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 27 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 368 288 258
Rank change year-on-year -80 -30 -8
Contract jobs citing BDD 325 291 355
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.61% 0.89% 0.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.72% 0.98% 1.07%
Number of daily rates quoted 203 196 244
10th Percentile £306 £361 £359
25th Percentile £400 £420 £424
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £459 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year -8.20% -6.54% -6.96%
75th Percentile £538 £595 £650
90th Percentile £674 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £463 £500
% change year-on-year -2.70% -7.50% -4.31%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 1 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - £82.50 -
Median hourly rate £45.00 £85.00 £56.25
Median % change year-on-year -47.06% +51.11% -25.00%
75th Percentile £46.88 £87.50 -
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 45,399 29,629 33,143
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.55% 90.46% 85.37%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,782 18,436 20,950
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £425 £402 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -3.67%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £725 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,881 1,773 1,687
10th Percentile £14.22 £14.20 £13.86
25th Percentile £17.87 £17.30 £18.13
Median hourly rate £41.00 £25.15 £40.50
Median % change year-on-year +63.02% -37.90% -4.71%
75th Percentile £67.84 £47.50 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £67.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +91.13% -45.88% +6.25%

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 27 August 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 27 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
England -64 267 £459 -10.87% 205
UK excluding London -46 181 £450 -2.70% 114
London -75 110 £488 -14.47% 120
Work from Home -51 97 £475 -5.00% 113
North of England -51 74 £450 -13.42% 35
Midlands -23 42 £425 -11.69% 16
West Midlands -19 41 £425 -15.00% 11
North West -36 34 £438 +3.67% 19
Scotland -10 25 £465 +0.54% 10
Yorkshire -49 24 £550 +4.76% 8
North East -28 20 £450 -2.17% 8
South East -62 17 £275 -12.42% 28
South West -41 14 £525 +27.27% 12
East of England -16 8 £510 +36.00% 7
Wales - 4 £531 - 4
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 5

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 33 (10.15%) Confluence
2 4 (1.23%) Apache
2 4 (1.23%) Apache Spark
3 3 (0.92%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (0.92%) CMS
3 3 (0.92%) Headless CMS
3 3 (0.92%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.31%) Camunda
Applications
1 3 (0.92%) Notion
2 2 (0.62%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.31%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 9 (2.77%) Dynamics CRM
2 8 (2.46%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.92%) Findur
3 3 (0.92%) Salesforce CRM
Cloud Services
1 111 (34.15%) AWS
2 99 (30.46%) Azure
3 91 (28.00%) GitHub
4 48 (14.77%) Azure DevOps
5 43 (13.23%) GitHub Actions
6 42 (12.92%) GCP
7 24 (7.38%) Serverless
8 21 (6.46%) GitHub Copilot
9 17 (5.23%) Amazon S3
9 17 (5.23%) Amazon SQS
10 15 (4.62%) AWS Lambda
11 14 (4.31%) Amazon EC2
11 14 (4.31%) ChatGPT
12 12 (3.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 12 (3.69%) Anthropic Claude
13 10 (3.08%) Power Automate
14 9 (2.77%) Dynamics 365
14 9 (2.77%) Power Platform
15 8 (2.46%) AWS KMS
15 8 (2.46%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.15%) RTP
1 7 (2.15%) Wireshark
2 6 (1.85%) 3GPP
3 3 (0.92%) DSL
3 3 (0.92%) Internet
4 2 (0.62%) Firewall
4 2 (0.62%) HTTP
5 1 (0.31%) NaaS
5 1 (0.31%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 52 (16.00%) MongoDB
2 30 (9.23%) PostgreSQL
3 22 (6.77%) NoSQL
4 21 (6.46%) Relational Database
5 16 (4.92%) SQL Server
6 15 (4.62%) Db2
7 13 (4.00%) DynamoDB
8 11 (3.38%) Amazon Aurora
8 11 (3.38%) Amazon RDS
8 11 (3.38%) Metadata
9 8 (2.46%) MySQL
10 7 (2.15%) Power BI
11 6 (1.85%) BigQuery
11 6 (1.85%) Data Warehouse
12 5 (1.54%) Couchbase
12 5 (1.54%) Data Lake
12 5 (1.54%) Tableau
13 3 (0.92%) Amazon Redshift
13 3 (0.92%) Looker
13 3 (0.92%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 112 (34.46%) Cucumber
2 91 (28.00%) Git
3 90 (27.69%) Selenium
4 74 (22.77%) Jenkins
5 63 (19.38%) GitLab
6 61 (18.77%) JUnit
7 48 (14.77%) JIRA
8 43 (13.23%) Postman
9 42 (12.92%) REST Assured
10 35 (10.77%) WebDriver
11 28 (8.62%) Mockito
11 28 (8.62%) SonarQube
12 25 (7.69%) Cypress.io
13 23 (7.08%) Gatling
14 19 (5.85%) SpecFlow
15 18 (5.54%) JMeter
16 17 (5.23%) Maven
17 13 (4.00%) TeamCity
18 9 (2.77%) IntelliJ
19 8 (2.46%) Bitbucket
General
1 109 (33.54%) Social Skills
2 72 (22.15%) Finance
3 62 (19.08%) Public Sector
4 51 (15.69%) Analytical Skills
5 41 (12.62%) Banking
6 15 (4.62%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 12 (3.69%) Front Office
8 9 (2.77%) Investment Banking
9 7 (2.15%) Retail
10 6 (1.85%) Military
11 5 (1.54%) Aviation
11 5 (1.54%) Fire and Rescue
11 5 (1.54%) Police
12 3 (0.92%) Automotive
12 3 (0.92%) Influencing Skills
12 3 (0.92%) Legal Technology
12 3 (0.92%) Marketing
12 3 (0.92%) Organisational Skills
12 3 (0.92%) Presentation Skills
13 2 (0.62%) Law
Job Titles
1 100 (30.77%) Developer
2 68 (20.92%) Senior
3 62 (19.08%) Java Developer
4 56 (17.23%) Test Engineer
5 35 (10.77%) Software Engineer
6 33 (10.15%) Test Automation Engineer
7 28 (8.62%) Lead
8 23 (7.08%) Senior Developer
9 21 (6.46%) Analyst
10 20 (6.15%) Java Engineer
11 18 (5.54%) Senior Java Developer
11 18 (5.54%) Tester
12 16 (4.92%) Automation Tester
13 14 (4.31%) Test Leader
14 13 (4.00%) QA Engineer
15 12 (3.69%) Quality Engineer
15 12 (3.69%) Senior Software Engineer
16 11 (3.38%) Python Developer
17 10 (3.08%) Senior Test Engineer
17 10 (3.08%) Test Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 75 (23.08%) Spring
2 66 (20.31%) Playwright
3 62 (19.08%) REST
4 61 (18.77%) Spring Boot
5 56 (17.23%) Gherkin
6 52 (16.00%) Kafka
7 40 (12.31%) RESTful
8 28 (8.62%) .NET
9 26 (8.00%) Node.js
10 25 (7.69%) React
11 24 (7.38%) WireMock
12 23 (7.08%) AngularJS
13 22 (6.77%) Terraform
14 20 (6.15%) ActiveMQ
15 18 (5.54%) SOAP
16 16 (4.92%) HTML
16 16 (4.92%) JSON
17 15 (4.62%) JAX-RS
18 13 (4.00%) XML
19 12 (3.69%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 37 (11.38%) Product Ownership
2 31 (9.54%) Distributed Systems
3 27 (8.31%) Cloud Native
4 18 (5.54%) Enterprise Software
5 14 (4.31%) Equity Derivative
6 13 (4.00%) Legacy Systems
7 10 (3.08%) Derivative
8 8 (2.46%) Distributed Architecture
9 7 (2.15%) Onboarding
10 6 (1.85%) Management Information System
10 6 (1.85%) Virtual Team
11 5 (1.54%) Mobile App
11 5 (1.54%) NHS
11 5 (1.54%) Robotics
11 5 (1.54%) Self-Motivation
11 5 (1.54%) Taxonomies
12 4 (1.23%) Data Protection Act
12 4 (1.23%) SWIFT Messaging Network
13 3 (0.92%) AI Agents
13 3 (0.92%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 44 (13.54%) Linux
2 22 (6.77%) Unix
3 6 (1.85%) Android
3 6 (1.85%) Apple iOS
4 5 (1.54%) Mac OS X
5 4 (1.23%) Windows
6 2 (0.62%) Mac OS
6 2 (0.62%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.62%) VMS
7 1 (0.31%) AIX
Processes & Methodologies
1 218 (67.08%) Agile
2 212 (65.23%) CI/CD
3 211 (64.92%) TDD
4 197 (60.62%) Test Automation
5 115 (35.38%) Microservices
6 114 (35.08%) DevOps
7 77 (23.69%) Scrum
8 70 (21.54%) Problem-Solving
9 68 (20.92%) Continuous Improvement
10 64 (19.69%) AI
10 64 (19.69%) Test Strategy
11 63 (19.38%) Software Engineering
12 59 (18.15%) API Testing
13 44 (13.54%) Software Testing
13 44 (13.54%) Stakeholder Management
14 42 (12.92%) Mentoring
15 40 (12.31%) Continuous Integration
16 39 (12.00%) SDLC
17 36 (11.08%) Pair Programming
18 34 (10.46%) Coaching
Programming Languages
1 200 (61.54%) Java
2 88 (27.08%) SQL
3 76 (23.38%) Python
4 59 (18.15%) JavaScript
5 48 (14.77%) C#
6 31 (9.54%) TypeScript
7 12 (3.69%) C++
8 10 (3.08%) Ruby
9 8 (2.46%) Bash
9 8 (2.46%) Groovy
10 7 (2.15%) Apex Code
11 6 (1.85%) Kotlin
11 6 (1.85%) R
12 4 (1.23%) Go
12 4 (1.23%) Perl
13 3 (0.92%) Scala
13 3 (0.92%) Shell Script
13 3 (0.92%) T-SQL
14 2 (0.62%) Cypher
14 2 (0.62%) SHACL
Qualifications
1 76 (23.38%) Security Cleared
2 61 (18.77%) SC Cleared
3 26 (8.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 20 (6.15%) Degree
5 19 (5.85%) ISTQB
6 14 (4.31%) Computer Science Degree
7 9 (2.77%) DV Cleared
7 9 (2.77%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 6 (1.85%) Microsoft Certification
9 3 (0.92%) CSPO
9 3 (0.92%) ISEB
9 3 (0.92%) Microsoft Certified Professional
10 2 (0.62%) AWS Certification
10 2 (0.62%) Azure Certification
11 1 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.31%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (22.46%) QA
2 52 (16.00%) Accessibility
3 32 (9.85%) WCAG
4 16 (4.92%) Data Quality
5 14 (4.31%) GDPR
6 3 (0.92%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.31%) EMIR
7 1 (0.31%) ISO 15022
7 1 (0.31%) MiFID
7 1 (0.31%) SEPA
7 1 (0.31%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 78 (24.00%) Docker
2 5 (1.54%) Postfix
Systems Management
1 62 (19.08%) Kubernetes
2 23 (7.08%) Grafana
3 17 (5.23%) Prometheus
4 7 (2.15%) Ansible
5 4 (1.23%) Kibana
6 3 (0.92%) Istio
7 2 (0.62%) Argo
7 2 (0.62%) Consul
7 2 (0.62%) Rancher
7 2 (0.62%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.31%) Amdocs OSS
8 1 (0.31%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.31%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 25 (7.69%) Microsoft
2 16 (4.92%) Salesforce
2 16 (4.92%) Sybase
3 15 (4.62%) Google
3 15 (4.62%) IBM
4 13 (4.00%) Oracle
5 8 (2.46%) Checkmarx
5 8 (2.46%) Conga
5 8 (2.46%) GoCardless
6 7 (2.15%) Atlassian
7 6 (1.85%) Databricks
7 6 (1.85%) Jaspersoft
8 4 (1.23%) Dynatrace
8 4 (1.23%) Splunk
9 3 (0.92%) Guidewire
9 3 (0.92%) OpenAI
9 3 (0.92%) OpenLink
10 2 (0.62%) Bloomberg
10 2 (0.62%) FactSet
10 2 (0.62%) ServiceNow