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

6 months to
30 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 343 288 286
Rank change year-on-year -55 -2 -66
Contract jobs citing BDD 348 263 340
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.68% 0.86% 0.79%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.80% 0.95% 0.92%
Number of daily rates quoted 205 168 251
10th Percentile £350 £358 £350
25th Percentile £400 £412 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £540
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -7.41% -10.00%
75th Percentile £550 £581 £644
90th Percentile £683 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £453 £460 £525
% change year-on-year -1.52% -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 43,613 27,816 36,814
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.98% 90.91% 85.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,139 17,565 23,448
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £414 £405 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £504 £525
Median % change year-on-year +2.18% -4.00% -4.55%
75th Percentile £623 £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 2,612 1,364 2,554
10th Percentile £14.82 £14.20 £12.74
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.49 £16.06
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £37.50
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -32.93% +4.17%
75th Percentile £68.00 £53.95 £61.30
90th Percentile £81.25 £70.00 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £44.50 £25.00 £38.12
% change year-on-year +78.00% -34.42% +8.91%

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 30 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 30 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 -53 280 £466 -9.02% 67
UK excluding London -22 202 £453 -1.52% 51
London -84 110 £488 -17.02% 25
Work from Home -29 106 £450 -10.00% 47
North of England -38 83 £453 -1.52% 16
Midlands -29 47 £425 -11.69% 11
West Midlands -24 46 £425 -15.00% 9
North West -18 43 £438 +8.83% 8
Scotland +1 30 £451 +12.81% 1
Yorkshire -50 26 £620 +19.29% 5
North East -22 19 £450 +7.14% 3
South West -24 19 £525 +23.53% 2
South East -72 15 £359 -12.97% 19
East of England -19 8 £510 - 4
Wales -12 2 £650 - 2
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 (14.08%) Confluence
2 5 (1.44%) Apache Spark
3 3 (0.86%) Apache
3 3 (0.86%) Apache Airflow
3 3 (0.86%) SharePoint
4 2 (0.57%) OpenStack
5 1 (0.29%) Camunda
5 1 (0.29%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.86%) Notion
2 2 (0.57%) 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 (2.30%) Payment Gateway
2 4 (1.15%) Dynamics CRM
3 3 (0.86%) Findur
4 2 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
4 2 (0.57%) Workday HCM
5 1 (0.29%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 131 (37.64%) AWS
2 107 (30.75%) Azure
3 90 (25.86%) GitHub
4 49 (14.08%) Azure DevOps
4 49 (14.08%) GCP
5 44 (12.64%) GitHub Actions
6 29 (8.33%) Serverless
7 25 (7.18%) Amazon S3
8 24 (6.90%) Amazon SQS
9 23 (6.61%) Amazon EC2
10 21 (6.03%) AWS Lambda
11 19 (5.46%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 13 (3.74%) BrowserStack
12 13 (3.74%) ChatGPT
13 12 (3.45%) AWS KMS
13 12 (3.45%) GitHub Copilot
13 12 (3.45%) Route 53
14 11 (3.16%) Anthropic Claude
15 10 (2.87%) Power Platform
16 7 (2.01%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.72%) 3GPP
1 6 (1.72%) RTP
1 6 (1.72%) Wireshark
2 3 (0.86%) Internet
2 3 (0.86%) WAN
3 2 (0.57%) DSL
3 2 (0.57%) Firewall
3 2 (0.57%) 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 55 (15.80%) MongoDB
2 49 (14.08%) PostgreSQL
3 25 (7.18%) Relational Database
4 20 (5.75%) DynamoDB
5 18 (5.17%) Amazon RDS
5 18 (5.17%) NoSQL
6 17 (4.89%) SQL Server
7 16 (4.60%) Amazon Aurora
8 15 (4.31%) Db2
9 11 (3.16%) Metadata
10 10 (2.87%) Data Lake
10 10 (2.87%) Oracle Database
11 8 (2.30%) MySQL
12 7 (2.01%) Power BI
13 5 (1.44%) Amazon Athena
13 5 (1.44%) Couchbase
13 5 (1.44%) Tableau
14 4 (1.15%) BigQuery
14 4 (1.15%) Data Warehouse
15 3 (0.86%) Looker
Development Applications
1 115 (33.05%) Cucumber
2 95 (27.30%) Git
3 94 (27.01%) Jenkins
4 93 (26.72%) Selenium
5 71 (20.40%) GitLab
6 68 (19.54%) JUnit
7 67 (19.25%) JIRA
8 45 (12.93%) Postman
8 45 (12.93%) REST Assured
9 42 (12.07%) WebDriver
10 40 (11.49%) Mockito
11 30 (8.62%) JMeter
11 30 (8.62%) SonarQube
12 22 (6.32%) Maven
13 21 (6.03%) Cypress.io
14 19 (5.46%) SpecFlow
15 18 (5.17%) Gatling
16 17 (4.89%) TeamCity
17 12 (3.45%) Bitbucket
17 12 (3.45%) DbUnit
General
1 97 (27.87%) Social Skills
2 74 (21.26%) Finance
3 70 (20.11%) Public Sector
4 50 (14.37%) Analytical Skills
5 39 (11.21%) Banking
6 12 (3.45%) Front Office
7 9 (2.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 9 (2.59%) Organisational Skills
7 9 (2.59%) Retail
8 8 (2.30%) Investment Banking
8 8 (2.30%) Military
9 5 (1.44%) Aviation
9 5 (1.44%) Fire and Rescue
9 5 (1.44%) Influencing Skills
9 5 (1.44%) Police
10 4 (1.15%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.86%) Billing
11 3 (0.86%) Marketing
12 2 (0.57%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.57%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 111 (31.90%) Developer
2 75 (21.55%) Java Developer
3 67 (19.25%) Senior
4 58 (16.67%) Test Engineer
5 42 (12.07%) Lead
6 37 (10.63%) Software Engineer
7 31 (8.91%) Test Automation Engineer
8 29 (8.33%) Tester
9 23 (6.61%) Automation Tester
10 21 (6.03%) Senior Developer
10 21 (6.03%) Senior Java Developer
11 19 (5.46%) Java Engineer
11 19 (5.46%) Test Leader
12 16 (4.60%) Analyst
13 13 (3.74%) QA Engineer
13 13 (3.74%) Senior Software Engineer
13 13 (3.74%) Senior Tester
14 12 (3.45%) Automation Test Lead
15 11 (3.16%) Salesforce Engineer
15 11 (3.16%) Senior Automation Tester
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 93 (26.72%) Spring
2 73 (20.98%) Spring Boot
3 64 (18.39%) Playwright
4 63 (18.10%) REST
5 55 (15.80%) Kafka
6 48 (13.79%) Gherkin
7 42 (12.07%) RESTful
8 34 (9.77%) .NET
9 30 (8.62%) AngularJS
9 30 (8.62%) WireMock
10 26 (7.47%) Node.js
11 25 (7.18%) ActiveMQ
11 25 (7.18%) React
12 21 (6.03%) Spring Cloud
13 20 (5.75%) SOAP
14 17 (4.89%) JPA
14 17 (4.89%) Web Services
15 16 (4.60%) Hibernate
15 16 (4.60%) JAX-RS
16 14 (4.02%) Spring Batch
Miscellaneous
1 36 (10.34%) Distributed Systems
2 33 (9.48%) Cloud Native
3 31 (8.91%) Product Ownership
4 16 (4.60%) Distributed Architecture
5 13 (3.74%) Enterprise Software
5 13 (3.74%) Equity Derivative
6 10 (2.87%) Derivative
7 8 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
8 7 (2.01%) Mobile App
9 5 (1.44%) Onboarding
9 5 (1.44%) Robotics
9 5 (1.44%) Self-Motivation
10 4 (1.15%) Distributed Applications
11 3 (0.86%) Equities
11 3 (0.86%) Fixed Income
11 3 (0.86%) Public Cloud
11 3 (0.86%) Taxonomies
11 3 (0.86%) Virtual Team
12 2 (0.57%) Management Information System
12 2 (0.57%) PKI
Operating Systems
1 50 (14.37%) Linux
2 21 (6.03%) Unix
3 10 (2.87%) Mac OS X
4 5 (1.44%) Android
4 5 (1.44%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.86%) Mac OS
5 3 (0.86%) Windows
6 2 (0.57%) VMS
7 1 (0.29%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 220 (63.22%) Agile
2 217 (62.36%) TDD
3 213 (61.21%) CI/CD
4 201 (57.76%) Test Automation
5 140 (40.23%) Microservices
6 126 (36.21%) DevOps
7 75 (21.55%) Scrum
8 68 (19.54%) Problem-Solving
8 68 (19.54%) Test Strategy
9 67 (19.25%) Software Engineering
10 66 (18.97%) Continuous Improvement
11 65 (18.68%) API Testing
12 48 (13.79%) AI
12 48 (13.79%) Mentoring
13 45 (12.93%) SDLC
14 43 (12.36%) Containerisation
15 41 (11.78%) Observability
16 38 (10.92%) Continuous Integration
17 35 (10.06%) Kanban
18 34 (9.77%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 216 (62.07%) Java
2 90 (25.86%) SQL
3 68 (19.54%) Python
4 56 (16.09%) JavaScript
5 55 (15.80%) C#
6 29 (8.33%) TypeScript
7 16 (4.60%) C++
8 8 (2.30%) Groovy
8 8 (2.30%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.01%) Apex Code
10 6 (1.72%) T-SQL
11 4 (1.15%) Go
11 4 (1.15%) Perl
11 4 (1.15%) Ruby
12 3 (0.86%) Shell Script
13 2 (0.57%) Bash
13 2 (0.57%) Bicep
13 2 (0.57%) PromQL
13 2 (0.57%) Scala
13 2 (0.57%) VBA
Qualifications
1 93 (26.72%) Security Cleared
2 76 (21.84%) SC Cleared
3 23 (6.61%) Degree
4 21 (6.03%) BPSS Clearance
5 14 (4.02%) Computer Science Degree
6 12 (3.45%) ISTQB
7 8 (2.30%) DV Cleared
8 6 (1.72%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 5 (1.44%) AWS Certification
9 5 (1.44%) Azure Certification
10 3 (0.86%) CSPO
11 2 (0.57%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.57%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 1 (0.29%) ISEB
12 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 60 (17.24%) QA
2 42 (12.07%) Accessibility
3 15 (4.31%) Data Quality
4 11 (3.16%) WCAG
5 8 (2.30%) GDPR
6 2 (0.57%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.29%) EMIR
7 1 (0.29%) MiFID
7 1 (0.29%) SEPA
System Software
1 95 (27.30%) Docker
2 9 (2.59%) Postfix
3 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 78 (22.41%) Kubernetes
2 45 (12.93%) Grafana
3 37 (10.63%) Prometheus
4 32 (9.20%) Terraform
5 7 (2.01%) Ansible
6 3 (0.86%) Istio
6 3 (0.86%) Kibana
7 2 (0.57%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.57%) Consul
7 2 (0.57%) Rancher
7 2 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.57%) 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 25 (7.18%) Oracle
2 17 (4.89%) Salesforce
3 16 (4.60%) Sybase
4 15 (4.31%) Atlassian
5 14 (4.02%) Google
6 11 (3.16%) IBM
6 11 (3.16%) Jaspersoft
6 11 (3.16%) Splunk
7 9 (2.59%) Microsoft
8 8 (2.30%) Checkmarx
8 8 (2.30%) Conga
8 8 (2.30%) GoCardless
9 6 (1.72%) Databricks
9 6 (1.72%) Dynatrace
10 5 (1.44%) ServiceNow
11 4 (1.15%) Veracode
12 3 (0.86%) OpenLink
13 2 (0.57%) CA Agile Central
13 2 (0.57%) SAP
13 2 (0.57%) Solace