diff --git a/erpnext/tests/test_text_collation_parity.py b/erpnext/tests/test_text_collation_parity.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..f2d26cfb2c1
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+++ b/erpnext/tests/test_text_collation_parity.py
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+# Copyright (c) 2026, Frappe Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and Contributors
+# License: GNU General Public License v3. See license.txt
+
+import frappe
+
+from erpnext.tests.utils import ERPNextTestSuite
+
+
+def max_of(values):
+	rows = " UNION ALL ".join(f"SELECT {frappe.db.escape(value)} AS v" for value in values)
+	return frappe.db.sql(f"SELECT MAX(v) FROM ({rows}) t")[0][0]
+
+
+class TestTextCollationParity(ERPNextTestSuite):
+	"""Does MAX() over text pick the same value on MariaDB and PostgreSQL?
+
+	The PostgreSQL parity effort wrapped many descriptive text columns in Max() to satisfy strict
+	GROUP BY, on the reasoning that Max() returns the value MariaDB picked arbitrarily. Where the
+	column genuinely varies within its group that reasoning does not hold: Max() over text is a
+	sort, and the two engines sort text by different rules.
+
+	These expectations are MariaDB's (utf8mb4 case-insensitive collation: case folded, punctuation
+	and spaces significant). A failure on the PostgreSQL job means the Max()-over-varying-text
+	sites are a live parity gap, not only a row-coherence one.
+	"""
+
+	def test_case_is_folded_not_byte_ordered(self):
+		self.assertEqual(max_of(["apple", "Banana", "cherry"]), "cherry")
+		self.assertEqual(max_of(["abc", "ABD"]), "ABD")
+
+	def test_punctuation_and_space_are_significant(self):
+		# glibc en_US.UTF-8 ignores punctuation at the primary level and would answer "ITEM-C";
+		# MariaDB compares '-' (0x2D) against 'B' (0x42) and answers "ITEMB"
+		self.assertEqual(max_of(["ITEM-C", "ITEMB"]), "ITEMB")
+		self.assertEqual(max_of(["Stores - TC", "StoresbTC"]), "StoresbTC")