5.03%) Computer Science Degree
5 77 (3.52%) ISTQB
6 63 (2.88%) CISSP
7 60 (2.74%) ITIL Certification
8 59 (2.70%) DV Cleared
9 56 (2.56%) CISM
10 46 (2.10%) AWS Certification
11 37 (1.69%) Master's Degree
12 32 (1.46%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 24 (1.10%) BPSS Clearance
14 22 (1.01%) HNC
15 17 (0.78%) HND
15 17 (0.78%) ISEB
16 16 (0.73%) DBS Check
17 13 (0.59%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
18 12 (0.55%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
19 9 (0.41%) PMI Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 511 (23.38%) QA
2 199 (9.10%) Accessibility
3 69 (3.16%) Data Quality
4 63 (2.88%) NIST
5 59 (2.70%) WCAG
6 52 (2.38%) ISO 22301
7 48 (2.20%) GDPR
8 14 (0.64%) SLA
9 13 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 12 (0.55%) GRC
11 11 (0.50%) Software Quality Assurance
12 9 (0.41%) SOC 2
13 8 (0.37%) COBIT
13 8 (0.37%) MISRA
14 7 (0.32%) JTAG
15 6 (0.27%) PMO
16 5 (0.23%) ISO 9001
16 5 (0.23%) NCSC
17 4 (0.18%) Cyber Essentials
17 4 (0.18%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 298 (13.63%) Docker
2 34 (1.56%) Firmware
3 20 (0.91%) VMware Infrastructure
4 16 (0.73%) Active Directory
4 16 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
5 12 (0.55%) Hyper-V
6 10 (0.46%) Embedded Firmware
6 10 (0.46%) KVM
7 2 (0.091%) ProxySG
7 2 (0.091%) vSphere
8 1 (0.046%) IAG
8 1 (0.046%) Oracle RAC
8 1 (0.046%) Terminal Server
8 1 (0.046%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 313 (14.32%) Kubernetes
2 310 (14.18%) Terraform
3 128 (5.86%) Grafana
4 80 (3.66%) Ansible
5 58 (2.65%) Prometheus
6 27 (1.24%) Argo
7 16 (0.73%) Kibana
8 14 (0.64%) CloudHub
9 11 (0.50%) Puppet
10 9 (0.41%) logstash
10 9 (0.41%) Microsoft Intune
11 8 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
12 7 (0.32%) HP Fortify
13 6 (0.27%) Functional Safety
13 6 (0.27%) vCenter Server
14 5 (0.23%) Packer
15 4 (0.18%) Progress Chef
15 4 (0.18%) SCCM
15 4 (0.18%) SCOM
16 3 (0.14%) SCOrch
Vendors
1 200 (9.15%) Microsoft
2 79 (3.61%) Google
3 61 (2.79%) Databricks
4 57 (2.61%) Oracle
5 51 (2.33%) Salesforce
6 40 (1.83%) ServiceNow
7 35 (1.60%) SAP
8 34 (1.56%) VMware
9 33 (1.51%) Splunk
10 26 (1.19%) Dynatrace
11 21 (0.96%) Pega
12 19 (0.87%) AppDynamics
13 17 (0.78%) MuleSoft
14 16 (0.73%) Atlassian
15 15 (0.69%) Braze
15 15 (0.69%) IBM
16 14 (0.64%) Adobe
16 14 (0.64%) OpenAI
17 13 (0.59%) Red Hat
17 13 (0.59%) SendGrid