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 21 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 353 290 281
Rank change year-on-year -63 -9 -96
Contract jobs citing BDD 300 254 343
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.62% 0.87% 0.81%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.74% 0.96% 0.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 166 161 261
10th Percentile £350 £363 £350
25th Percentile £400 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £473 £500 £533
Median % change year-on-year -5.50% -6.19% -11.17%
75th Percentile £550 £610 £638
90th Percentile £681 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -2.11% -9.52% +5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £46.25 - -
Median hourly rate £47.50 - £56.25
75th Percentile £48.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 - £56.25
% change year-on-year - - -22.41%

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 40,694 26,498 36,630
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.34% 91.04% 86.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,533 17,004 23,615
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £495 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.21% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,389 1,106 2,441
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.35 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.91 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.50 £28.00 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +51.79% -23.29% +1.39%
75th Percentile £67.50 £59.98 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +78.93% -33.82% +8.57%

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 21 May 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 16 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 21 May 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 -59 252 £475 -7.97% 73
UK excluding London -34 179 £465 -2.11% 58
London -73 100 £488 -13.26% 22
Work from Home -47 86 £435 -12.95% 61
North of England -33 83 £450 -2.17% 19
North West -8 43 £431 +4.61% 11
Midlands -32 38 £425 -7.61% 10
West Midlands -32 37 £425 -7.86% 4
Yorkshire -47 31 £620 +19.29% 5
Scotland +9 23 £438 +12.90% 1
South West -26 16 £525 - 5
North East -18 13 £426 +9.10% 4
South East -63 12 £358 -28.40% 17
East of England -17 8 £510 - 2
Northern Ireland - 2 - - 1
Wales -10 1 £650 - 3

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 37 (12.33%) Confluence
2 3 (1.00%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 3 (1.00%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.67%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.33%) Camunda
4 1 (0.33%) nginx
4 1 (0.33%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.33%) Tomcat
Applications
1 2 (0.67%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (0.67%) Notion
2 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.33%) Mingle
2 1 (0.33%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (2.67%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (1.00%) Findur
3 2 (0.67%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.67%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.33%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 108 (36.00%) AWS
2 85 (28.33%) Azure
3 70 (23.33%) GitHub
4 44 (14.67%) GCP
5 33 (11.00%) Azure DevOps
6 30 (10.00%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (8.33%) Serverless
8 22 (7.33%) Amazon S3
9 21 (7.00%) Amazon SQS
10 20 (6.67%) Amazon EC2
11 19 (6.33%) AWS Lambda
12 17 (5.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 14 (4.67%) BrowserStack
14 12 (4.00%) AWS KMS
14 12 (4.00%) Route 53
15 10 (3.33%) SaaS
16 9 (3.00%) ChatGPT
17 8 (2.67%) GitHub Copilot
18 7 (2.33%) Anthropic Claude
18 7 (2.33%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.67%) 3GPP
1 5 (1.67%) RTP
1 5 (1.67%) Wireshark
2 3 (1.00%) WAN
3 2 (0.67%) NaaS
4 1 (0.33%) DSL
4 1 (0.33%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (0.33%) Firewall
4 1 (0.33%) HTTP
4 1 (0.33%) iSCSI
4 1 (0.33%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 45 (15.00%) PostgreSQL
2 41 (13.67%) MongoDB
3 20 (6.67%) Relational Database
4 18 (6.00%) DynamoDB
4 18 (6.00%) SQL Server
5 16 (5.33%) Amazon Aurora
5 16 (5.33%) Amazon RDS
6 15 (5.00%) MySQL
7 10 (3.33%) DB2
7 10 (3.33%) Oracle Database
8 9 (3.00%) Metadata
9 7 (2.33%) Data Lake
9 7 (2.33%) NoSQL
10 4 (1.33%) Power BI
11 3 (1.00%) Amazon Athena
11 3 (1.00%) Delta Lake
11 3 (1.00%) MariaDB
12 2 (0.67%) Elasticsearch
12 2 (0.67%) InfluxDB
12 2 (0.67%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 102 (34.00%) Cucumber
2 84 (28.00%) Jenkins
3 83 (27.67%) Selenium
4 82 (27.33%) Git
5 61 (20.33%) JIRA
6 60 (20.00%) GitLab
7 56 (18.67%) JUnit
8 41 (13.67%) Postman
8 41 (13.67%) REST Assured
9 33 (11.00%) Mockito
10 31 (10.33%) SonarQube
10 31 (10.33%) WebDriver
11 25 (8.33%) JMeter
12 18 (6.00%) Maven
13 14 (4.67%) Cypress.io
13 14 (4.67%) SpecFlow
13 14 (4.67%) TeamCity
14 13 (4.33%) Gatling
15 12 (4.00%) DbUnit
15 12 (4.00%) Serenity BDD
General
1 78 (26.00%) Social Skills
2 67 (22.33%) Finance
3 58 (19.33%) Public Sector
4 40 (13.33%) Analytical Skills
5 30 (10.00%) Banking
6 8 (2.67%) Front Office
6 8 (2.67%) Organisational Skills
7 7 (2.33%) Investment Banking
8 4 (1.33%) Aviation
8 4 (1.33%) Fire and Rescue
8 4 (1.33%) Influencing Skills
8 4 (1.33%) Police
8 4 (1.33%) Presentation Skills
9 3 (1.00%) Billing
9 3 (1.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 3 (1.00%) Military
9 3 (1.00%) Retail
10 2 (0.67%) Automotive
10 2 (0.67%) Manufacturing
10 2 (0.67%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 96 (32.00%) Developer
2 63 (21.00%) Java Developer
3 55 (18.33%) Test Engineer
4 49 (16.33%) Senior
5 44 (14.67%) Lead
6 31 (10.33%) Test Automation Engineer
7 30 (10.00%) Software Engineer
8 22 (7.33%) Tester
9 19 (6.33%) Senior Developer
9 19 (6.33%) Test Leader
10 18 (6.00%) Automation Tester
10 18 (6.00%) Senior Java Developer
11 15 (5.00%) Automation Test Lead
12 14 (4.67%) Java Engineer
13 13 (4.33%) Analyst
13 13 (4.33%) Lead Test Engineer
14 12 (4.00%) QA Engineer
15 10 (3.33%) Business Analyst
15 10 (3.33%) Senior Automation Tester
15 10 (3.33%) Senior Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (28.00%) Spring
2 67 (22.33%) Spring Boot
3 55 (18.33%) REST
4 52 (17.33%) Playwright
5 43 (14.33%) RESTful
6 42 (14.00%) Gherkin
7 39 (13.00%) Kafka
8 32 (10.67%) AngularJS
9 30 (10.00%) .NET
10 26 (8.67%) React
11 25 (8.33%) Node.js
12 22 (7.33%) ActiveMQ
12 22 (7.33%) Spring Cloud
13 21 (7.00%) WireMock
14 18 (6.00%) Web Services
15 17 (5.67%) SOAP
16 16 (5.33%) Hibernate
16 16 (5.33%) JPA
17 14 (4.67%) Spring Batch
18 13 (4.33%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 32 (10.67%) Distributed Systems
2 29 (9.67%) Cloud Native
3 25 (8.33%) Product Ownership
4 14 (4.67%) Distributed Architecture
5 11 (3.67%) Enterprise Software
5 11 (3.67%) Mobile App
6 9 (3.00%) Equity Derivative
7 8 (2.67%) Derivative
8 4 (1.33%) Distributed Applications
8 4 (1.33%) Legacy Systems
8 4 (1.33%) Onboarding
8 4 (1.33%) Public Cloud
8 4 (1.33%) Robotics
8 4 (1.33%) Self-Motivation
9 2 (0.67%) Data Protection Act
9 2 (0.67%) Hybrid Cloud
9 2 (0.67%) iSeries
9 2 (0.67%) Private Cloud
9 2 (0.67%) Synthetic Data
9 2 (0.67%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 43 (14.33%) Linux
2 16 (5.33%) Unix
3 10 (3.33%) Mac OS X
4 5 (1.67%) Android
4 5 (1.67%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.67%) Mac OS
5 2 (0.67%) VMS
5 2 (0.67%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 184 (61.33%) TDD
2 180 (60.00%) Test Automation
3 173 (57.67%) CI/CD
4 171 (57.00%) Agile
5 119 (39.67%) Microservices
6 106 (35.33%) DevOps
7 64 (21.33%) API Testing
7 64 (21.33%) Test Strategy
8 60 (20.00%) Continuous Improvement
8 60 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
9 57 (19.00%) Scrum
10 50 (16.67%) Software Engineering
11 41 (13.67%) AI
12 39 (13.00%) Mentoring
13 38 (12.67%) Containerisation
13 38 (12.67%) Observability
14 37 (12.33%) SDLC
15 32 (10.67%) Continuous Integration
16 31 (10.33%) Performance Testing
17 30 (10.00%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 189 (63.00%) Java
2 82 (27.33%) SQL
3 70 (23.33%) Python
4 51 (17.00%) JavaScript
5 41 (13.67%) C#
6 27 (9.00%) TypeScript
7 13 (4.33%) C++
8 11 (3.67%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.33%) Apex Code
9 7 (2.33%) PHP
9 7 (2.33%) Ruby
10 5 (1.67%) Go
10 5 (1.67%) T-SQL
11 4 (1.33%) Perl
12 3 (1.00%) Groovy
13 2 (0.67%) Bash
13 2 (0.67%) PromQL
13 2 (0.67%) Scala
13 2 (0.67%) VBA
14 1 (0.33%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 72 (24.00%) Security Cleared
2 61 (20.33%) SC Cleared
3 22 (7.33%) Degree
4 13 (4.33%) Computer Science Degree
5 11 (3.67%) BPSS Clearance
6 9 (3.00%) ISTQB
7 6 (2.00%) AWS Certification
8 5 (1.67%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 3 (1.00%) DV Cleared
11 1 (0.33%) ISEB
11 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 62 (20.67%) QA
2 30 (10.00%) Accessibility
3 10 (3.33%) Data Quality
4 6 (2.00%) WCAG
5 1 (0.33%) HL7
5 1 (0.33%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 84 (28.00%) Docker
2 9 (3.00%) Postfix
3 1 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 64 (21.33%) Kubernetes
2 42 (14.00%) Grafana
3 35 (11.67%) Prometheus
4 21 (7.00%) Terraform
5 6 (2.00%) Ansible
6 3 (1.00%) Kibana
7 2 (0.67%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.67%) Consul
7 2 (0.67%) HP Fortify
7 2 (0.67%) Istio
7 2 (0.67%) Rancher
7 2 (0.67%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.67%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.33%) EMC VPLEX
8 1 (0.33%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.33%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 22 (7.33%) Oracle
2 15 (5.00%) Atlassian
2 15 (5.00%) Salesforce
3 12 (4.00%) Google
4 11 (3.67%) Jaspersoft
4 11 (3.67%) Splunk
4 11 (3.67%) Sybase
5 10 (3.33%) ServiceNow
6 8 (2.67%) Checkmarx
6 8 (2.67%) Conga
6 8 (2.67%) GoCardless
6 8 (2.67%) IBM
7 7 (2.33%) Databricks
8 5 (1.67%) Dynatrace
9 4 (1.33%) Veracode
10 3 (1.00%) Adobe
10 3 (1.00%) Microsoft
10 3 (1.00%) OpenLink
11 2 (0.67%) Bloomberg
11 2 (0.67%) SAP