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

6 months to
29 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 338 278 296
Rank change year-on-year -60 +18 -160
Contract jobs citing BDD 275 282 322
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.71% 0.90% 0.73%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.82% 1.01% 0.84%
Number of daily rates quoted 168 162 225
10th Percentile £374 £355 £340
25th Percentile £406 £413 £406
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% - -14.78%
75th Percentile £575 £600 £595
90th Percentile £675 £811 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £489 £500 £488
% change year-on-year -2.25% +2.56% -9.51%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £82.50 - -
Median hourly rate £85.00 - £90.00
75th Percentile £87.50 - -
90th Percentile - - -
UK excluding London median hourly rate - - -

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 33,625 28,045 38,284
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 87.37% 89.09% 87.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 21,290 17,011 25,209
10th Percentile £305 £306 £300
25th Percentile £406 £413 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £613 £638 £640
90th Percentile £723 £738 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £499 £500
% change year-on-year -3.86% -0.15% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,022 880 1,958
10th Percentile £14.50 £15.62 £13.50
25th Percentile £17.69 £21.00 £16.85
Median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £35.96
Median % change year-on-year -22.62% -9.62% +10.65%
75th Percentile £58.00 £62.50 £62.50
90th Percentile £70.00 £75.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £24.71 £30.45 £37.18
% change year-on-year -18.85% -18.10% +39.38%

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 29 January 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 17 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 29 January 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 -74 235 £500 -0.74% 98
UK excluding London -54 138 £489 -2.25% 78
London -31 108 £513 -10.87% 33
North of England -31 104 £500 +11.11% 21
Work from Home -21 72 £475 -9.52% 64
Yorkshire -47 51 £563 +12.50% 4
North West -13 33 £428 +7.00% 17
North East +3 24 £460 +26.90%
Midlands -52 9 £394 -23.73% 11
Scotland +1 7 £400 -5.88% 1
West Midlands -33 7 £488 -5.57% 8
South West -27 6 £425 -19.05% 14
South East -45 5 £550 +10.00% 26
Wales 0 4 £375 - 1
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 1
East Midlands - 2 £310 - 3
East of England -14 1 £375 +20.00% 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 24 (8.73%) Confluence
2 4 (1.45%) Adobe Experience Manager
3 2 (0.73%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.73%) nginx
3 2 (0.73%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.36%) Cloud Foundry
4 1 (0.36%) CMS
4 1 (0.36%) Tomcat
Applications
1 5 (1.82%) Microsoft PowerPoint
1 5 (1.82%) MS Visio
2 3 (1.09%) Microsoft Excel
Business Applications
1 2 (0.73%) Dynamics CRM
1 2 (0.73%) Workday HCM
2 1 (0.36%) Oracle ERP
2 1 (0.36%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 85 (30.91%) AWS
2 57 (20.73%) Azure
3 34 (12.36%) GitHub
4 27 (9.82%) Serverless
5 21 (7.64%) Azure DevOps
6 20 (7.27%) AWS Lambda
7 18 (6.55%) GCP
8 12 (4.36%) Amazon S3
8 12 (4.36%) SaaS
9 11 (4.00%) BrowserStack
10 10 (3.64%) GitHub Actions
11 9 (3.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 9 (3.27%) Amazon ECS
11 9 (3.27%) AWS Step Functions
12 8 (2.91%) Amazon SQS
13 7 (2.55%) Amazon EventBridge
13 7 (2.55%) Apigee
13 7 (2.55%) PaaS
14 6 (2.18%) Amazon EC2
14 6 (2.18%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 5 (1.82%) Cisco IPT
2 3 (1.09%) HTTP
3 1 (0.36%) FTP
3 1 (0.36%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 40 (14.55%) MongoDB
2 26 (9.45%) PostgreSQL
3 19 (6.91%) MySQL
4 15 (5.45%) NoSQL
4 15 (5.45%) Relational Database
5 13 (4.73%) SQL Server
6 12 (4.36%) Amazon RDS
7 9 (3.27%) DynamoDB
7 9 (3.27%) Redis
8 7 (2.55%) Oracle Database
9 6 (2.18%) BigQuery
9 6 (2.18%) Data Lake
9 6 (2.18%) RDBMS
10 5 (1.82%) Amazon Aurora
11 3 (1.09%) Apache Cassandra
11 3 (1.09%) Delta Lake
12 2 (0.73%) Amazon Athena
12 2 (0.73%) Big Data
12 2 (0.73%) DB2
13 1 (0.36%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 95 (34.55%) Cucumber
2 66 (24.00%) Jenkins
3 63 (22.91%) Selenium
4 55 (20.00%) Git
5 54 (19.64%) GitLab
6 51 (18.55%) JIRA
7 39 (14.18%) Postman
8 30 (10.91%) Mockito
9 29 (10.55%) REST Assured
10 22 (8.00%) Cypress.io
11 17 (6.18%) JUnit
11 17 (6.18%) SonarQube
12 15 (5.45%) JMeter
13 13 (4.73%) Bitbucket
14 12 (4.36%) Gradle
14 12 (4.36%) WebDriver
15 11 (4.00%) Maven
16 10 (3.64%) Gatling
17 9 (3.27%) TestRail
18 6 (2.18%) Zephyr
General
1 70 (25.45%) Social Skills
2 57 (20.73%) Public Sector
3 40 (14.55%) Finance
4 26 (9.45%) Banking
5 13 (4.73%) Analytical Skills
6 6 (2.18%) Military
7 5 (1.82%) Front Office
7 5 (1.82%) Legal
8 4 (1.45%) Electronics
9 3 (1.09%) Documentation Skills
9 3 (1.09%) Investment Banking
10 1 (0.36%) Financial Institution
10 1 (0.36%) Influencing Skills
10 1 (0.36%) Manufacturing
10 1 (0.36%) Marketing
10 1 (0.36%) Organisational Skills
10 1 (0.36%) Retail
10 1 (0.36%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 98 (35.64%) Developer
2 63 (22.91%) Java Developer
3 51 (18.55%) Senior
4 48 (17.45%) Test Engineer
5 29 (10.55%) Senior Developer
6 26 (9.45%) Lead
7 25 (9.09%) Senior Java Developer
8 23 (8.36%) Software Engineer
9 21 (7.64%) Test Automation Engineer
10 16 (5.82%) QA Engineer
11 14 (5.09%) Java Engineer
12 13 (4.73%) Tester
13 12 (4.36%) Lead Test Engineer
14 10 (3.64%) Automation Engineer
15 9 (3.27%) Analyst
15 9 (3.27%) Automation Tester
15 9 (3.27%) Senior Test Engineer
16 8 (2.91%) Angular Developer
16 8 (2.91%) Architect
16 8 (2.91%) Technical Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 61 (22.18%) Spring Boot
2 53 (19.27%) REST
3 44 (16.00%) Spring
4 41 (14.91%) Kafka
5 39 (14.18%) RESTful
6 38 (13.82%) Playwright
7 37 (13.45%) React
8 36 (13.09%) Node.js
9 27 (9.82%) Gherkin
10 24 (8.73%) ActiveMQ
10 24 (8.73%) JAX-RS
11 20 (7.27%) .NET
12 18 (6.55%) CSS
13 17 (6.18%) AngularJS
14 16 (5.82%) Jest
15 14 (5.09%) WireMock
16 12 (4.36%) HTML
16 12 (4.36%) JSON
17 11 (4.00%) SOAP
17 11 (4.00%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 29 (10.55%) Product Ownership
2 18 (6.55%) Cloud Native
3 11 (4.00%) Mobile App
4 7 (2.55%) Distributed Systems
4 7 (2.55%) Onboarding
5 6 (2.18%) Client/Server
5 6 (2.18%) Distributed Architecture
5 6 (2.18%) N-Tier
6 5 (1.82%) Equities
6 5 (1.82%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 5 (1.82%) NHS
7 4 (1.45%) Public Cloud
8 3 (1.09%) Analytical Mindset
8 3 (1.09%) Data Protection Act
8 3 (1.09%) Educational Technology
8 3 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
8 3 (1.09%) Mobile Banking
8 3 (1.09%) Private Cloud
9 2 (0.73%) Hybrid Cloud
9 2 (0.73%) iSeries
Operating Systems
1 38 (13.82%) Linux
2 29 (10.55%) Unix
3 20 (7.27%) Mac OS X
4 4 (1.45%) Android
5 3 (1.09%) Apple iOS
5 3 (1.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.73%) Windows
7 1 (0.36%) VMS
7 1 (0.36%) Windows Embedded Compact
Processes & Methodologies
1 185 (67.27%) Agile
2 174 (63.27%) TDD
3 166 (60.36%) Test Automation
4 139 (50.55%) CI/CD
5 130 (47.27%) Microservices
6 65 (23.64%) DevOps
7 59 (21.45%) Problem-Solving
7 59 (21.45%) Scrum
8 54 (19.64%) API Testing
9 50 (18.18%) Software Engineering
10 49 (17.82%) Containerisation
11 42 (15.27%) Test Strategy
12 41 (14.91%) Continuous Improvement
13 38 (13.82%) SDLC
14 36 (13.09%) Non-Functional Testing
15 35 (12.73%) Functional Testing
16 33 (12.00%) Mentoring
16 33 (12.00%) Performance Testing
17 32 (11.64%) Continuous Deployment
18 31 (11.27%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 185 (67.27%) Java
2 58 (21.09%) JavaScript
3 48 (17.45%) SQL
4 47 (17.09%) Python
5 38 (13.82%) TypeScript
6 18 (6.55%) C#
7 11 (4.00%) C++
7 11 (4.00%) Ruby
8 9 (3.27%) Scala
9 8 (2.91%) Kotlin
10 7 (2.55%) PHP
11 6 (2.18%) JSX
12 4 (1.45%) Bash
12 4 (1.45%) C
13 3 (1.09%) Go
13 3 (1.09%) Objective-C
13 3 (1.09%) Swift
14 2 (0.73%) Shell Script
15 1 (0.36%) Groovy
15 1 (0.36%) XPath
Qualifications
1 76 (27.64%) Security Cleared
2 60 (21.82%) SC Cleared
3 14 (5.09%) BPSS Clearance
3 14 (5.09%) ISTQB
4 10 (3.64%) Degree
5 5 (1.82%) Computer Science Degree
5 5 (1.82%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
6 3 (1.09%) AWS Certification
6 3 (1.09%) ISEB
7 2 (0.73%) AWS Certified Developer
7 2 (0.73%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
8 1 (0.36%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.36%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 61 (22.18%) QA
2 35 (12.73%) Accessibility
3 11 (4.00%) WCAG
4 8 (2.91%) GDPR
5 5 (1.82%) PERC
6 3 (1.09%) Data Quality
7 2 (0.73%) HL7
8 1 (0.36%) HMG Security Policy Framework
8 1 (0.36%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 1 (0.36%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 65 (23.64%) Docker
Systems Management
1 46 (16.73%) Kubernetes
2 28 (10.18%) Terraform
3 13 (4.73%) Grafana
4 9 (3.27%) Prometheus
5 8 (2.91%) Ansible
6 2 (0.73%) HP Fortify
6 2 (0.73%) Single Sign-On
7 1 (0.36%) HAProxy
7 1 (0.36%) HP ALM
7 1 (0.36%) Kibana
7 1 (0.36%) Kustomize
7 1 (0.36%) Rancher
Vendors
1 19 (6.91%) Oracle
2 11 (4.00%) Splunk
3 7 (2.55%) Microsoft
3 7 (2.55%) Salesforce
4 6 (2.18%) Atlassian
4 6 (2.18%) Databricks
5 5 (1.82%) Gigya
5 5 (1.82%) Red Hat
5 5 (1.82%) ServiceNow
6 4 (1.45%) Adobe
6 4 (1.45%) Veracode
7 2 (0.73%) IBM
7 2 (0.73%) SAP
7 2 (0.73%) Workday
8 1 (0.36%) CA Agile Central
8 1 (0.36%) HP
8 1 (0.36%) Marketo
8 1 (0.36%) MuleSoft
8 1 (0.36%) TOWER Software
8 1 (0.36%) VMware