We studied bulk viscosity in the modified $f(Q,T)$ gravity theory formalism, where $Q$ represents the non-metricity and $T$ denotes the trace of energy-momentum tensor within a flat Friedmann-Lema^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker metric (FLRW). We consider the effective equation of state, which includes a bulk viscosity term explicitly. We find the exact solutions relating to bulk viscosity by assuming a specific form of $f(Q,T)=alpha Q+beta T$, where $alpha$ and $beta$ are constants. Furthermore, we constrained our model with revised Hubble datasets consisting of 57 data points and newly published Pantheon samples with 1048 points to obtain the best fitting values of the model parameters. Our model is found to be in good agreement with observations. Furthermore, we analysed the cosmological behavior of the density parameter, the equation of state (EoS) parameter ($omega$), and the deceleration parameter ($q$). The universe appears to be evolving from a decelerated to an accelerated phase. The EoS parameter is further found to be in the quintessence phase, indicating that the universe is accelerating. We can deduce that the accumulation of bulk viscosity as effective dark energy is responsible for the current accelerated expansion of the universe.