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 25 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
25 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 336 283 290
Rank change year-on-year -53 +7 -80
Contract jobs citing BDD 340 262 341
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.67% 0.87% 0.78%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.79% 0.96% 0.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 201 164 256
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £400 £410 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £535
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -6.54% -10.83%
75th Percentile £550 £576 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £455 £460 £525
% change year-on-year -1.03% -12.38% +5.00%
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 - - -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 43,238 27,425 37,092
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.97% 91.06% 85.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 26,959 17,371 23,647
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £505 £525
Median % change year-on-year +1.78% -3.81% -4.55%
75th Percentile £620 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,600 1,291 2,584
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.65
25th Percentile £20.09 £17.70 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +7.14%
75th Percentile £68.00 £54.88 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £71.25 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £25.04 £38.12
% change year-on-year +79.73% -34.32% +17.29%

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 25 June 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 25 June 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 -57 275 £463 -8.64% 67
UK excluding London -38 197 £455 -1.03% 50
London -65 109 £488 -17.02% 25
Work from Home -32 103 £450 -10.00% 48
North of England -40 81 £453 -1.52% 16
Midlands -30 46 £425 -11.69% 12
West Midlands -28 45 £425 -15.00% 10
North West -13 41 £438 +8.83% 7
Scotland +2 29 £451 +12.81% 2
Yorkshire -53 26 £620 +19.29% 4
South West -39 19 £525 +23.53% 1
North East -24 18 £450 +7.14% 5
South East -70 14 £359 -13.09% 19
East of England -19 8 £510 - 4
Wales -11 2 £650 -
Northern Ireland - 2 - -

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 49 (14.41%) Confluence
2 6 (1.76%) Apache Spark
3 3 (0.88%) Apache
3 3 (0.88%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (0.88%) SharePoint
4 2 (0.59%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.29%) Camunda
5 1 (0.29%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.88%) Notion
2 2 (0.59%) 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 (2.35%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (1.18%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.88%) Findur
4 2 (0.59%) Oracle EBS
4 2 (0.59%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.29%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 126 (37.06%) AWS
2 104 (30.59%) Azure
3 88 (25.88%) GitHub
4 49 (14.41%) GCP
5 48 (14.12%) Azure DevOps
6 42 (12.35%) GitHub Actions
7 27 (7.94%) Serverless
8 25 (7.35%) Amazon S3
9 23 (6.76%) Amazon EC2
9 23 (6.76%) Amazon SQS
10 20 (5.88%) AWS Lambda
11 19 (5.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 14 (4.12%) BrowserStack
13 12 (3.53%) AWS KMS
13 12 (3.53%) ChatGPT
13 12 (3.53%) Route 53
14 11 (3.24%) GitHub Copilot
15 10 (2.94%) Anthropic Claude
15 10 (2.94%) Power Platform
16 7 (2.06%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.76%) 3GPP
1 6 (1.76%) RTP
1 6 (1.76%) Wireshark
2 3 (0.88%) Internet
2 3 (0.88%) WAN
3 2 (0.59%) DSL
3 2 (0.59%) Firewall
3 2 (0.59%) NaaS
4 1 (0.29%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (0.29%) HTTP
4 1 (0.29%) iSCSI
4 1 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 50 (14.71%) MongoDB
2 48 (14.12%) PostgreSQL
3 23 (6.76%) Relational Database
4 19 (5.59%) DynamoDB
5 18 (5.29%) Amazon RDS
6 17 (5.00%) NoSQL
7 16 (4.71%) Amazon Aurora
7 16 (4.71%) SQL Server
8 13 (3.82%) Db2
9 11 (3.24%) Metadata
10 10 (2.94%) Data Lake
10 10 (2.94%) Oracle Database
11 9 (2.65%) MySQL
12 7 (2.06%) Power BI
13 5 (1.47%) Amazon Athena
13 5 (1.47%) Tableau
14 4 (1.18%) Couchbase
15 3 (0.88%) Amazon Redshift
15 3 (0.88%) Looker
15 3 (0.88%) MariaDB
Development Applications
1 116 (34.12%) Cucumber
2 96 (28.24%) Git
3 93 (27.35%) Selenium
4 92 (27.06%) Jenkins
5 72 (21.18%) GitLab
6 67 (19.71%) JUnit
7 66 (19.41%) JIRA
8 45 (13.24%) Postman
9 44 (12.94%) REST Assured
10 41 (12.06%) WebDriver
11 38 (11.18%) Mockito
12 31 (9.12%) JMeter
13 30 (8.82%) SonarQube
14 21 (6.18%) Cypress.io
14 21 (6.18%) Maven
15 18 (5.29%) Gatling
15 18 (5.29%) SpecFlow
16 16 (4.71%) TeamCity
17 12 (3.53%) Bitbucket
17 12 (3.53%) DbUnit
General
1 95 (27.94%) Social Skills
2 75 (22.06%) Finance
3 67 (19.71%) Public Sector
4 49 (14.41%) Analytical Skills
5 38 (11.18%) Banking
6 12 (3.53%) Front Office
7 9 (2.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (2.65%) Organisational Skills
8 8 (2.35%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.35%) Military
9 7 (2.06%) Retail
10 5 (1.47%) Aviation
10 5 (1.47%) Fire and Rescue
10 5 (1.47%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.47%) Police
11 4 (1.18%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.88%) Billing
12 3 (0.88%) Marketing
13 2 (0.59%) Manufacturing
13 2 (0.59%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 103 (30.29%) Developer
2 70 (20.59%) Java Developer
3 65 (19.12%) Senior
4 58 (17.06%) Test Engineer
5 42 (12.35%) Lead
6 37 (10.88%) Software Engineer
7 31 (9.12%) Test Automation Engineer
8 29 (8.53%) Tester
9 23 (6.76%) Automation Tester
10 20 (5.88%) Java Engineer
11 19 (5.59%) Senior Developer
11 19 (5.59%) Senior Java Developer
11 19 (5.59%) Test Leader
12 16 (4.71%) Analyst
13 13 (3.82%) QA Engineer
13 13 (3.82%) Senior Software Engineer
13 13 (3.82%) Senior Tester
14 12 (3.53%) Automation Test Lead
15 11 (3.24%) Salesforce Engineer
15 11 (3.24%) Senior Automation Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 94 (27.65%) Spring
2 74 (21.76%) Spring Boot
3 63 (18.53%) Playwright
4 62 (18.24%) REST
5 52 (15.29%) Kafka
6 48 (14.12%) Gherkin
7 42 (12.35%) RESTful
8 32 (9.41%) .NET
9 30 (8.82%) AngularJS
9 30 (8.82%) WireMock
10 27 (7.94%) Node.js
10 27 (7.94%) React
11 23 (6.76%) ActiveMQ
12 21 (6.18%) Spring Cloud
13 20 (5.88%) SOAP
14 17 (5.00%) JPA
14 17 (5.00%) Web Services
15 16 (4.71%) Hibernate
16 14 (4.12%) JAX-RS
16 14 (4.12%) Spring Batch
Miscellaneous
1 35 (10.29%) Distributed Systems
2 32 (9.41%) Cloud Native
3 29 (8.53%) Product Ownership
4 16 (4.71%) Distributed Architecture
5 13 (3.82%) Enterprise Software
6 12 (3.53%) Equity Derivative
7 10 (2.94%) Derivative
8 7 (2.06%) Legacy Systems
8 7 (2.06%) Mobile App
9 5 (1.47%) Onboarding
9 5 (1.47%) Robotics
9 5 (1.47%) Self-Motivation
10 4 (1.18%) Distributed Applications
11 3 (0.88%) Equities
11 3 (0.88%) Fixed Income
11 3 (0.88%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.88%) Taxonomies
11 3 (0.88%) Virtual Team
12 2 (0.59%) Linux Command Line
12 2 (0.59%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 48 (14.12%) Linux
2 17 (5.00%) Unix
3 10 (2.94%) Mac OS X
4 5 (1.47%) Android
4 5 (1.47%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.88%) Mac OS
6 2 (0.59%) VMS
6 2 (0.59%) Windows
7 1 (0.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 214 (62.94%) Agile
2 209 (61.47%) TDD
3 208 (61.18%) CI/CD
4 197 (57.94%) Test Automation
5 134 (39.41%) Microservices
6 125 (36.76%) DevOps
7 72 (21.18%) Scrum
8 68 (20.00%) Test Strategy
9 66 (19.41%) API Testing
9 66 (19.41%) Software Engineering
10 65 (19.12%) Continuous Improvement
11 64 (18.82%) Problem-Solving
12 48 (14.12%) Mentoring
13 47 (13.82%) AI
14 45 (13.24%) SDLC
15 41 (12.06%) Containerisation
15 41 (12.06%) Observability
16 38 (11.18%) Continuous Integration
17 34 (10.00%) Validation
18 33 (9.71%) Kanban
Programming Languages
1 210 (61.76%) Java
2 88 (25.88%) SQL
3 68 (20.00%) Python
4 56 (16.47%) JavaScript
5 54 (15.88%) C#
6 29 (8.53%) TypeScript
7 16 (4.71%) C++
8 8 (2.35%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.06%) Apex Code
9 7 (2.06%) Groovy
10 6 (1.76%) T-SQL
11 4 (1.18%) Go
11 4 (1.18%) Perl
11 4 (1.18%) Ruby
12 2 (0.59%) Bash
12 2 (0.59%) PromQL
12 2 (0.59%) Scala
12 2 (0.59%) Shell Script
12 2 (0.59%) VBA
13 1 (0.29%) Cypher
Qualifications
1 88 (25.88%) Security Cleared
2 71 (20.88%) SC Cleared
3 22 (6.47%) Degree
4 21 (6.18%) BPSS Clearance
5 13 (3.82%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (3.53%) ISTQB
7 7 (2.06%) DV Cleared
8 6 (1.76%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 5 (1.47%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.47%) Azure Certification
10 3 (0.88%) CSPO
11 2 (0.59%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.59%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 1 (0.29%) ISEB
12 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 61 (17.94%) QA
2 43 (12.65%) Accessibility
3 15 (4.41%) Data Quality
4 11 (3.24%) WCAG
5 8 (2.35%) GDPR
6 2 (0.59%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.29%) EMIR
7 1 (0.29%) MiFID
7 1 (0.29%) SEPA
System Software
1 93 (27.35%) Docker
2 9 (2.65%) Postfix
3 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 76 (22.35%) Kubernetes
2 45 (13.24%) Grafana
3 37 (10.88%) Prometheus
4 29 (8.53%) Terraform
5 7 (2.06%) Ansible
6 3 (0.88%) Istio
6 3 (0.88%) Kibana
7 2 (0.59%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.59%) Consul
7 2 (0.59%) Rancher
7 2 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.59%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.29%) Argo
8 1 (0.29%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.29%) EMC VPLEX
8 1 (0.29%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 24 (7.06%) Oracle
2 17 (5.00%) Salesforce
3 15 (4.41%) Atlassian
3 15 (4.41%) Google
3 15 (4.41%) Sybase
4 11 (3.24%) Jaspersoft
4 11 (3.24%) Splunk
5 9 (2.65%) IBM
6 8 (2.35%) Checkmarx
6 8 (2.35%) Conga
6 8 (2.35%) GoCardless
6 8 (2.35%) Microsoft
7 6 (1.76%) Databricks
7 6 (1.76%) Dynatrace
8 5 (1.47%) ServiceNow
9 4 (1.18%) Veracode
10 3 (0.88%) OpenLink
11 2 (0.59%) Bloomberg
11 2 (0.59%) CA Agile Central
11 2 (0.59%) SAP