BDD Contract Job Trends

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring BDD skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 368 262 280
Rank change year-on-year -106 +18 -29
Contract jobs citing BDD 344 330 322
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.63% 1.00% 0.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.74% 1.10% 0.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 234 221 202
10th Percentile £306 £363 £359
25th Percentile £400 £413 £420
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £500 £523
Median % change year-on-year -10.00% -4.31% -3.24%
75th Percentile £537 £588 £623
90th Percentile £646 £700 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £438 £475 £450
% change year-on-year -7.89% +5.56% -10.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - £82.50 -
Median hourly rate £45.00 £85.00 -
Median % change year-on-year -47.06% - -
75th Percentile £46.88 £87.50 -
90th Percentile £48.00 - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £46.25 - -

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 46,195 29,974 32,629
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.63% 90.49% 86.03%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,749 18,609 19,667
10th Percentile £325 £294 £308
25th Percentile £425 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -2.78%
75th Percentile £638 £623 £638
90th Percentile £738 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 3,350 1,884 1,294
10th Percentile £13.54 £14.35 £15.00
25th Percentile £17.00 £17.30 £20.03
Median hourly rate £37.50 £25.15 £40.16
Median % change year-on-year +49.11% -37.38% -8.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £43.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £78.75 £65.00 £73.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £37.50 £22.27 £41.50
% change year-on-year +68.43% -46.35% -2.35%

BDD
Job Vacancy Trend

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

BDD job vacancy trend in the UK

BDD
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing BDD.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing BDD

BDD
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing BDD over the 6 months to 10 October 2026.

Daily rate histogram for BDD in the UK

BDD
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing BDD.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing BDD

BDD
Top 15 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing BDD within the UK over the 6 months to 10 October 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
England -96 289 £450 -12.39% 208
UK excluding London -79 168 £438 -7.89% 126
London -66 137 £500 -7.41% 115
Work from Home -63 95 £475 -5.00% 102
North of England -91 69 £450 -13.85% 32
Midlands -5 51 £438 -7.89% 24
West Midlands -6 50 £438 -12.50% 17
Yorkshire -42 31 £438 -17.65% 10
North West -51 25 £441 +4.56% 13
Scotland -19 19 £470 +1.62% 18
North East -43 17 £450 -6.49% 9
South East -75 15 £275 -4.51% 17
South West -31 12 £500 +17.65% 14
Wales -8 5 £425 +13.33% 5
Northern Ireland +6 1 - - 11

BDD
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 32 (9.30%) Confluence
2 4 (1.16%) Apache
2 4 (1.16%) Apache Spark
3 3 (0.87%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (0.87%) CMS
3 3 (0.87%) Headless CMS
3 3 (0.87%) SharePoint
Applications
1 3 (0.87%) Mingle
1 3 (0.87%) Notion
2 2 (0.58%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 12 (3.49%) Dynamics CRM
2 7 (2.03%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.87%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 133 (38.66%) AWS
2 115 (33.43%) Azure
3 95 (27.62%) GitHub
4 47 (13.66%) Azure DevOps
5 45 (13.08%) GitHub Actions
6 34 (9.88%) GCP
7 28 (8.14%) GitHub Copilot
7 28 (8.14%) Serverless
8 19 (5.52%) Amazon S3
9 17 (4.94%) AWS Lambda
10 16 (4.65%) Amazon SQS
11 15 (4.36%) Dynamics 365
12 14 (4.07%) Amazon EC2
13 13 (3.78%) Anthropic Claude
13 13 (3.78%) Power Automate
13 13 (3.78%) Power Platform
14 12 (3.49%) ChatGPT
15 10 (2.91%) Snowflake
16 9 (2.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 9 (2.62%) Azure Functions
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.74%) Internet
2 5 (1.45%) RTP
2 5 (1.45%) Wireshark
3 4 (1.16%) 3GPP
3 4 (1.16%) DNS
4 3 (0.87%) Firewall
5 2 (0.58%) DSL
5 2 (0.58%) HTTP
6 1 (0.29%) BGP
6 1 (0.29%) Intrusion Detection
6 1 (0.29%) Network Security
6 1 (0.29%) SD-WAN
6 1 (0.29%) TCP/IP
6 1 (0.29%) VPN
6 1 (0.29%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 57 (16.57%) MongoDB
2 30 (8.72%) PostgreSQL
3 26 (7.56%) NoSQL
4 21 (6.10%) Relational Database
5 19 (5.52%) SQL Server
6 13 (3.78%) Db2
7 11 (3.20%) Amazon RDS
7 11 (3.20%) Data Lake
8 10 (2.91%) DynamoDB
8 10 (2.91%) Metadata
9 9 (2.62%) MySQL
10 8 (2.33%) Power BI
11 7 (2.03%) Amazon Aurora
11 7 (2.03%) BigQuery
11 7 (2.03%) Data Warehouse
12 5 (1.45%) Couchbase
12 5 (1.45%) Tableau
13 4 (1.16%) Apache Iceberg
13 4 (1.16%) Big Data
13 4 (1.16%) Neo4j
Development Applications
1 144 (41.86%) Cucumber
2 109 (31.69%) Selenium
3 104 (30.23%) Git
4 81 (23.55%) Jenkins
5 70 (20.35%) GitLab
6 64 (18.60%) JUnit
7 51 (14.83%) JIRA
8 49 (14.24%) REST Assured
9 48 (13.95%) Postman
10 35 (10.17%) Gatling
11 31 (9.01%) Cypress.io
11 31 (9.01%) SonarQube
12 30 (8.72%) WebDriver
13 29 (8.43%) Mockito
14 22 (6.40%) Maven
14 22 (6.40%) SpecFlow
15 14 (4.07%) JMeter
16 13 (3.78%) Gradle
17 10 (2.91%) Serenity BDD
17 10 (2.91%) TeamCity
General
1 134 (38.95%) Social Skills
2 79 (22.97%) Finance
3 67 (19.48%) Public Sector
4 61 (17.73%) Analytical Skills
5 50 (14.53%) Banking
6 21 (6.10%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 14 (4.07%) Front Office
8 8 (2.33%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.33%) Military
9 7 (2.03%) Retail
10 4 (1.16%) Marketing
10 4 (1.16%) Organisational Skills
11 3 (0.87%) Aviation
11 3 (0.87%) Fire and Rescue
11 3 (0.87%) Legal Technology
11 3 (0.87%) Local Government
11 3 (0.87%) Police
11 3 (0.87%) Presentation Skills
12 2 (0.58%) Law
13 1 (0.29%) Legal
Job Titles
1 92 (26.74%) Developer
2 77 (22.38%) Senior
3 57 (16.57%) Test Engineer
4 51 (14.83%) Java Developer
5 34 (9.88%) Software Engineer
6 30 (8.72%) Lead
6 30 (8.72%) Test Automation Engineer
7 28 (8.14%) Senior Developer
8 23 (6.69%) Analyst
8 23 (6.69%) Java Engineer
8 23 (6.69%) Quality Engineer
9 19 (5.52%) QA Engineer
10 15 (4.36%) Senior Java Developer
11 14 (4.07%) Automation Engineer
11 14 (4.07%) Senior Test Engineer
11 14 (4.07%) Test Leader
12 13 (3.78%) Test Analyst
13 12 (3.49%) Senior Software Engineer
14 11 (3.20%) Architect
14 11 (3.20%) Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (24.13%) Playwright
2 74 (21.51%) Spring
3 68 (19.77%) REST
4 63 (18.31%) Gherkin
5 61 (17.73%) Spring Boot
6 58 (16.86%) Kafka
7 46 (13.37%) RESTful
8 32 (9.30%) .NET
8 32 (9.30%) React
9 30 (8.72%) WireMock
10 28 (8.14%) Terraform
11 26 (7.56%) Node.js
12 22 (6.40%) AngularJS
13 21 (6.10%) HTML
14 18 (5.23%) ActiveMQ
14 18 (5.23%) pytest
14 18 (5.23%) SOAP
15 17 (4.94%) RabbitMQ
16 15 (4.36%) Swagger
17 14 (4.07%) OpenAPI
Miscellaneous
1 37 (10.76%) Product Ownership
2 32 (9.30%) Cloud Native
3 27 (7.85%) Distributed Systems
4 21 (6.10%) Enterprise Software
5 14 (4.07%) Legacy Systems
6 13 (3.78%) Onboarding
7 12 (3.49%) Equity Derivative
8 9 (2.62%) AI Agents
8 9 (2.62%) Self-Motivation
9 8 (2.33%) Derivative
9 8 (2.33%) Management Information System
10 7 (2.03%) Virtual Team
11 5 (1.45%) Distributed Architecture
11 5 (1.45%) NHS
11 5 (1.45%) Taxonomies
12 4 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
12 4 (1.16%) SWIFT Messaging Network
13 3 (0.87%) Analytical Mindset
13 3 (0.87%) Legacy Applications
13 3 (0.87%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 41 (11.92%) Linux
2 23 (6.69%) Unix
3 5 (1.45%) Android
3 5 (1.45%) Apple iOS
3 5 (1.45%) Mac OS X
4 3 (0.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 3 (0.87%) Windows
5 2 (0.58%) AIX
5 2 (0.58%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 246 (71.51%) Agile
2 245 (71.22%) CI/CD
3 224 (65.12%) TDD
4 223 (64.83%) Test Automation
5 129 (37.50%) Microservices
6 123 (35.76%) DevOps
7 92 (26.74%) Scrum
8 78 (22.67%) Problem-Solving
9 75 (21.80%) AI
9 75 (21.80%) Software Engineering
10 73 (21.22%) Continuous Improvement
10 73 (21.22%) Software Testing
11 71 (20.64%) API Testing
12 69 (20.06%) Test Strategy
13 63 (18.31%) Stakeholder Management
14 49 (14.24%) SDLC
15 48 (13.95%) Integration Testing
16 46 (13.37%) Coaching
17 45 (13.08%) Continuous Integration
18 42 (12.21%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 213 (61.92%) Java
2 87 (25.29%) Python
3 85 (24.71%) SQL
4 79 (22.97%) JavaScript
5 63 (18.31%) C#
6 44 (12.79%) TypeScript
7 15 (4.36%) Bash
8 13 (3.78%) Ruby
9 8 (2.33%) C++
10 7 (2.03%) Apex Code
10 7 (2.03%) Groovy
10 7 (2.03%) Scala
11 6 (1.74%) R
12 5 (1.45%) Kotlin
13 4 (1.16%) Go
13 4 (1.16%) Perl
14 3 (0.87%) Bicep
14 3 (0.87%) Shell Script
14 3 (0.87%) T-SQL
15 2 (0.58%) PromQL
Qualifications
1 88 (25.58%) Security Cleared
2 72 (20.93%) SC Cleared
3 32 (9.30%) BPSS Clearance
4 25 (7.27%) Degree
5 22 (6.40%) ISTQB
6 19 (5.52%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (3.78%) DV Cleared
8 9 (2.62%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 8 (2.33%) Microsoft Certification
10 6 (1.74%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 5 (1.45%) AWS Certification
12 3 (0.87%) CSPO
13 2 (0.58%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
13 2 (0.58%) Azure Certification
13 2 (0.58%) ISEB
13 2 (0.58%) Master's Degree
14 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 96 (27.91%) QA
2 75 (21.80%) Accessibility
3 47 (13.66%) WCAG
4 16 (4.65%) GDPR
5 15 (4.36%) Data Quality
6 3 (0.87%) ISO 20022
7 2 (0.58%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 2 (0.58%) SEPA
7 2 (0.58%) SOC 2
8 1 (0.29%) EMIR
8 1 (0.29%) ISO 15022
8 1 (0.29%) MiFID
8 1 (0.29%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 96 (27.91%) Docker
2 3 (0.87%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 84 (24.42%) Kubernetes
2 19 (5.52%) Grafana
3 13 (3.78%) Prometheus
4 6 (1.74%) Ansible
5 5 (1.45%) Kibana
6 3 (0.87%) Istio
7 2 (0.58%) Argo
7 2 (0.58%) Consul
7 2 (0.58%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.29%) Control-M
8 1 (0.29%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 34 (9.88%) Microsoft
2 17 (4.94%) Databricks
2 17 (4.94%) Oracle
3 16 (4.65%) Salesforce
4 15 (4.36%) IBM
5 14 (4.07%) Sybase
6 12 (3.49%) Google
7 8 (2.33%) Conga
7 8 (2.33%) GoCardless
8 6 (1.74%) OpenAI
9 5 (1.45%) Atlassian
9 5 (1.45%) Splunk
10 4 (1.16%) CA Agile Central
10 4 (1.16%) ION Trading
10 4 (1.16%) Jaspersoft
11 3 (0.87%) Guidewire
11 3 (0.87%) OutSystems
12 2 (0.58%) FactSet
12 2 (0.58%) HP
12 2 (0.58%) OneLogin