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

6 months to
3 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 350 298 248
Rank change year-on-year -52 -50 -6
Contract jobs citing BDD 350 281 364
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 0.66% 0.85% 0.93%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.78% 0.94% 1.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 210 188 258
10th Percentile £312 £352 £363
25th Percentile £400 £412 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £463 £500 £534
Median % change year-on-year -7.50% -6.37% -7.13%
75th Percentile £550 £589 £650
90th Percentile £688 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £425 £500
% change year-on-year +5.88% -15.00% -0.50%
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 45,145 29,940 33,399
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 84.95% 90.42% 85.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 27,873 18,766 21,491
10th Percentile £325 £300 £310
25th Percentile £420 £404 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £625 £625 £638
90th Percentile £725 £734 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,760 1,664 1,872
10th Percentile £14.50 £14.20 £14.00
25th Percentile £19.50 £17.30 £18.14
Median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £40.33
Median % change year-on-year +74.79% -37.63% -5.12%
75th Percentile £68.00 £50.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £68.00 £74.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.96 £23.63 £40.94
% change year-on-year +86.03% -42.28% +2.35%

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 3 August 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 3 August 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 -51 294 £463 -8.87% 103
UK excluding London -11 204 £450 +5.88% 76
London -63 113 £494 -16.31% 35
Work from Home -28 112 £475 -5.00% 77
North of England -26 82 £464 +6.06% 25
Midlands -4 56 £425 -7.86% 15
West Midlands -17 55 £425 -8.11% 9
North West -25 41 £488 +18.90% 17
Scotland +1 25 £465 +7.83% 1
Yorkshire -35 25 £660 +26.98% 5
North East -25 20 £450 +7.14% 4
South East -77 19 £309 -11.79% 18
South West -36 15 £525 +27.27% 8
East of England -9 8 £510 +36.00% 3
Wales -13 2 £650 -
Northern Ireland - 1 - - 7

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 52 (14.86%) Confluence
2 5 (1.43%) Apache Spark
3 4 (1.14%) Apache
3 4 (1.14%) SharePoint
4 3 (0.86%) Apache Airflow
4 3 (0.86%) CMS
4 3 (0.86%) Headless CMS
5 1 (0.29%) Camunda
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 9 (2.57%) Dynamics CRM
2 8 (2.29%) Payment Gateway
3 3 (0.86%) Findur
3 3 (0.86%) Salesforce CRM
4 2 (0.57%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 126 (36.00%) AWS
2 114 (32.57%) Azure
3 94 (26.86%) GitHub
4 53 (15.14%) Azure DevOps
4 53 (15.14%) GCP
5 48 (13.71%) GitHub Actions
6 26 (7.43%) Serverless
7 25 (7.14%) Amazon SQS
8 23 (6.57%) Amazon S3
9 22 (6.29%) Amazon EC2
10 18 (5.14%) Amazon CloudWatch
11 17 (4.86%) AWS Lambda
11 17 (4.86%) GitHub Copilot
12 14 (4.00%) ChatGPT
13 13 (3.71%) AWS KMS
14 12 (3.43%) Anthropic Claude
14 12 (3.43%) Route 53
15 10 (2.86%) Power Automate
16 9 (2.57%) Dynamics 365
16 9 (2.57%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 7 (2.00%) RTP
1 7 (2.00%) Wireshark
2 6 (1.71%) 3GPP
3 3 (0.86%) DSL
3 3 (0.86%) Internet
3 3 (0.86%) WAN
4 2 (0.57%) Firewall
4 2 (0.57%) NaaS
5 1 (0.29%) Fibre Channel
5 1 (0.29%) HTTP
5 1 (0.29%) iSCSI
5 1 (0.29%) LAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 61 (17.43%) MongoDB
2 51 (14.57%) PostgreSQL
3 22 (6.29%) NoSQL
4 21 (6.00%) Relational Database
4 21 (6.00%) SQL Server
5 19 (5.43%) DynamoDB
6 17 (4.86%) Amazon RDS
7 16 (4.57%) Amazon Aurora
7 16 (4.57%) Db2
8 11 (3.14%) Metadata
9 8 (2.29%) MySQL
10 7 (2.00%) Power BI
11 6 (1.71%) BigQuery
11 6 (1.71%) Data Warehouse
12 5 (1.43%) Couchbase
12 5 (1.43%) Data Lake
12 5 (1.43%) Tableau
13 4 (1.14%) Amazon Athena
14 3 (0.86%) Apache Iceberg
14 3 (0.86%) Looker
Development Applications
1 121 (34.57%) Cucumber
2 101 (28.86%) Git
3 100 (28.57%) Selenium
4 85 (24.29%) Jenkins
5 70 (20.00%) JUnit
6 68 (19.43%) JIRA
7 65 (18.57%) GitLab
8 46 (13.14%) WebDriver
9 45 (12.86%) Postman
10 42 (12.00%) REST Assured
11 41 (11.71%) Mockito
12 28 (8.00%) JMeter
12 28 (8.00%) SonarQube
13 26 (7.43%) Cypress.io
14 22 (6.29%) SpecFlow
15 21 (6.00%) Maven
16 20 (5.71%) Gatling
17 17 (4.86%) TeamCity
18 12 (3.43%) DbUnit
19 11 (3.14%) jMock
General
1 108 (30.86%) Social Skills
2 73 (20.86%) Finance
2 73 (20.86%) Public Sector
3 56 (16.00%) Analytical Skills
4 39 (11.14%) Banking
5 14 (4.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 12 (3.43%) Front Office
7 10 (2.86%) Organisational Skills
8 9 (2.57%) Investment Banking
9 8 (2.29%) Military
9 8 (2.29%) Retail
10 5 (1.43%) Aviation
10 5 (1.43%) Fire and Rescue
10 5 (1.43%) Influencing Skills
10 5 (1.43%) Police
11 4 (1.14%) Presentation Skills
12 3 (0.86%) Automotive
12 3 (0.86%) Billing
12 3 (0.86%) Legal Technology
12 3 (0.86%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 116 (33.14%) Developer
2 78 (22.29%) Senior
3 76 (21.71%) Java Developer
4 55 (15.71%) Test Engineer
5 39 (11.14%) Lead
6 32 (9.14%) Software Engineer
6 32 (9.14%) Test Automation Engineer
7 28 (8.00%) Tester
8 27 (7.71%) Senior Developer
9 24 (6.86%) Analyst
9 24 (6.86%) Senior Java Developer
10 23 (6.57%) Automation Tester
11 22 (6.29%) Test Leader
12 14 (4.00%) Java Engineer
13 13 (3.71%) Senior Software Engineer
13 13 (3.71%) Senior Tester
14 12 (3.43%) Architect
14 12 (3.43%) Automation Test Lead
14 12 (3.43%) QA Engineer
15 11 (3.14%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 84 (24.00%) Spring
2 69 (19.71%) Playwright
3 68 (19.43%) REST
4 64 (18.29%) Spring Boot
5 57 (16.29%) Kafka
6 55 (15.71%) Gherkin
7 44 (12.57%) RESTful
8 36 (10.29%) .NET
9 32 (9.14%) WireMock
10 31 (8.86%) ActiveMQ
10 31 (8.86%) Node.js
11 30 (8.57%) AngularJS
12 26 (7.43%) React
13 23 (6.57%) SOAP
14 22 (6.29%) JAX-RS
15 17 (4.86%) JPA
15 17 (4.86%) Web Services
16 16 (4.57%) Hibernate
16 16 (4.57%) Spring Cloud
17 15 (4.29%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 42 (12.00%) Distributed Systems
2 34 (9.71%) Product Ownership
3 30 (8.57%) Cloud Native
4 16 (4.57%) Distributed Architecture
5 15 (4.29%) Enterprise Software
6 14 (4.00%) Equity Derivative
7 10 (2.86%) Derivative
8 9 (2.57%) Legacy Systems
9 7 (2.00%) Onboarding
10 6 (1.71%) Management Information System
11 5 (1.43%) Mobile App
11 5 (1.43%) Robotics
11 5 (1.43%) Self-Motivation
11 5 (1.43%) Taxonomies
11 5 (1.43%) Virtual Team
12 4 (1.14%) Data Protection Act
12 4 (1.14%) Distributed Applications
13 3 (0.86%) Equities
13 3 (0.86%) Fixed Income
13 3 (0.86%) Legacy Code
Operating Systems
1 56 (16.00%) Linux
2 28 (8.00%) Unix
3 12 (3.43%) Mac OS X
4 7 (2.00%) Android
4 7 (2.00%) Apple iOS
5 3 (0.86%) Mac OS
5 3 (0.86%) Windows
6 2 (0.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.57%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 237 (67.71%) Agile
2 227 (64.86%) TDD
3 225 (64.29%) CI/CD
4 212 (60.57%) Test Automation
5 143 (40.86%) Microservices
6 127 (36.29%) DevOps
7 84 (24.00%) Scrum
8 76 (21.71%) Continuous Improvement
9 73 (20.86%) Problem-Solving
10 71 (20.29%) API Testing
11 70 (20.00%) Test Strategy
12 61 (17.43%) Software Engineering
13 58 (16.57%) AI
14 48 (13.71%) Mentoring
15 47 (13.43%) Continuous Integration
15 47 (13.43%) Stakeholder Management
16 41 (11.71%) Containerisation
17 40 (11.43%) SDLC
18 39 (11.14%) Kanban
18 39 (11.14%) Validation
Programming Languages
1 202 (57.71%) Java
2 89 (25.43%) SQL
3 72 (20.57%) Python
4 62 (17.71%) JavaScript
5 58 (16.57%) C#
6 31 (8.86%) TypeScript
7 14 (4.00%) C++
8 8 (2.29%) Groovy
8 8 (2.29%) Kotlin
9 7 (2.00%) Apex Code
10 6 (1.71%) T-SQL
11 5 (1.43%) Go
11 5 (1.43%) R
11 5 (1.43%) Ruby
12 4 (1.14%) Perl
12 4 (1.14%) Scala
13 3 (0.86%) Bash
13 3 (0.86%) Shell Script
14 2 (0.57%) Cypher
14 2 (0.57%) SHACL
Qualifications
1 91 (26.00%) Security Cleared
2 73 (20.86%) SC Cleared
3 24 (6.86%) Degree
4 23 (6.57%) BPSS Clearance
5 17 (4.86%) ISTQB
6 15 (4.29%) Computer Science Degree
7 8 (2.29%) DV Cleared
8 7 (2.00%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
9 6 (1.71%) Microsoft Certification
10 5 (1.43%) AWS Certification
10 5 (1.43%) Azure Certification
11 3 (0.86%) CSPO
11 3 (0.86%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 1 (0.29%) ISEB
12 1 (0.29%) ITIL Certification
12 1 (0.29%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 72 (20.57%) QA
2 48 (13.71%) Accessibility
3 21 (6.00%) WCAG
4 16 (4.57%) Data Quality
5 14 (4.00%) GDPR
6 2 (0.57%) ISO 20022
7 1 (0.29%) EMIR
7 1 (0.29%) MiFID
7 1 (0.29%) SEPA
7 1 (0.29%) Software Quality Assurance
System Software
1 93 (26.57%) Docker
2 9 (2.57%) Postfix
3 1 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 72 (20.57%) Kubernetes
2 41 (11.71%) Grafana
3 32 (9.14%) Prometheus
4 21 (6.00%) Terraform
5 6 (1.71%) Ansible
6 5 (1.43%) Kibana
7 3 (0.86%) Istio
8 2 (0.57%) Amdocs OSS
8 2 (0.57%) Argo
8 2 (0.57%) Consul
8 2 (0.57%) Rancher
8 2 (0.57%) Zipkin
9 1 (0.29%) Docker Swarm
9 1 (0.29%) EMC VPLEX
9 1 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 22 (6.29%) Microsoft
2 18 (5.14%) Salesforce
3 17 (4.86%) Sybase
4 15 (4.29%) Google
4 15 (4.29%) Oracle
5 14 (4.00%) Atlassian
6 12 (3.43%) IBM
7 11 (3.14%) Jaspersoft
8 8 (2.29%) Checkmarx
8 8 (2.29%) Conga
8 8 (2.29%) GoCardless
9 6 (1.71%) Dynatrace
9 6 (1.71%) Splunk
10 5 (1.43%) ServiceNow
11 3 (0.86%) CA Agile Central
11 3 (0.86%) Databricks
11 3 (0.86%) Guidewire
11 3 (0.86%) OpenAI
11 3 (0.86%) OpenLink
12 2 (0.57%) Amdocs