QA Engineer salary
What a qa engineer actually earns, from 795 live job postings blended with the official US OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) wage anchor. Pick a market for its median and range, then read the seniority split, the trend, and the country comparison below. Updated 2026-09-06.
Switch the market above to see qa engineer pay in the 5 countries our sources cover, each with its own cost of living. The trend, seniority, and state detail below are United States data, where the official record runs deepest.
What the number means
Quality-assurance engineering posts a blended US median near 111,000 dollars, and the number is quietly rising as the role shifts from manual testing to automation and tooling. That shift is also the risk: the manual-testing floor is exactly what automated tooling and AI absorb first, while the automation-engineering ceiling holds and climbs. The spread between the two is wide and widening. If you are in quality assurance, the pay advice and the job-security advice are the same one: move from running tests to writing the systems that run them.
Open qa engineer roles
Live openings tagged to this occupation, from company career pages and remote boards. Apply at the source.
Senior GTM Systems AI and Automation Engineer at CamundaRemote1d agoApply
Staff QA Engineer (Power BI & Microsoft Fabric) at Growth Acceleration PartnersColombia; United States · Remote1d agoApply- Quality Engineer at Pilatus Flugzeugwerke AGEmmen, Luzern, Switzerland1d agoApply
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at M3 USAPhilippines · Remote1d agoApply
Automation Engineer - PLC / Plant Control (m/f/d) at METYCLECologne (GER)2d agoApply- QA Automation Engineer at TCITChile$12k–$17k2d agoApply
By seniority
Posted-median pay by seniority signal in the title, from our corpus. Noisy at the edges where sample sizes are small.
By country
- Canada$65,288$75,806$86,978
- United States$89,682$112,217$144,642
- United Kingdom$57,986$70,265$81,862
- France$47,157$53,435$58,399
- India$12,005$15,137$19,834
Switzerland · official wage bands
median CHF 9'949/month
Swiss postings do not state pay, so these are not posted salaries: they are the federal wage survey (Lohnstrukturerhebung 2024) for the ISCO group 25 Spezialisten in der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie: standardized gross monthly, full-time, 13th salary included pro rata. The band covers the whole occupation group, which is coarser than this occupation alone.
Annual ≈ CHF 119'388 at the median. Source: Bundesamt für Statistik, LSE 2024.
Top-paying US states
OEWS median by state, highest first.
- California$145,843
- Washington$128,270
- Virginia$123,270
- Maryland$122,310
- Colorado$114,600
- New Jersey$111,790
Roles that pay more, that these skills already reach
Median pay from each destination’s own postings, with the readiness a qa engineer profile already covers.
- 600 open software engineer roles$185,617 median · +$73,400 · 25% readiness
- 600 open data engineer roles$147,787 median · +$35,570 · 13% readiness
- 600 open backend developer roles$130,255 median · +$18,038 · 22% readiness
- 23 open robotics engineer roles$128,468 median · +$16,251 · 31% readiness
Every measured move out of this role, ranked by readiness: alternative careers for a qa engineer.
Is your offer fair?
Run a specific number through FairElephant, which weighs it against this data, your location, and remote market rates.
Related salaries
- Software Engineer salary$185,617 median
- Backend Developer salary$130,255 median
- Data Engineer salary$147,787 median
Quick answers
How much do QA engineers make?
The blended US median is about 111,000 dollars, with a wide gap between manual testing at the floor and automation engineering above.
Is QA a dying field?
Manual testing is shrinking under automation and AI; automation and quality-engineering roles are growing and pay more.
How does a QA engineer earn more?
By moving from manual testing into test automation and tooling, which is also the more secure side of the role.
Method: bands are the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of live US postings with stated pay, shrunk toward the official OEWS anchor by sample size (the “blended” figure). Trend is the OEWS annual median for SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) code 15-1253. Unemployment is the 2025 BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) CPS (Current Population Survey) annual-average rate for “Software quality assurance analysts and testers.” Live corpus 795 observations, 2026-09-06. Definitions in the glossary.