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

6 months to
23 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 334 300 275
Rank change year-on-year -34 -25 -42
Contract jobs citing BDD 356 279 349
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.68% 0.85% 0.85%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.79% 0.95% 0.99%
Number of daily rates quoted 206 185 247
10th Percentile £315 £355 £360
25th Percentile £400 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -7.41% -8.28%
75th Percentile £550 £595 £650
90th Percentile £681 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £450 £518
% change year-on-year - -13.04% +3.50%
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 44,826 29,510 35,120
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.01% 90.34% 85.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,774 18,532 22,551
10th Percentile £325 £300 £306
25th Percentile £419 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% -4.76% -4.11%
75th Percentile £625 £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 2,642 1,578 2,152
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £13.25
25th Percentile £20.01 £17.46 £17.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £39.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -36.33% -7.06%
75th Percentile £68.55 £50.94 £62.76
90th Percentile £83.00 £69.13 £73.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.00 £24.34 £40.00
% change year-on-year +84.88% -39.15% -1.45%

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 23 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 23 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 -50 293 £463 -9.76% 78
UK excluding London -5 210 £450 - 55
London -70 112 £488 -17.37% 28
Work from Home -38 109 £470 -6.00% 39
North of England -24 84 £464 +3.11% 17
Midlands -17 52 £425 -7.86% 20
West Midlands -22 51 £425 -8.11% 10
North West -17 42 £475 +17.00% 11
Scotland +9 31 £451 +4.64%
Yorkshire -38 27 £620 +19.29% 3
North East -24 21 £450 +7.14% 4
South West -32 19 £525 +23.53% 4
South East -75 18 £358 -10.50% 12
East of England -18 8 £510 - 2
Wales -15 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 50 (14.04%) Confluence
2 5 (1.40%) Apache Spark
3 4 (1.12%) Apache
3 4 (1.12%) SharePoint
4 3 (0.84%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.28%) Camunda
5 1 (0.28%) CMS
5 1 (0.28%) Headless CMS
5 1 (0.28%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.84%) Notion
2 2 (0.56%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.28%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.28%) Mingle
3 1 (0.28%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (2.25%) Payment Gateway
2 7 (1.97%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.84%) Findur
3 3 (0.84%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.56%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 128 (35.96%) AWS
2 109 (30.62%) Azure
3 96 (26.97%) GitHub
4 52 (14.61%) Azure DevOps
4 52 (14.61%) GCP
5 49 (13.76%) GitHub Actions
6 26 (7.30%) Serverless
7 25 (7.02%) Amazon SQS
8 24 (6.74%) Amazon S3
9 22 (6.18%) Amazon EC2
10 19 (5.34%) AWS Lambda
11 18 (5.06%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 14 (3.93%) ChatGPT
12 14 (3.93%) GitHub Copilot
13 13 (3.65%) AWS KMS
14 12 (3.37%) Anthropic Claude
14 12 (3.37%) BrowserStack
14 12 (3.37%) Route 53
15 10 (2.81%) Power Platform
16 8 (2.25%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 7 (1.97%) RTP
1 7 (1.97%) Wireshark
2 6 (1.69%) 3GPP
3 3 (0.84%) DSL
3 3 (0.84%) Internet
3 3 (0.84%) WAN
4 2 (0.56%) Firewall
4 2 (0.56%) NaaS
5 1 (0.28%) Fibre Channel
5 1 (0.28%) HTTP
5 1 (0.28%) iSCSI
5 1 (0.28%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 63 (17.70%) MongoDB
2 51 (14.33%) PostgreSQL
3 26 (7.30%) Relational Database
4 21 (5.90%) NoSQL
5 19 (5.34%) DynamoDB
5 19 (5.34%) SQL Server
6 17 (4.78%) Amazon RDS
7 16 (4.49%) Amazon Aurora
7 16 (4.49%) Db2
8 11 (3.09%) Metadata
9 10 (2.81%) Oracle Database
10 9 (2.53%) Data Lake
11 8 (2.25%) MySQL
12 7 (1.97%) Power BI
13 6 (1.69%) BigQuery
13 6 (1.69%) Data Warehouse
14 5 (1.40%) Couchbase
14 5 (1.40%) Tableau
15 4 (1.12%) Amazon Athena
16 3 (0.84%) Looker
Development Applications
1 116 (32.58%) Cucumber
2 100 (28.09%) Selenium
3 96 (26.97%) Git
4 94 (26.40%) Jenkins
5 67 (18.82%) GitLab
5 67 (18.82%) JIRA
6 65 (18.26%) JUnit
7 45 (12.64%) REST Assured
7 45 (12.64%) WebDriver
8 43 (12.08%) Postman
9 42 (11.80%) Mockito
10 28 (7.87%) JMeter
11 27 (7.58%) SonarQube
12 25 (7.02%) Cypress.io
13 23 (6.46%) SpecFlow
14 22 (6.18%) Maven
15 21 (5.90%) Gatling
16 18 (5.06%) TeamCity
17 12 (3.37%) DbUnit
17 12 (3.37%) Serenity BDD
General
1 104 (29.21%) Social Skills
2 76 (21.35%) Finance
3 72 (20.22%) Public Sector
4 54 (15.17%) Analytical Skills
5 40 (11.24%) Banking
6 12 (3.37%) Front Office
6 12 (3.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 10 (2.81%) Organisational Skills
8 8 (2.25%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.25%) Military
8 8 (2.25%) Retail
9 5 (1.40%) Aviation
9 5 (1.40%) Fire and Rescue
9 5 (1.40%) Influencing Skills
9 5 (1.40%) Police
10 4 (1.12%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.84%) Automotive
11 3 (0.84%) Billing
11 3 (0.84%) Marketing
12 2 (0.56%) Law
Job Titles
1 117 (32.87%) Developer
2 78 (21.91%) Java Developer
3 77 (21.63%) Senior
4 60 (16.85%) Test Engineer
5 43 (12.08%) Lead
6 33 (9.27%) Software Engineer
6 33 (9.27%) Test Automation Engineer
7 28 (7.87%) Tester
8 27 (7.58%) Senior Developer
9 24 (6.74%) Senior Java Developer
10 23 (6.46%) Automation Tester
11 22 (6.18%) Analyst
12 20 (5.62%) Test Leader
13 17 (4.78%) Java Engineer
14 13 (3.65%) Senior Software Engineer
14 13 (3.65%) Senior Tester
15 12 (3.37%) Architect
15 12 (3.37%) Automation Test Lead
15 12 (3.37%) QA Engineer
16 11 (3.09%) Senior Automation Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 93 (26.12%) Spring
2 73 (20.51%) Spring Boot
3 67 (18.82%) Playwright
4 64 (17.98%) REST
5 62 (17.42%) Kafka
6 51 (14.33%) Gherkin
7 43 (12.08%) RESTful
8 36 (10.11%) .NET
9 30 (8.43%) ActiveMQ
9 30 (8.43%) AngularJS
10 29 (8.15%) WireMock
11 28 (7.87%) Node.js
12 25 (7.02%) React
13 23 (6.46%) SOAP
14 21 (5.90%) JAX-RS
14 21 (5.90%) Spring Cloud
15 18 (5.06%) Web Services
16 17 (4.78%) JPA
17 16 (4.49%) Hibernate
18 15 (4.21%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 39 (10.96%) Distributed Systems
2 33 (9.27%) Product Ownership
3 31 (8.71%) Cloud Native
4 16 (4.49%) Distributed Architecture
5 15 (4.21%) Enterprise Software
6 14 (3.93%) Equity Derivative
7 10 (2.81%) Derivative
8 9 (2.53%) Legacy Systems
9 7 (1.97%) Onboarding
10 6 (1.69%) Mobile App
11 5 (1.40%) Robotics
11 5 (1.40%) Self-Motivation
11 5 (1.40%) Taxonomies
11 5 (1.40%) Virtual Team
12 4 (1.12%) Data Protection Act
12 4 (1.12%) Distributed Applications
12 4 (1.12%) Management Information System
13 3 (0.84%) AI Agents
13 3 (0.84%) Equities
13 3 (0.84%) Fixed Income
Operating Systems
1 53 (14.89%) Linux
2 27 (7.58%) Unix
3 12 (3.37%) Mac OS X
4 7 (1.97%) Android
4 7 (1.97%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.84%) Mac OS
5 3 (0.84%) Windows
6 2 (0.56%) VMS
7 1 (0.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 233 (65.45%) Agile
2 228 (64.04%) TDD
3 225 (63.20%) CI/CD
4 207 (58.15%) Test Automation
5 143 (40.17%) Microservices
6 130 (36.52%) DevOps
7 81 (22.75%) Scrum
8 76 (21.35%) Problem-Solving
9 73 (20.51%) Continuous Improvement
10 70 (19.66%) Test Strategy
11 68 (19.10%) API Testing
12 62 (17.42%) Software Engineering
13 57 (16.01%) AI
14 48 (13.48%) Mentoring
15 45 (12.64%) Continuous Integration
16 42 (11.80%) Containerisation
16 42 (11.80%) Observability
17 41 (11.52%) Kanban
17 41 (11.52%) SDLC
17 41 (11.52%) Stakeholder Management
Programming Languages
1 212 (59.55%) Java
2 92 (25.84%) SQL
3 71 (19.94%) Python
4 58 (16.29%) C#
4 58 (16.29%) JavaScript
5 31 (8.71%) TypeScript
6 15 (4.21%) C++
7 8 (2.25%) Groovy
7 8 (2.25%) Kotlin
8 7 (1.97%) Apex Code
9 6 (1.69%) T-SQL
10 5 (1.40%) Go
10 5 (1.40%) Ruby
11 4 (1.12%) Perl
11 4 (1.12%) R
11 4 (1.12%) Shell Script
12 3 (0.84%) Scala
13 2 (0.56%) Bash
13 2 (0.56%) Cypher
13 2 (0.56%) VBA
Qualifications
1 93 (26.12%) Security Cleared
2 75 (21.07%) SC Cleared
3 24 (6.74%) Degree
4 21 (5.90%) BPSS Clearance
5 15 (4.21%) Computer Science Degree
5 15 (4.21%) ISTQB
6 8 (2.25%) DV Cleared
7 7 (1.97%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
8 5 (1.40%) AWS Certification
8 5 (1.40%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.12%) Microsoft Certification
10 3 (0.84%) CSPO
10 3 (0.84%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 1 (0.28%) ISEB
11 1 (0.28%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.28%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 68 (19.10%) QA
2 47 (13.20%) Accessibility
3 16 (4.49%) Data Quality
3 16 (4.49%) WCAG
4 12 (3.37%) GDPR
5 2 (0.56%) ISO 20022
6 1 (0.28%) EMIR
6 1 (0.28%) MiFID
6 1 (0.28%) SEPA
6 1 (0.28%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 97 (27.25%) Docker
2 9 (2.53%) Postfix
3 1 (0.28%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 80 (22.47%) Kubernetes
2 46 (12.92%) Grafana
3 37 (10.39%) Prometheus
4 32 (8.99%) Terraform
5 7 (1.97%) Ansible
6 4 (1.12%) Kibana
7 3 (0.84%) Istio
8 2 (0.56%) Amdocs OSS
8 2 (0.56%) Argo
8 2 (0.56%) Consul
8 2 (0.56%) Rancher
8 2 (0.56%) Zipkin
9 1 (0.28%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.28%) EMC VPLEX
9 1 (0.28%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 26 (7.30%) Oracle
2 18 (5.06%) Salesforce
3 17 (4.78%) Microsoft
3 17 (4.78%) Sybase
4 16 (4.49%) Google
5 14 (3.93%) Atlassian
6 12 (3.37%) IBM
7 11 (3.09%) Jaspersoft
7 11 (3.09%) Splunk
8 8 (2.25%) Checkmarx
8 8 (2.25%) Conga
8 8 (2.25%) GoCardless
9 6 (1.69%) Dynatrace
10 5 (1.40%) ServiceNow
11 4 (1.12%) Databricks
12 3 (0.84%) CA Agile Central
12 3 (0.84%) Guidewire
12 3 (0.84%) OpenAI
12 3 (0.84%) OpenLink
13 2 (0.56%) Bloomberg