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 4 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 364 299 296
Rank change year-on-year -65 -3 -131
Contract jobs citing BDD 289 248 330
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.64% 0.85% 0.75%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.75% 0.94% 0.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 167 157 241
10th Percentile £350 £370 £340
25th Percentile £400 £425 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £525 £500
Median % change year-on-year -10.48% +5.00% -16.67%
75th Percentile £559 £630 £625
90th Percentile £705 £775 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £472 £500 £488
% change year-on-year -5.70% +2.56% -7.14%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 2
Median hourly rate - - £56.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - £56.25
% change year-on-year - - -19.64%

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 38,631 26,466 38,100
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.54% 90.55% 86.35%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,504 17,183 24,720
10th Percentile £313 £308 £300
25th Percentile £413 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £638
90th Percentile £725 £744 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £488 £500
% change year-on-year -0.51% -2.50% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,266 983 2,350
10th Percentile £15.00 £15.00 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.00 £20.00 £16.00
Median hourly rate £35.96 £31.52 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.07% -4.48% -11.53%
75th Percentile £65.00 £63.75 £57.83
90th Percentile £77.50 £76.10 £70.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.55 £30.00 £32.50
% change year-on-year +18.50% -7.69% -12.87%

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 4 April 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 4 April 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 -69 249 £475 -9.52% 104
UK excluding London -61 147 £472 -5.70% 86
London -49 116 £475 -17.03% 32
Work from Home -33 83 £425 -19.05% 72
North of England -55 77 £481 +4.62% 31
North West -21 38 £453 +0.67% 15
West Midlands -36 31 £425 -8.11% 7
Midlands -51 31 £425 -8.11% 11
Yorkshire -61 29 £598 +13.81% 7
North East -11 13 £413 +5.77% 9
Scotland +9 12 £350 -20.00% 7
South West -27 10 £494 -8.14% 5
South East -57 9 £359 -28.20% 24
East of England -28 5 £500 - 3
Wales -13 2 £525 - 2
Northern Ireland - 2 - - 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 39 (13.49%) Confluence
2 4 (1.38%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 4 (1.38%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.69%) nginx
3 2 (0.69%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.35%) Camunda
4 1 (0.35%) CMS
4 1 (0.35%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.35%) Tomcat
Applications
1 2 (0.69%) Microsoft PowerPoint
1 2 (0.69%) MS Visio
2 1 (0.35%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.35%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.35%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 3 (1.04%) Findur
2 2 (0.69%) Dynamics CRM
2 2 (0.69%) Oracle EBS
2 2 (0.69%) Workday HCM
3 1 (0.35%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.35%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 107 (37.02%) AWS
2 86 (29.76%) Azure
3 61 (21.11%) GitHub
4 40 (13.84%) GCP
5 35 (12.11%) Azure DevOps
6 32 (11.07%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (8.65%) Serverless
8 20 (6.92%) Amazon S3
9 19 (6.57%) AWS Lambda
10 13 (4.50%) Amazon EC2
10 13 (4.50%) Amazon SQS
10 13 (4.50%) BrowserStack
11 12 (4.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 11 (3.81%) SaaS
13 7 (2.42%) AWS KMS
13 7 (2.42%) Route 53
14 6 (2.08%) AWS Step Functions
15 5 (1.73%) Google Kubernetes Engine
16 4 (1.38%) Amazon ECS
16 4 (1.38%) Azure AKS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.73%) Cisco IPT
2 3 (1.04%) WAN
3 2 (0.69%) HTTP
3 2 (0.69%) NaaS
4 1 (0.35%) DSL
4 1 (0.35%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (0.35%) FTP
4 1 (0.35%) iSCSI
4 1 (0.35%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 42 (14.53%) PostgreSQL
2 31 (10.73%) MongoDB
3 16 (5.54%) SQL Server
4 15 (5.19%) MySQL
5 14 (4.84%) Amazon RDS
5 14 (4.84%) Relational Database
6 12 (4.15%) DynamoDB
7 10 (3.46%) Oracle Database
8 9 (3.11%) Amazon Aurora
8 9 (3.11%) NoSQL
9 7 (2.42%) Data Lake
10 4 (1.38%) Amazon Athena
10 4 (1.38%) Redis
11 3 (1.04%) DB2
11 3 (1.04%) Delta Lake
12 2 (0.69%) Apache Cassandra
12 2 (0.69%) Elasticsearch
12 2 (0.69%) Flink
12 2 (0.69%) InfluxDB
12 2 (0.69%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 105 (36.33%) Cucumber
2 79 (27.34%) Jenkins
3 76 (26.30%) Git
3 76 (26.30%) Selenium
4 68 (23.53%) JIRA
5 60 (20.76%) GitLab
6 52 (17.99%) JUnit
7 42 (14.53%) Postman
8 30 (10.38%) Mockito
8 30 (10.38%) WebDriver
9 29 (10.03%) REST Assured
10 26 (9.00%) JMeter
11 23 (7.96%) SonarQube
12 16 (5.54%) Cypress.io
13 14 (4.84%) Maven
14 10 (3.46%) Bitbucket
14 10 (3.46%) Gatling
15 9 (3.11%) TestNG
16 8 (2.77%) SpecFlow
16 8 (2.77%) TestRail
General
1 73 (25.26%) Social Skills
2 55 (19.03%) Finance
3 53 (18.34%) Public Sector
4 28 (9.69%) Analytical Skills
5 23 (7.96%) Banking
6 8 (2.77%) Organisational Skills
7 6 (2.08%) Front Office
8 5 (1.73%) Influencing Skills
8 5 (1.73%) Legal
9 4 (1.38%) Electronics
9 4 (1.38%) Military
10 3 (1.04%) Billing
10 3 (1.04%) Investment Banking
10 3 (1.04%) Manufacturing
11 2 (0.69%) Automotive
11 2 (0.69%) Retail
11 2 (0.69%) Telecoms
12 1 (0.35%) Documentation Skills
12 1 (0.35%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 1 (0.35%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 98 (33.91%) Developer
2 58 (20.07%) Java Developer
3 50 (17.30%) Senior
4 46 (15.92%) Test Engineer
5 34 (11.76%) Lead
6 26 (9.00%) Test Automation Engineer
6 26 (9.00%) Tester
7 25 (8.65%) Software Engineer
8 20 (6.92%) Automation Tester
8 20 (6.92%) Senior Developer
9 16 (5.54%) Senior Java Developer
10 13 (4.50%) Test Leader
11 12 (4.15%) Automation Engineer
11 12 (4.15%) Java Engineer
11 12 (4.15%) QA Engineer
12 10 (3.46%) Automation Test Lead
12 10 (3.46%) Lead Test Engineer
12 10 (3.46%) Senior Automation Tester
12 10 (3.46%) Senior Tester
13 9 (3.11%) Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 73 (25.26%) Spring
2 58 (20.07%) Spring Boot
3 54 (18.69%) REST
4 41 (14.19%) RESTful
5 39 (13.49%) Playwright
6 37 (12.80%) Node.js
7 36 (12.46%) Kafka
8 35 (12.11%) Gherkin
9 34 (11.76%) React
10 28 (9.69%) AngularJS
11 26 (9.00%) WireMock
12 24 (8.30%) .NET
13 19 (6.57%) ActiveMQ
14 17 (5.88%) CSS
14 17 (5.88%) Jest
15 16 (5.54%) SOAP
16 15 (5.19%) JAX-RS
16 15 (5.19%) Spring Cloud
17 14 (4.84%) Web Services
18 12 (4.15%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 29 (10.03%) Product Ownership
2 25 (8.65%) Distributed Systems
3 21 (7.27%) Cloud Native
4 15 (5.19%) Distributed Architecture
5 10 (3.46%) Mobile App
6 6 (2.08%) Client/Server
6 6 (2.08%) Public Cloud
7 5 (1.73%) Onboarding
8 4 (1.38%) Distributed Applications
8 4 (1.38%) Enterprise Software
8 4 (1.38%) Equities
8 4 (1.38%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 3 (1.04%) Analytical Mindset
10 2 (0.69%) Derivative
10 2 (0.69%) Hybrid Cloud
10 2 (0.69%) iSeries
10 2 (0.69%) Legacy Systems
10 2 (0.69%) Private Cloud
10 2 (0.69%) Synthetic Data
10 2 (0.69%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 37 (12.80%) Linux
2 17 (5.88%) Unix
3 11 (3.81%) Mac OS X
4 3 (1.04%) VMS
5 2 (0.69%) Android
5 2 (0.69%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.69%) Mac OS
5 2 (0.69%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 179 (61.94%) TDD
2 177 (61.25%) Agile
3 175 (60.55%) Test Automation
4 160 (55.36%) CI/CD
5 120 (41.52%) Microservices
6 94 (32.53%) DevOps
7 64 (22.15%) Problem-Solving
8 63 (21.80%) API Testing
9 60 (20.76%) Continuous Improvement
10 59 (20.42%) Test Strategy
11 51 (17.65%) Scrum
12 44 (15.22%) Software Engineering
13 42 (14.53%) Containerisation
14 39 (13.49%) SDLC
15 36 (12.46%) Mentoring
16 33 (11.42%) End-to-End Testing
17 32 (11.07%) Performance Testing
18 31 (10.73%) Kanban
19 30 (10.38%) Continuous Integration
19 30 (10.38%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 176 (60.90%) Java
2 63 (21.80%) SQL
3 61 (21.11%) Python
4 55 (19.03%) JavaScript
5 33 (11.42%) TypeScript
6 30 (10.38%) C#
7 11 (3.81%) C++
8 10 (3.46%) Kotlin
9 8 (2.77%) Ruby
10 7 (2.42%) PHP
11 6 (2.08%) Go
12 5 (1.73%) JSX
13 4 (1.38%) Scala
14 3 (1.04%) T-SQL
15 2 (0.69%) Groovy
15 2 (0.69%) Shell Script
16 1 (0.35%) Bash
16 1 (0.35%) Swift
16 1 (0.35%) VBScript
16 1 (0.35%) XPath
Qualifications
1 73 (25.26%) Security Cleared
2 62 (21.45%) SC Cleared
3 13 (4.50%) BPSS Clearance
4 12 (4.15%) Degree
5 7 (2.42%) Computer Science Degree
5 7 (2.42%) ISTQB
6 5 (1.73%) AWS Certification
7 3 (1.04%) Azure Certification
8 2 (0.69%) ISEB
9 1 (0.35%) AWS Certified Developer
9 1 (0.35%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
9 1 (0.35%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 1 (0.35%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 59 (20.42%) QA
2 31 (10.73%) Accessibility
3 7 (2.42%) WCAG
4 6 (2.08%) GDPR
5 5 (1.73%) PERC
6 4 (1.38%) Data Quality
7 2 (0.69%) HL7
8 1 (0.35%) HMG Security Policy Framework
8 1 (0.35%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.35%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 77 (26.64%) Docker
2 6 (2.08%) Postfix
3 1 (0.35%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 61 (21.11%) Kubernetes
2 33 (11.42%) Grafana
3 29 (10.03%) Prometheus
4 23 (7.96%) Terraform
5 3 (1.04%) Ansible
5 3 (1.04%) Rancher
6 2 (0.69%) Amdocs OSS
6 2 (0.69%) HP Fortify
6 2 (0.69%) Kibana
6 2 (0.69%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.35%) EMC VPLEX
7 1 (0.35%) HAProxy
7 1 (0.35%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 19 (6.57%) Oracle
2 11 (3.81%) Atlassian
3 10 (3.46%) ServiceNow
3 10 (3.46%) Splunk
4 9 (3.11%) Google
5 8 (2.77%) Salesforce
6 7 (2.42%) Databricks
6 7 (2.42%) Jaspersoft
7 5 (1.73%) Checkmarx
7 5 (1.73%) Microsoft
8 4 (1.38%) Adobe
8 4 (1.38%) Dynatrace
8 4 (1.38%) IBM
8 4 (1.38%) Veracode
9 3 (1.04%) OpenLink
9 3 (1.04%) Sybase
10 2 (0.69%) Amdocs
10 2 (0.69%) Bloomberg
10 2 (0.69%) SAP
10 2 (0.69%) VMware