Quality Assurance Analyst Job Demand: Where the Jobs Are and Where They’re Headed

Yes. But a full answer has three parts: how big the job is, how fast it grows, and how often seats open up.

How big, and how fast

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks software QA analysts and testers as their own group:

• About 187,600 jobs in 2025

• About 198,200 jobs expected by 2035

• 6% growth over ten years, while all jobs together are expected to grow about 3%

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook

That’s about 10,600 new jobs in ten years. So the quality assurance analyst job growth story is steady, not fast. BLS expects developers to grow faster, at 10%.

How it compares to nearby jobs

Not every computer job is growing. Here’s how QA analysts line up against their neighbors:

Source: BLS Employment Projections

QA analysts sit in the middle. They grow slower than developers, but far better than programmers, whose jobs are expected to shrink.

Where openings really come from

BLS expects about 10,700 openings a year for QA analysts. But growth adds only about 1,060 jobs a year. By our math, that means roughly nine in ten openings replace someone who left.

BLS explains that many openings come from replacing workers who move to other jobs or leave the workforce, such as to retire.

What this means for you: You’re not waiting for new roles to appear. You’re competing for seats that open all the time. Turnover is where most of your chances come from.

Why companies keep paying for this job

In 2012, a trading firm called Knight Capital put new software into use. A software error followed. In about 45 minutes, the firm lost $440 million, or roughly $10 million a minute.

A bug in a note-taking app costs a bad review. A bug in a trading system costs a fortune. The more money a system moves, the more a company will pay to check it first.

Ten-year numbers are nice. But you want to know about this month.

CompTIA, a tech industry group, tracks hiring every month. Here’s what it found for September 2026:

Source: CompTIA, October 2026

Postings are up, but jobs slipped. CompTIA says employers are still cautious about hiring. It also reports that tech employment dipped 0.3% in 2025 and is forecast to grow 1.9% in 2026. These are tech numbers, not QA-only numbers, but QA teams hire in the same market.

Now look at who those ads want. In April 2026, tech postings split like this by years of experience:

• 20% asked for 0 to 3 years

• 28% asked for 4 to 7 years

• 17% asked for 8 years or more

If you’re new, that first number is the one to worry about. If you have four or more years, 45% of those ads fit you. Quality assurance analyst demand is steady, but the seats go to people who can show they’ve done the work.

Here’s the part most articles skip. Look at how the same sources counted this job a few years ago, and how they count it now.

Sources: BLS wage survey for May 2022 and May 2025; BLS’s earlier forecast and current forecast; Census survey data

These counts use different methods, so don’t treat the gaps as exact. But they all lean the same way: fewer seats than a few years ago, and a cooler forecast than last year. Openings fell about 24% between the two BLS forecasts, by our math.

Here’s the other side. BLS expects about 198,200 jobs by 2035. In May 2022, its wage survey counted 196,420. So the 6% growth mostly brings the job back to where it stood in 2022.

Pay moved the other way. The average wage rose from $105,750 in May 2022 to $111,490 in May 2025. Fewer seats, but better pay.

Why the dip? We can’t say for sure. Two reasons are possible. Tech hiring slowed, as CompTIA’s 2025 dip shows. And titles may have shifted, so some people who test software are now counted as engineers or developers. Neither is proven.

What we can say: the work of testing isn’t going away, but the exact title “QA analyst” is a smaller target than it used to be. That’s why you should know the title map:

Government job data lists most of these titles as one family of jobs. The right-hand column is plain-language guidance, and it changes from company to company. So search all of them. If you type only “QA analyst,” you’ll miss a lot of openings.

Where you live changes both your options and your pay. Here are five states with lots of QA analyst jobs:

Source: BLS wage survey, May 2025

Job count and pay don’t line up. Texas has the second most jobs, but its median sits near the national middle. Washington has far fewer jobs than Texas, yet pays almost as much as California. So the biggest market isn’t always the best-paying one.

Some other things stand out:

• Virginia has about twice as many QA analysts as you’d expect for its size. No other state is that concentrated.

• The biggest metro areas for these jobs are New York (11,460), Dallas–Fort Worth (8,840), and the Washington, DC area (8,460).

• San Jose pays the most, with a median of $166,530.

• The same job pays about half as much in some states. West Virginia’s median is $62,300, against California’s $128,740.

Now look at how pay spreads across the whole job:

The top of that range is about 2.7 times the bottom. That’s a wide gap for one job. The average ($111,490) sits above the median, which tells you a group of high earners pulls it up. BLS doesn’t say why people land where they do. Our best clue is the skills in the next section.

These numbers include everyone, from new hires to people with 20 years in the job. They are not starting pay.

BLS describes the work in five parts. You create test plans and test scenarios. You spot project risks and suggest ways to cut them. You run manual, automated, and exploratory tests. You report defects. And you tell developers how usable the software feels. Here’s a sample week, to make that real:

This is an example. Real teams differ.

Notice how much of that week is reading, talking, and writing. O*NET, the government’s job database, backs this up. It rates reading, listening, speaking, critical thinking, and writing between 3.8 and 4.0 out of 5. This job is more about words than code.

Then came the tools. O*NET flags these as in demand: Jira, SQL, Selenium, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, Python, Java, AWS, Azure, and Linux. We sorted them by how hard they are to learn:

If you test by hand today, our manual tester job demand guide shows how that side of the work is changing.

What about school? BLS says a bachelor’s degree is typical to start, and it lists no work experience as a must. In real life, about half of working QA analysts (50.3%) hold a bachelor’s, and another 19.2% hold a master’s. That leaves about 28% with less than a bachelor’s, by our sum of the BLS education figures. A degree helps, but it isn’t the only door.

A 2025 survey of about 1,500 QA professionals found that testers who use AI tools were twice as likely to fear being replaced by them. Even so, AI use kept climbing. People are scared, and they’re using it anyway.

Now look at the job ads. In September, employers posted 349,821 jobs that ask for AI skills. That’s up about 282% since May 2024. But only 13,636 postings were for AI or machine learning job titles. In other words, AI isn’t mostly creating new jobs. It’s being added to ordinary ones. Yours is likely one of them.

Here’s what changes. AI is good at drafting test cases from a written requirement. It can also make test data and sum up long logs. That’s the routine work, and some of it shrinks. It’s one reason entry-level bars keep rising.

Here’s what AI is bad at. It doesn’t question the requirement.

Say the requirement reads: “Customers can cancel an order any time before it ships.” AI drafts 20 tests for that. But nobody asked what happens when an order ships in two boxes. An analyst who reads closely, asks that question, and writes it down is doing the part AI skips.

So learn an AI helper, and then practice checking its work against the requirement. That’s a skill you can show in an interview.

Where you start decides your next step.

If you’re completely new to QA, start with how software gets built and how to write a test plan and a clear bug report. JanBask Training’s Manual Testing course covers that in 4 weeks, including the software life cycle, test case design, test plans, and levels of testing. You only need basic computer skills. While you learn, test an app you already use. Write three bugs the way a developer would want to read them.

If you test manually, you need the “step up” skills from the table above. JanBask Training’s QA Software Testing program runs 8 weeks and covers manual testing, Java, Selenium, TestNG, Playwright, API testing, GitHub, and Jenkins, plus a capstone project. Put a few automated tests on GitHub, and add a short note on what each one checks. An interviewer can read that in two minutes.

If you’re already a QA analyst, your options split three ways: go deeper on analysis, lead a team, or write more code. The certificate ladder for testers shows the same split. ISTQB’s Advanced Level has separate tracks for Test Analyst, Test Manager, Technical Test Analyst, and Test Automation Engineering, and you need its Foundation certificate first. A certificate can help a résumé get read. A project you can explain helps more.

Not sure which row is yours? JanBask Training offers free demo classes, and an advisor can match a starting point to your background.

The short version: quality assurance analyst job demand is steady, but the outlook is cooler than it was a year ago, and hiring is picky. The title may shift. The work of checking software will stay. Build the skills, and you’ll be easy to hire under any title.