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

6 months to
25 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 345 292 271
Rank change year-on-year -53 -21 -79
Contract jobs citing BDD 305 248 349
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.63% 0.86% 0.82%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.75% 0.95% 0.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 166 162 264
10th Percentile £350 £363 £350
25th Percentile £400 £410 £445
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -4.76% -12.50%
75th Percentile £562 £584 £638
90th Percentile £694 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £467 £460 £500
% change year-on-year +1.41% -8.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 2
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £46.25 - -
Median hourly rate £47.50 - £56.25
75th Percentile £48.75 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £47.50 - £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 40,852 26,213 36,586
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.38% 91.03% 85.87%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,586 16,831 23,574
10th Percentile £325 £303 £300
25th Percentile £413 £409 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £510 £513 £525
Median % change year-on-year -0.49% -2.38% -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £738 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £498 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +4.74% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,418 1,066 2,483
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £19.85 £18.13 £16.00
Median hourly rate £42.13 £27.59 £36.05
Median % change year-on-year +52.71% -23.47% -0.22%
75th Percentile £67.50 £58.73 £60.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £75.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.69 £25.15 £38.00
% change year-on-year +73.72% -33.82% +8.57%

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 May 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 May 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 -68 255 £475 -6.17% 81
UK excluding London -37 183 £467 +1.41% 65
London -85 101 £500 -9.09% 23
Work from Home -28 88 £448 -12.68% 55
North of England -42 84 £450 +1.41% 17
North West -11 45 £431 +8.70% 10
Midlands -38 38 £425 -7.86% 16
West Midlands -39 37 £425 -8.11% 5
Yorkshire -55 30 £620 +19.29% 5
Scotland +14 25 £438 +12.90% 1
South West -22 17 £525 - 6
North East -21 13 £426 +1.31% 3
South East -66 12 £358 -28.40% 16
East of England -25 8 £510 - 3
Northern Ireland - 2 - - 3
Wales -11 1 £650 - 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 (12.79%) Confluence
2 3 (0.98%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 3 (0.98%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.66%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.33%) Camunda
4 1 (0.33%) nginx
4 1 (0.33%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.33%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.98%) Notion
2 2 (0.66%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.33%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.33%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.33%) Mingle
3 1 (0.33%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (2.62%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.98%) Findur
3 2 (0.66%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.66%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.33%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 110 (36.07%) AWS
2 85 (27.87%) Azure
3 74 (24.26%) GitHub
4 43 (14.10%) GCP
5 33 (10.82%) Azure DevOps
6 30 (9.84%) GitHub Actions
7 25 (8.20%) Serverless
8 22 (7.21%) Amazon S3
9 21 (6.89%) Amazon EC2
9 21 (6.89%) Amazon SQS
10 19 (6.23%) AWS Lambda
11 18 (5.90%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 14 (4.59%) BrowserStack
13 12 (3.93%) AWS KMS
13 12 (3.93%) Route 53
14 11 (3.61%) ChatGPT
15 10 (3.28%) GitHub Copilot
15 10 (3.28%) SaaS
16 9 (2.95%) Anthropic Claude
17 6 (1.97%) AWS Step Functions
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.64%) 3GPP
1 5 (1.64%) RTP
1 5 (1.64%) Wireshark
2 3 (0.98%) WAN
3 2 (0.66%) NaaS
4 1 (0.33%) DSL
4 1 (0.33%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (0.33%) Firewall
4 1 (0.33%) HTTP
4 1 (0.33%) iSCSI
4 1 (0.33%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 45 (14.75%) MongoDB
1 45 (14.75%) PostgreSQL
2 22 (7.21%) Relational Database
3 18 (5.90%) DynamoDB
3 18 (5.90%) SQL Server
4 17 (5.57%) Amazon RDS
5 16 (5.25%) Amazon Aurora
6 15 (4.92%) MySQL
7 12 (3.93%) DB2
8 11 (3.61%) Metadata
9 10 (3.28%) Oracle Database
10 8 (2.62%) NoSQL
11 7 (2.30%) Data Lake
12 4 (1.31%) Amazon Athena
12 4 (1.31%) Power BI
13 3 (0.98%) Delta Lake
13 3 (0.98%) MariaDB
14 2 (0.66%) Elasticsearch
14 2 (0.66%) Flink
14 2 (0.66%) InfluxDB
Development Applications
1 104 (34.10%) Cucumber
2 83 (27.21%) Git
2 83 (27.21%) Selenium
3 82 (26.89%) Jenkins
4 63 (20.66%) JIRA
5 59 (19.34%) GitLab
6 57 (18.69%) JUnit
7 42 (13.77%) Postman
7 42 (13.77%) REST Assured
8 34 (11.15%) Mockito
9 33 (10.82%) WebDriver
10 30 (9.84%) SonarQube
11 25 (8.20%) JMeter
12 17 (5.57%) Maven
13 15 (4.92%) Cypress.io
14 14 (4.59%) SpecFlow
14 14 (4.59%) TeamCity
15 13 (4.26%) Gatling
16 12 (3.93%) DbUnit
16 12 (3.93%) Serenity BDD
General
1 80 (26.23%) Social Skills
2 71 (23.28%) Finance
3 60 (19.67%) Public Sector
4 40 (13.11%) Analytical Skills
5 34 (11.15%) Banking
6 10 (3.28%) Front Office
7 9 (2.95%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.62%) Organisational Skills
9 5 (1.64%) Military
10 4 (1.31%) Aviation
10 4 (1.31%) Fire and Rescue
10 4 (1.31%) Influencing Skills
10 4 (1.31%) Police
10 4 (1.31%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.98%) Billing
11 3 (0.98%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 3 (0.98%) Retail
12 2 (0.66%) Automotive
12 2 (0.66%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.66%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 95 (31.15%) Developer
2 62 (20.33%) Java Developer
3 58 (19.02%) Test Engineer
4 51 (16.72%) Senior
5 43 (14.10%) Lead
6 32 (10.49%) Test Automation Engineer
7 31 (10.16%) Software Engineer
8 22 (7.21%) Tester
9 19 (6.23%) Senior Developer
10 18 (5.90%) Automation Tester
10 18 (5.90%) Senior Java Developer
10 18 (5.90%) Test Leader
11 15 (4.92%) Automation Test Lead
12 14 (4.59%) Java Engineer
13 13 (4.26%) Analyst
13 13 (4.26%) Lead Test Engineer
14 12 (3.93%) QA Engineer
15 10 (3.28%) Business Analyst
15 10 (3.28%) Senior Automation Tester
15 10 (3.28%) Senior Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (27.54%) Spring
2 66 (21.64%) Spring Boot
3 58 (19.02%) REST
4 52 (17.05%) Playwright
5 43 (14.10%) Gherkin
6 41 (13.44%) RESTful
7 40 (13.11%) Kafka
8 31 (10.16%) .NET
8 31 (10.16%) AngularJS
9 26 (8.52%) Node.js
9 26 (8.52%) React
10 22 (7.21%) ActiveMQ
10 22 (7.21%) WireMock
11 21 (6.89%) Spring Cloud
12 18 (5.90%) SOAP
12 18 (5.90%) Web Services
13 16 (5.25%) Hibernate
13 16 (5.25%) JPA
14 14 (4.59%) Spring Batch
15 13 (4.26%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 31 (10.16%) Distributed Systems
2 29 (9.51%) Cloud Native
3 25 (8.20%) Product Ownership
4 14 (4.59%) Distributed Architecture
5 11 (3.61%) Enterprise Software
5 11 (3.61%) Equity Derivative
5 11 (3.61%) Mobile App
6 10 (3.28%) Derivative
7 4 (1.31%) Distributed Applications
7 4 (1.31%) Legacy Systems
7 4 (1.31%) Onboarding
7 4 (1.31%) Public Cloud
7 4 (1.31%) Robotics
7 4 (1.31%) Self-Motivation
8 2 (0.66%) Data Protection Act
8 2 (0.66%) Hybrid Cloud
8 2 (0.66%) iSeries
8 2 (0.66%) Private Cloud
8 2 (0.66%) Synthetic Data
8 2 (0.66%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 43 (14.10%) Linux
2 16 (5.25%) Unix
3 10 (3.28%) Mac OS X
4 5 (1.64%) Android
4 5 (1.64%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.66%) Mac OS
5 2 (0.66%) VMS
5 2 (0.66%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 186 (60.98%) TDD
2 185 (60.66%) Test Automation
3 176 (57.70%) CI/CD
4 175 (57.38%) Agile
5 119 (39.02%) Microservices
6 106 (34.75%) DevOps
7 67 (21.97%) API Testing
8 65 (21.31%) Test Strategy
9 61 (20.00%) Continuous Improvement
9 61 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
10 56 (18.36%) Scrum
11 51 (16.72%) Software Engineering
12 44 (14.43%) AI
13 40 (13.11%) Mentoring
13 40 (13.11%) SDLC
14 38 (12.46%) Containerisation
14 38 (12.46%) Observability
15 32 (10.49%) Continuous Integration
16 31 (10.16%) Performance Testing
17 30 (9.84%) Software Testing
Programming Languages
1 192 (62.95%) Java
2 84 (27.54%) SQL
3 72 (23.61%) Python
4 52 (17.05%) JavaScript
5 42 (13.77%) C#
6 26 (8.52%) TypeScript
7 15 (4.92%) C++
8 10 (3.28%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.30%) Apex Code
9 7 (2.30%) Ruby
10 6 (1.97%) PHP
11 5 (1.64%) Go
11 5 (1.64%) T-SQL
12 4 (1.31%) Perl
13 3 (0.98%) Groovy
14 2 (0.66%) PromQL
14 2 (0.66%) Scala
14 2 (0.66%) VBA
15 1 (0.33%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.33%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 74 (24.26%) Security Cleared
2 61 (20.00%) SC Cleared
3 21 (6.89%) Degree
4 12 (3.93%) Computer Science Degree
5 11 (3.61%) BPSS Clearance
6 9 (2.95%) ISTQB
7 6 (1.97%) AWS Certification
8 5 (1.64%) Azure Certification
9 4 (1.31%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 3 (0.98%) DV Cleared
11 1 (0.33%) ISEB
11 1 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.33%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 63 (20.66%) QA
2 32 (10.49%) Accessibility
3 12 (3.93%) Data Quality
4 6 (1.97%) WCAG
5 1 (0.33%) ISO 20022
System Software
1 84 (27.54%) Docker
2 9 (2.95%) Postfix
3 1 (0.33%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 64 (20.98%) Kubernetes
2 42 (13.77%) Grafana
3 35 (11.48%) Prometheus
4 22 (7.21%) Terraform
5 6 (1.97%) Ansible
6 3 (0.98%) Kibana
7 2 (0.66%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.66%) Consul
7 2 (0.66%) Istio
7 2 (0.66%) Rancher
7 2 (0.66%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.66%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.33%) EMC VPLEX
8 1 (0.33%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.33%) HP ALM
8 1 (0.33%) HP Fortify
Vendors
1 23 (7.54%) Oracle
2 15 (4.92%) Atlassian
2 15 (4.92%) Salesforce
3 13 (4.26%) Sybase
4 12 (3.93%) Google
5 11 (3.61%) Jaspersoft
5 11 (3.61%) Splunk
6 10 (3.28%) IBM
6 10 (3.28%) ServiceNow
7 8 (2.62%) Checkmarx
7 8 (2.62%) Conga
7 8 (2.62%) GoCardless
8 7 (2.30%) Databricks
9 5 (1.64%) Dynatrace
10 4 (1.31%) Veracode
11 3 (0.98%) Adobe
11 3 (0.98%) Microsoft
11 3 (0.98%) OpenLink
12 2 (0.66%) Bloomberg
12 2 (0.66%) SAP