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 30 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 345 295 267
Rank change year-on-year -50 -28 -34
Contract jobs citing BDD 350 277 358
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.66% 0.84% 0.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.78% 0.93% 1.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 207 183 253
10th Percentile £313 £351 £363
25th Percentile £400 £411 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -6.54% -8.94%
75th Percentile £544 £591 £650
90th Percentile £680 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £425 £500
% change year-on-year +5.88% -15.00% -0.99%
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 excluding London median hourly rate £46.25 - £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 45,002 29,684 34,056
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.96% 90.46% 85.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,855 18,648 21,888
10th Percentile £325 £300 £308
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,714 1,621 1,980
10th Percentile £14.64 £14.20 £13.69
25th Percentile £19.89 £17.33 £17.74
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.00
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.13% -5.88%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £63.75
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.75 £74.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.57 £40.33
% change year-on-year +86.55% -41.56% -

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 30 July 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 30 July 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 -45 294 £459 -9.56% 87
UK excluding London -6 204 £450 +5.88% 58
London -71 113 £488 -17.37% 33
Work from Home -27 111 £475 -5.00% 49
North of England -23 82 £453 +3.54% 20
Midlands -17 55 £425 -7.86% 17
West Midlands -23 54 £425 -8.11% 10
North West -24 41 £475 +15.85% 13
Scotland -7 25 £465 +7.83% 1
Yorkshire -36 25 £660 +26.98% 3
North East -32 20 £450 +7.14% 5
South East -75 20 £323 -7.86% 16
South West -34 15 £525 +27.27% 3
East of England -8 8 £510 - 4
Wales -14 2 £650 -
Northern Ireland - 1 - -

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 52 (14.86%) Confluence
2 5 (1.43%) Apache Spark
3 4 (1.14%) Apache
3 4 (1.14%) SharePoint
4 3 (0.86%) Apache Airflow
4 3 (0.86%) CMS
4 3 (0.86%) Headless CMS
5 1 (0.29%) Camunda
Applications
1 3 (0.86%) Notion
2 2 (0.57%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.29%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.29%) Mingle
3 1 (0.29%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (2.29%) Dynamics CRM
1 8 (2.29%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.86%) Findur
2 3 (0.86%) Salesforce CRM
3 2 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 126 (36.00%) AWS
2 114 (32.57%) Azure
3 94 (26.86%) GitHub
4 54 (15.43%) GCP
5 52 (14.86%) Azure DevOps
6 49 (14.00%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (7.14%) Amazon SQS
7 25 (7.14%) Serverless
8 23 (6.57%) Amazon S3
9 22 (6.29%) Amazon EC2
10 18 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 17 (4.86%) AWS Lambda
12 16 (4.57%) GitHub Copilot
13 14 (4.00%) ChatGPT
14 13 (3.71%) AWS KMS
15 12 (3.43%) Anthropic Claude
15 12 (3.43%) Route 53
16 9 (2.57%) Power Automate
16 9 (2.57%) Power Platform
17 8 (2.29%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.00%) RTP
1 7 (2.00%) Wireshark
2 6 (1.71%) 3GPP
3 3 (0.86%) DSL
3 3 (0.86%) Internet
3 3 (0.86%) WAN
4 2 (0.57%) Firewall
4 2 (0.57%) NaaS
5 1 (0.29%) Fibre Channel
5 1 (0.29%) HTTP
5 1 (0.29%) iSCSI
5 1 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 60 (17.14%) MongoDB
2 51 (14.57%) PostgreSQL
3 21 (6.00%) NoSQL
3 21 (6.00%) Relational Database
4 20 (5.71%) SQL Server
5 19 (5.43%) DynamoDB
6 17 (4.86%) Amazon RDS
7 16 (4.57%) Amazon Aurora
7 16 (4.57%) Db2
8 11 (3.14%) Metadata
9 8 (2.29%) MySQL
10 7 (2.00%) Power BI
11 6 (1.71%) BigQuery
11 6 (1.71%) Data Warehouse
12 5 (1.43%) Couchbase
12 5 (1.43%) Data Lake
12 5 (1.43%) Tableau
13 4 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
14 3 (0.86%) Apache Iceberg
14 3 (0.86%) Looker
Development Applications
1 119 (34.00%) Cucumber
2 100 (28.57%) Git
2 100 (28.57%) Selenium
3 87 (24.86%) Jenkins
4 70 (20.00%) JUnit
5 68 (19.43%) JIRA
6 66 (18.86%) GitLab
7 45 (12.86%) WebDriver
8 44 (12.57%) Postman
9 43 (12.29%) REST Assured
10 41 (11.71%) Mockito
11 28 (8.00%) JMeter
12 27 (7.71%) SonarQube
13 25 (7.14%) Cypress.io
14 23 (6.57%) SpecFlow
15 21 (6.00%) Maven
16 19 (5.43%) Gatling
17 17 (4.86%) TeamCity
18 12 (3.43%) DbUnit
19 11 (3.14%) jMock
General
1 106 (30.29%) Social Skills
2 74 (21.14%) Finance
3 73 (20.86%) Public Sector
4 55 (15.71%) Analytical Skills
5 39 (11.14%) Banking
6 13 (3.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 12 (3.43%) Front Office
8 10 (2.86%) Organisational Skills
9 9 (2.57%) Investment Banking
10 8 (2.29%) Military
10 8 (2.29%) Retail
11 5 (1.43%) Aviation
11 5 (1.43%) Fire and Rescue
11 5 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
11 5 (1.43%) Police
12 4 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
13 3 (0.86%) Automotive
13 3 (0.86%) Billing
13 3 (0.86%) Legal Technology
13 3 (0.86%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 116 (33.14%) Developer
2 76 (21.71%) Java Developer
2 76 (21.71%) Senior
3 56 (16.00%) Test Engineer
4 40 (11.43%) Lead
5 33 (9.43%) Test Automation Engineer
6 32 (9.14%) Software Engineer
7 28 (8.00%) Tester
8 26 (7.43%) Senior Developer
9 23 (6.57%) Analyst
9 23 (6.57%) Automation Tester
9 23 (6.57%) Senior Java Developer
10 21 (6.00%) Test Leader
11 15 (4.29%) Java Engineer
12 13 (3.71%) QA Engineer
12 13 (3.71%) Senior Software Engineer
12 13 (3.71%) Senior Tester
13 12 (3.43%) Architect
13 12 (3.43%) Automation Test Lead
14 11 (3.14%) Senior Automation Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 85 (24.29%) Spring
2 68 (19.43%) Playwright
2 68 (19.43%) REST
3 65 (18.57%) Spring Boot
4 57 (16.29%) Kafka
5 53 (15.14%) Gherkin
6 44 (12.57%) RESTful
7 36 (10.29%) .NET
8 31 (8.86%) Node.js
8 31 (8.86%) WireMock
9 30 (8.57%) ActiveMQ
9 30 (8.57%) AngularJS
10 26 (7.43%) React
11 23 (6.57%) SOAP
12 21 (6.00%) JAX-RS
13 17 (4.86%) JPA
13 17 (4.86%) Web Services
14 16 (4.57%) Hibernate
14 16 (4.57%) Spring Cloud
15 15 (4.29%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 40 (11.43%) Distributed Systems
2 35 (10.00%) Product Ownership
3 30 (8.57%) Cloud Native
4 16 (4.57%) Distributed Architecture
4 16 (4.57%) Enterprise Software
5 14 (4.00%) Equity Derivative
6 10 (2.86%) Derivative
7 9 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
8 7 (2.00%) Onboarding
9 5 (1.43%) Management Information System
9 5 (1.43%) Mobile App
9 5 (1.43%) Robotics
9 5 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
9 5 (1.43%) Taxonomies
9 5 (1.43%) Virtual Team
10 4 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
10 4 (1.14%) Distributed Applications
11 3 (0.86%) AI Agents
11 3 (0.86%) Fixed Income
11 3 (0.86%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 54 (15.43%) Linux
2 27 (7.71%) Unix
3 12 (3.43%) Mac OS X
4 7 (2.00%) Android
4 7 (2.00%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.86%) Mac OS
5 3 (0.86%) Windows
6 2 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.57%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 235 (67.14%) Agile
2 227 (64.86%) TDD
3 226 (64.57%) CI/CD
4 211 (60.29%) Test Automation
5 142 (40.57%) Microservices
6 128 (36.57%) DevOps
7 84 (24.00%) Scrum
8 75 (21.43%) Continuous Improvement
9 72 (20.57%) Problem-Solving
10 71 (20.29%) API Testing
11 69 (19.71%) Test Strategy
12 61 (17.43%) Software Engineering
13 57 (16.29%) AI
14 47 (13.43%) Continuous Integration
14 47 (13.43%) Mentoring
15 45 (12.86%) Stakeholder Management
16 42 (12.00%) Containerisation
17 39 (11.14%) Observability
17 39 (11.14%) SDLC
17 39 (11.14%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 202 (57.71%) Java
2 89 (25.43%) SQL
3 72 (20.57%) Python
4 62 (17.71%) JavaScript
5 58 (16.57%) C#
6 32 (9.14%) TypeScript
7 14 (4.00%) C++
8 8 (2.29%) Groovy
8 8 (2.29%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.00%) Apex Code
10 6 (1.71%) T-SQL
11 5 (1.43%) Go
11 5 (1.43%) R
11 5 (1.43%) Ruby
12 4 (1.14%) Perl
12 4 (1.14%) Scala
13 3 (0.86%) Shell Script
14 2 (0.57%) Bash
14 2 (0.57%) Cypher
14 2 (0.57%) SHACL
Qualifications
1 90 (25.71%) Security Cleared
2 72 (20.57%) SC Cleared
3 24 (6.86%) Degree
4 23 (6.57%) BPSS Clearance
5 16 (4.57%) ISTQB
6 15 (4.29%) Computer Science Degree
7 8 (2.29%) DV Cleared
8 7 (2.00%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 5 (1.43%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.43%) Azure Certification
9 5 (1.43%) Microsoft Certification
10 3 (0.86%) CSPO
10 3 (0.86%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.29%) ISEB
11 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.29%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (20.86%) QA
2 47 (13.43%) Accessibility
3 20 (5.71%) WCAG
4 16 (4.57%) Data Quality
5 13 (3.71%) GDPR
6 2 (0.57%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.29%) EMIR
7 1 (0.29%) MiFID
7 1 (0.29%) SEPA
7 1 (0.29%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 94 (26.86%) Docker
2 9 (2.57%) Postfix
3 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 73 (20.86%) Kubernetes
2 41 (11.71%) Grafana
3 32 (9.14%) Prometheus
4 22 (6.29%) Terraform
5 6 (1.71%) Ansible
6 5 (1.43%) Kibana
7 3 (0.86%) Istio
8 2 (0.57%) Amdocs OSS
8 2 (0.57%) Argo
8 2 (0.57%) Consul
8 2 (0.57%) Rancher
8 2 (0.57%) Zipkin
9 1 (0.29%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.29%) EMC VPLEX
9 1 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 21 (6.00%) Microsoft
2 18 (5.14%) Salesforce
3 17 (4.86%) Sybase
4 16 (4.57%) Google
4 16 (4.57%) Oracle
5 14 (4.00%) Atlassian
6 12 (3.43%) IBM
7 11 (3.14%) Jaspersoft
8 8 (2.29%) Checkmarx
8 8 (2.29%) Conga
8 8 (2.29%) GoCardless
9 6 (1.71%) Dynatrace
9 6 (1.71%) Splunk
10 5 (1.43%) ServiceNow
11 3 (0.86%) CA Agile Central
11 3 (0.86%) Databricks
11 3 (0.86%) Guidewire
11 3 (0.86%) OpenAI
11 3 (0.86%) OpenLink
12 2 (0.57%) Amdocs