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

6 months to
5 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 357 289 286
Rank change year-on-year -68 -3 -79
Contract jobs citing BDD 315 250 342
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.64% 0.86% 0.80%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.76% 0.95% 0.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 182 156 258
10th Percentile £350 £360 £350
25th Percentile £400 £410 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year -6.00% -4.76% -12.50%
75th Percentile £550 £576 £638
90th Percentile £688 £750 £741
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £444 £500
% change year-on-year +4.23% -11.25% -
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 41,594 26,332 36,644
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.70% 91.01% 85.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 25,970 16,762 23,491
10th Percentile £325 £300 £300
25th Percentile £413 £406 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £510 £525
Median % change year-on-year +0.49% -2.86% -4.55%
75th Percentile £614 £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 2,502 1,133 2,525
10th Percentile £14.68 £14.20 £12.75
25th Percentile £20.00 £17.87 £16.00
Median hourly rate £43.96 £27.53 £36.50
Median % change year-on-year +59.68% -24.58% +1.39%
75th Percentile £68.00 £56.25 £60.75
90th Percentile £81.24 £73.75 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £45.29 £25.15 £38.12
% change year-on-year +80.09% -34.02% +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 5 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 5 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 -52 260 £475 -5.00% 92
UK excluding London -37 187 £463 +4.23% 70
London -69 103 £500 -11.03% 35
Work from Home -29 91 £450 -10.00% 64
North of England -43 81 £453 +3.54% 18
Midlands -29 40 £425 -11.69% 17
West Midlands -33 39 £425 -15.00% 7
North West -11 38 £431 +10.23% 13
Yorkshire -45 31 £585 +12.55% 4
Scotland +7 26 £438 +12.90% 2
South West -20 18 £525 +27.27% 6
North East -21 16 £450 +7.14% 1
South East -69 13 £359 -24.53% 17
East of England -21 8 £510 - 3
Northern Ireland - 3 - - 5
Wales -18 2 £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 43 (13.65%) Confluence
2 3 (0.95%) Adobe Experience Manager
2 3 (0.95%) Apache Spark
3 2 (0.63%) OpenStack
4 1 (0.32%) Camunda
4 1 (0.32%) nginx
4 1 (0.32%) SharePoint
4 1 (0.32%) Tomcat
Applications
1 3 (0.95%) Notion
2 2 (0.63%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.32%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.32%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 1 (0.32%) Mingle
3 1 (0.32%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 8 (2.54%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.95%) Findur
3 2 (0.63%) Oracle EBS
3 2 (0.63%) Workday HCM
4 1 (0.32%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 116 (36.83%) AWS
2 94 (29.84%) Azure
3 81 (25.71%) GitHub
4 45 (14.29%) GCP
5 37 (11.75%) Azure DevOps
5 37 (11.75%) GitHub Actions
6 26 (8.25%) Serverless
7 23 (7.30%) Amazon SQS
8 22 (6.98%) Amazon EC2
8 22 (6.98%) Amazon S3
9 20 (6.35%) AWS Lambda
10 18 (5.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 14 (4.44%) BrowserStack
12 12 (3.81%) AWS KMS
12 12 (3.81%) Route 53
13 11 (3.49%) ChatGPT
14 10 (3.17%) GitHub Copilot
14 10 (3.17%) SaaS
15 9 (2.86%) Anthropic Claude
16 6 (1.90%) Amazon EKS
Communications & Networking
1 6 (1.90%) 3GPP
1 6 (1.90%) RTP
1 6 (1.90%) Wireshark
2 3 (0.95%) WAN
3 2 (0.63%) NaaS
4 1 (0.32%) DSL
4 1 (0.32%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (0.32%) Firewall
4 1 (0.32%) HTTP
4 1 (0.32%) Internet
4 1 (0.32%) iSCSI
4 1 (0.32%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 49 (15.56%) PostgreSQL
2 46 (14.60%) MongoDB
3 22 (6.98%) Relational Database
4 19 (6.03%) SQL Server
5 18 (5.71%) DynamoDB
6 17 (5.40%) Amazon RDS
7 16 (5.08%) Amazon Aurora
8 15 (4.76%) MySQL
9 12 (3.81%) Db2
10 11 (3.49%) Metadata
10 11 (3.49%) NoSQL
11 10 (3.17%) Oracle Database
12 7 (2.22%) Data Lake
13 4 (1.27%) Amazon Athena
13 4 (1.27%) Power BI
14 3 (0.95%) Delta Lake
14 3 (0.95%) MariaDB
15 2 (0.63%) Couchbase
15 2 (0.63%) Elasticsearch
15 2 (0.63%) TimescaleDB
Development Applications
1 108 (34.29%) Cucumber
2 89 (28.25%) Selenium
3 87 (27.62%) Jenkins
4 86 (27.30%) Git
5 65 (20.63%) JIRA
6 64 (20.32%) GitLab
7 59 (18.73%) JUnit
8 44 (13.97%) REST Assured
9 42 (13.33%) Postman
10 37 (11.75%) WebDriver
11 34 (10.79%) Mockito
12 29 (9.21%) SonarQube
13 27 (8.57%) JMeter
14 16 (5.08%) Maven
14 16 (5.08%) SpecFlow
15 15 (4.76%) TeamCity
16 14 (4.44%) Cypress.io
16 14 (4.44%) Gatling
17 12 (3.81%) DbUnit
17 12 (3.81%) Serenity BDD
General
1 85 (26.98%) Social Skills
2 69 (21.90%) Finance
3 60 (19.05%) Public Sector
4 40 (12.70%) Analytical Skills
5 33 (10.48%) Banking
6 12 (3.81%) Front Office
7 9 (2.86%) Investment Banking
7 9 (2.86%) Organisational Skills
8 6 (1.90%) Military
9 5 (1.59%) Aviation
9 5 (1.59%) Fire and Rescue
9 5 (1.59%) Police
9 5 (1.59%) Retail
10 4 (1.27%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 4 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
10 4 (1.27%) Presentation Skills
11 3 (0.95%) Billing
12 2 (0.63%) Automotive
12 2 (0.63%) Manufacturing
12 2 (0.63%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 95 (30.16%) Developer
2 63 (20.00%) Java Developer
3 59 (18.73%) Test Engineer
4 58 (18.41%) Senior
5 45 (14.29%) Lead
6 34 (10.79%) Software Engineer
7 32 (10.16%) Test Automation Engineer
8 24 (7.62%) Tester
9 19 (6.03%) Senior Developer
10 18 (5.71%) Automation Tester
10 18 (5.71%) Senior Java Developer
10 18 (5.71%) Test Leader
11 16 (5.08%) Java Engineer
12 15 (4.76%) Automation Test Lead
12 15 (4.76%) QA Engineer
13 13 (4.13%) Lead Test Engineer
14 11 (3.49%) Analyst
14 11 (3.49%) Senior Software Engineer
14 11 (3.49%) Senior Tester
15 10 (3.17%) Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 83 (26.35%) Spring
2 66 (20.95%) Spring Boot
3 61 (19.37%) REST
4 56 (17.78%) Playwright
5 42 (13.33%) Kafka
6 41 (13.02%) RESTful
7 39 (12.38%) Gherkin
8 36 (11.43%) .NET
9 31 (9.84%) AngularJS
10 25 (7.94%) Node.js
11 24 (7.62%) React
11 24 (7.62%) WireMock
12 22 (6.98%) ActiveMQ
13 21 (6.67%) Spring Cloud
14 18 (5.71%) SOAP
14 18 (5.71%) Web Services
15 17 (5.40%) JPA
16 16 (5.08%) Hibernate
17 14 (4.44%) Spring Batch
18 13 (4.13%) JAX-RS
Miscellaneous
1 32 (10.16%) Distributed Systems
2 31 (9.84%) Cloud Native
3 24 (7.62%) Product Ownership
4 16 (5.08%) Distributed Architecture
5 12 (3.81%) Enterprise Software
6 11 (3.49%) Equity Derivative
7 10 (3.17%) Derivative
8 7 (2.22%) Mobile App
9 5 (1.59%) Legacy Systems
9 5 (1.59%) Robotics
10 4 (1.27%) Distributed Applications
10 4 (1.27%) Onboarding
10 4 (1.27%) Public Cloud
10 4 (1.27%) Self-Motivation
11 3 (0.95%) Equities
11 3 (0.95%) Fixed Income
12 2 (0.63%) Data Protection Act
12 2 (0.63%) Hybrid Cloud
12 2 (0.63%) Private Cloud
12 2 (0.63%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 46 (14.60%) Linux
2 16 (5.08%) Unix
3 10 (3.17%) Mac OS X
4 5 (1.59%) Android
4 5 (1.59%) Apple iOS
5 2 (0.63%) Mac OS
5 2 (0.63%) VMS
5 2 (0.63%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 197 (62.54%) TDD
2 189 (60.00%) CI/CD
3 185 (58.73%) Agile
3 185 (58.73%) Test Automation
4 123 (39.05%) Microservices
5 112 (35.56%) DevOps
6 66 (20.95%) Test Strategy
7 65 (20.63%) API Testing
8 60 (19.05%) Scrum
9 59 (18.73%) Continuous Improvement
10 58 (18.41%) Software Engineering
11 56 (17.78%) Problem-Solving
12 45 (14.29%) AI
13 41 (13.02%) Containerisation
14 40 (12.70%) Mentoring
14 40 (12.70%) Observability
14 40 (12.70%) SDLC
15 34 (10.79%) Validation
16 32 (10.16%) Continuous Integration
16 32 (10.16%) Performance Testing
Programming Languages
1 196 (62.22%) Java
2 88 (27.94%) SQL
3 72 (22.86%) Python
4 54 (17.14%) JavaScript
5 48 (15.24%) C#
6 27 (8.57%) TypeScript
7 16 (5.08%) C++
8 7 (2.22%) Apex Code
8 7 (2.22%) Kotlin
9 6 (1.90%) PHP
9 6 (1.90%) T-SQL
10 5 (1.59%) Groovy
10 5 (1.59%) Ruby
11 4 (1.27%) Go
11 4 (1.27%) Perl
12 2 (0.63%) PromQL
12 2 (0.63%) Scala
12 2 (0.63%) VBA
13 1 (0.32%) Bicep
13 1 (0.32%) Swift
Qualifications
1 77 (24.44%) Security Cleared
2 65 (20.63%) SC Cleared
3 23 (7.30%) Degree
4 16 (5.08%) BPSS Clearance
5 14 (4.44%) Computer Science Degree
6 7 (2.22%) ISTQB
7 6 (1.90%) AWS Certification
8 5 (1.59%) Azure Certification
8 5 (1.59%) DV Cleared
9 4 (1.27%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
10 1 (0.32%) ISEB
10 1 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
10 1 (0.32%) Microsoft Certified Professional
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 66 (20.95%) QA
2 33 (10.48%) Accessibility
3 12 (3.81%) Data Quality
4 6 (1.90%) WCAG
5 1 (0.32%) EMIR
5 1 (0.32%) ISO 20022
5 1 (0.32%) MiFID
System Software
1 90 (28.57%) Docker
2 9 (2.86%) Postfix
3 1 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 69 (21.90%) Kubernetes
2 44 (13.97%) Grafana
3 37 (11.75%) Prometheus
4 25 (7.94%) Terraform
5 7 (2.22%) Ansible
6 3 (0.95%) Kibana
7 2 (0.63%) Amdocs OSS
7 2 (0.63%) Consul
7 2 (0.63%) Istio
7 2 (0.63%) Rancher
7 2 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
7 2 (0.63%) Zipkin
8 1 (0.32%) Docker Swarm
8 1 (0.32%) EMC VPLEX
8 1 (0.32%) HAProxy
8 1 (0.32%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 24 (7.62%) Oracle
2 16 (5.08%) Salesforce
3 15 (4.76%) Atlassian
4 14 (4.44%) Sybase
5 12 (3.81%) Google
6 11 (3.49%) Jaspersoft
6 11 (3.49%) Splunk
7 10 (3.17%) ServiceNow
8 8 (2.54%) Checkmarx
8 8 (2.54%) Conga
8 8 (2.54%) GoCardless
8 8 (2.54%) IBM
9 7 (2.22%) Databricks
10 5 (1.59%) Dynatrace
11 4 (1.27%) Veracode
12 3 (0.95%) Adobe
12 3 (0.95%) Microsoft
12 3 (0.95%) OpenLink
13 2 (0.63%) Bloomberg
13 2 (0.63%) SAP