BDD Contract Job Trends in England

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring BDD skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 26 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 376 301 246
Rank change year-on-year -75 -55 +21
Contract jobs citing BDD 270 226 316
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.59% 0.82% 0.95%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.70% 0.90% 1.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 169 161 231
10th Percentile £305 £360 £363
25th Percentile £400 £413 £434
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £515 £540
Median % change year-on-year -10.19% -4.63% -10.00%
75th Percentile £538 £643 £650
90th Percentile £690 £750 £750
UK median daily rate £463 £500 £534
% change year-on-year -7.50% -6.37% -7.13%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 0 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate £45.00 - £56.25
75th Percentile £46.88 - -
90th Percentile £48.00 - -
UK median hourly rate £45.00 £85.00 £56.25
% change year-on-year -47.06% +51.11% -25.00%

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

BDD falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 38,747 25,016 28,488
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 84.82% 90.80% 85.76%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,944 15,923 18,325
10th Percentile £325 £300 £313
25th Percentile £425 £404 £423
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £630 £626 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £753
UK median daily rate £525 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,579 1,477 1,517
10th Percentile £14.25 £14.23 £14.05
25th Percentile £18.80 £17.87 £18.13
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +1.18%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.05 £69.79 £75.00
UK median hourly rate £41.06 £25.15 £40.50
% change year-on-year +63.26% -37.90% -4.71%

BDD
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing BDD relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

BDD job vacancy trend in England

BDD
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing BDD.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing BDD

BDD
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing BDD in England over the 6 months to 26 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for BDD in England

BDD
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing BDD.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing BDD

BDD
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing BDD within the England region over the 6 months to 26 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -78 110 £500 -14.89% 74
North of England -53 74 £450 -13.42% 23
Midlands -19 45 £425 -11.69% 10
West Midlands -25 44 £425 -15.00% 8
North West -40 34 £438 +3.67% 11
Yorkshire -38 24 £550 +4.76% 7
North East -28 20 £450 -2.17% 5
South East -77 17 £275 -12.42% 17
South West -43 14 £525 +27.27% 8
East of England -18 8 £510 +36.00% 6
BDD
UK

BDD
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 28 (10.37%) Confluence
2 3 (1.11%) CMS
2 3 (1.11%) Headless CMS
2 3 (1.11%) SharePoint
3 2 (0.74%) Apache Spark
4 1 (0.37%) Apache
4 1 (0.37%) Camunda
Applications
1 3 (1.11%) Notion
2 2 (0.74%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.37%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 9 (3.33%) Dynamics CRM
2 8 (2.96%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (1.11%) Findur
3 3 (1.11%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 88 (32.59%) Azure
2 87 (32.22%) AWS
3 69 (25.56%) GitHub
4 43 (15.93%) Azure DevOps
5 35 (12.96%) GitHub Actions
6 31 (11.48%) GCP
7 21 (7.78%) Serverless
8 16 (5.93%) Amazon SQS
9 13 (4.81%) Amazon EC2
9 13 (4.81%) Amazon S3
10 12 (4.44%) AWS Lambda
11 11 (4.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 10 (3.70%) GitHub Copilot
12 10 (3.70%) Power Automate
13 9 (3.33%) Dynamics 365
14 7 (2.59%) AWS KMS
14 7 (2.59%) Route 53
15 6 (2.22%) Azure Functions
15 6 (2.22%) OpenShift
16 5 (1.85%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.59%) RTP
1 7 (2.59%) Wireshark
2 6 (2.22%) 3GPP
3 3 (1.11%) DSL
3 3 (1.11%) Internet
4 2 (0.74%) Firewall
4 2 (0.74%) HTTP
4 2 (0.74%) NaaS
4 2 (0.74%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 38 (14.07%) MongoDB
2 31 (11.48%) PostgreSQL
3 15 (5.56%) SQL Server
4 14 (5.19%) NoSQL
5 13 (4.81%) DynamoDB
6 11 (4.07%) Amazon RDS
7 7 (2.59%) Amazon Aurora
8 6 (2.22%) Relational Database
9 5 (1.85%) Couchbase
10 3 (1.11%) Amazon Athena
10 3 (1.11%) Apache Iceberg
10 3 (1.11%) BigQuery
10 3 (1.11%) Data Warehouse
10 3 (1.11%) Flink
10 3 (1.11%) MySQL
11 2 (0.74%) Data Lake
11 2 (0.74%) InfluxDB
11 2 (0.74%) Power BI
11 2 (0.74%) Snowflake Schema
11 2 (0.74%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 100 (37.04%) Cucumber
2 86 (31.85%) Git
3 78 (28.89%) Selenium
4 61 (22.59%) JUnit
5 60 (22.22%) Jenkins
6 51 (18.89%) GitLab
7 43 (15.93%) JIRA
8 37 (13.70%) REST Assured
9 35 (12.96%) Postman
10 34 (12.59%) WebDriver
11 27 (10.00%) SonarQube
12 26 (9.63%) Mockito
13 21 (7.78%) Cypress.io
13 21 (7.78%) Gatling
14 17 (6.30%) SpecFlow
15 16 (5.93%) JMeter
16 14 (5.19%) Maven
16 14 (5.19%) TeamCity
17 8 (2.96%) Bitbucket
17 8 (2.96%) IntelliJ
General
1 86 (31.85%) Social Skills
2 55 (20.37%) Finance
3 50 (18.52%) Public Sector
4 41 (15.19%) Analytical Skills
5 31 (11.48%) Banking
6 11 (4.07%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 7 (2.59%) Retail
8 5 (1.85%) Aviation
8 5 (1.85%) Fire and Rescue
8 5 (1.85%) Military
8 5 (1.85%) Organisational Skills
8 5 (1.85%) Police
9 4 (1.48%) Front Office
10 3 (1.11%) Automotive
10 3 (1.11%) Billing
10 3 (1.11%) Influencing Skills
10 3 (1.11%) Legal Technology
11 2 (0.74%) Investment Banking
11 2 (0.74%) Law
11 2 (0.74%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 70 (25.93%) Developer
2 60 (22.22%) Senior
3 50 (18.52%) Java Developer
3 50 (18.52%) Test Engineer
4 31 (11.48%) Test Automation Engineer
5 29 (10.74%) Software Engineer
6 27 (10.00%) Lead
7 20 (7.41%) Senior Developer
8 17 (6.30%) Analyst
8 17 (6.30%) Java Engineer
8 17 (6.30%) Senior Java Developer
8 17 (6.30%) Tester
9 15 (5.56%) Test Leader
10 13 (4.81%) Automation Tester
11 12 (4.44%) QA Engineer
11 12 (4.44%) Quality Engineer
12 10 (3.70%) Automation Engineer
12 10 (3.70%) Test Analyst
13 9 (3.33%) Architect
13 9 (3.33%) Senior Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 62 (22.96%) Spring
2 57 (21.11%) Playwright
3 54 (20.00%) REST
4 49 (18.15%) Kafka
5 47 (17.41%) Spring Boot
6 45 (16.67%) Gherkin
7 29 (10.74%) RESTful
8 27 (10.00%) .NET
9 25 (9.26%) WireMock
10 22 (8.15%) AngularJS
10 22 (8.15%) Node.js
10 22 (8.15%) Terraform
11 21 (7.78%) React
12 18 (6.67%) ActiveMQ
13 17 (6.30%) SOAP
14 15 (5.56%) JSON
15 13 (4.81%) HTML
16 12 (4.44%) Swagger
16 12 (4.44%) XML
17 11 (4.07%) pytest
Miscellaneous
1 34 (12.59%) Distributed Systems
2 26 (9.63%) Product Ownership
3 25 (9.26%) Cloud Native
4 18 (6.67%) Enterprise Software
5 12 (4.44%) Legacy Systems
6 10 (3.70%) Distributed Architecture
7 6 (2.22%) Management Information System
7 6 (2.22%) Onboarding
7 6 (2.22%) Virtual Team
8 5 (1.85%) Mobile App
8 5 (1.85%) Robotics
8 5 (1.85%) Self-Motivation
8 5 (1.85%) Taxonomies
9 4 (1.48%) NHS
9 4 (1.48%) SWIFT Messaging Network
10 3 (1.11%) AI Agents
10 3 (1.11%) Data Protection Act
11 2 (0.74%) Distributed Applications
11 2 (0.74%) Linux Command Line
11 2 (0.74%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 38 (14.07%) Linux
2 18 (6.67%) Unix
3 6 (2.22%) Android
3 6 (2.22%) Apple iOS
4 5 (1.85%) Mac OS X
5 4 (1.48%) Windows
6 2 (0.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.74%) VMS
7 1 (0.37%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 188 (69.63%) Agile
2 173 (64.07%) TDD
3 169 (62.59%) CI/CD
4 166 (61.48%) Test Automation
5 100 (37.04%) Microservices
6 99 (36.67%) DevOps
7 66 (24.44%) Continuous Improvement
8 61 (22.59%) Scrum
9 60 (22.22%) Test Strategy
10 55 (20.37%) Problem-Solving
11 54 (20.00%) API Testing
12 53 (19.63%) AI
13 49 (18.15%) Software Engineering
14 41 (15.19%) Stakeholder Management
15 38 (14.07%) Mentoring
16 37 (13.70%) Continuous Integration
16 37 (13.70%) Software Testing
17 34 (12.59%) SDLC
18 33 (12.22%) End-to-End Testing
19 32 (11.85%) Coaching
Programming Languages
1 158 (58.52%) Java
2 70 (25.93%) SQL
3 56 (20.74%) Python
4 46 (17.04%) JavaScript
5 44 (16.30%) C#
6 25 (9.26%) TypeScript
7 7 (2.59%) Groovy
8 6 (2.22%) Apex Code
8 6 (2.22%) Kotlin
8 6 (2.22%) R
9 5 (1.85%) Bash
9 5 (1.85%) Ruby
10 4 (1.48%) Go
11 3 (1.11%) C++
11 3 (1.11%) Scala
11 3 (1.11%) T-SQL
12 2 (0.74%) Bicep
12 2 (0.74%) Cypher
12 2 (0.74%) PromQL
12 2 (0.74%) SHACL
Qualifications
1 64 (23.70%) Security Cleared
2 49 (18.15%) SC Cleared
3 16 (5.93%) Degree
4 15 (5.56%) BPSS Clearance
4 15 (5.56%) ISTQB
5 11 (4.07%) Computer Science Degree
6 9 (3.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 6 (2.22%) Microsoft Certification
8 5 (1.85%) DV Cleared
9 3 (1.11%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.74%) AWS Certification
10 2 (0.74%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.74%) ISEB
11 1 (0.37%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 69 (25.56%) QA
2 41 (15.19%) Accessibility
3 29 (10.74%) WCAG
4 11 (4.07%) GDPR
5 3 (1.11%) ISO 20022
6 2 (0.74%) Data Quality
7 1 (0.37%) ISO 15022
7 1 (0.37%) SEPA
7 1 (0.37%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 71 (26.30%) Docker
2 5 (1.85%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 55 (20.37%) Kubernetes
2 25 (9.26%) Grafana
3 20 (7.41%) Prometheus
4 7 (2.59%) Ansible
5 4 (1.48%) Kibana
6 3 (1.11%) Istio
7 2 (0.74%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.74%) Argo
7 2 (0.74%) Consul
7 2 (0.74%) Rancher
7 2 (0.74%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.37%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 24 (8.89%) Microsoft
2 16 (5.93%) Salesforce
3 11 (4.07%) Google
4 8 (2.96%) Checkmarx
4 8 (2.96%) Oracle
5 7 (2.59%) Atlassian
5 7 (2.59%) Conga
5 7 (2.59%) GoCardless
6 6 (2.22%) Databricks
6 6 (2.22%) Jaspersoft
7 5 (1.85%) Dynatrace
7 5 (1.85%) IBM
8 3 (1.11%) Guidewire
8 3 (1.11%) OpenAI
8 3 (1.11%) OpenLink
8 3 (1.11%) ServiceNow
8 3 (1.11%) Splunk
9 2 (0.74%) CA Agile Central
9 2 (0.74%) FactSet
9 2 (0.74%) Solace