Kafka Contract Job Trends

Apache Kafka
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring Kafka skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 124 106 173
Rank change year-on-year -18 +67 -43
Contract jobs citing Kafka 925 743 631
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.18% 2.51% 1.41%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.02% 11.00% 6.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 593 450 485
10th Percentile £363 £374 £400
25th Percentile £418 £459 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £575 £550
Median % change year-on-year -6.61% +4.55% -15.38%
75th Percentile £675 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.70% -6.00% -9.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 4 5
10th Percentile £42.40 £52.23 £27.04
25th Percentile £64.00 £71.69 £35.00
Median hourly rate £69.72 £88.75 £42.19
Median % change year-on-year -21.44% +110.36% -43.75%
75th Percentile £81.75 £93.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £94.50 - £67.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.72 £85.00 £50.00
% change year-on-year -21.51% +70.00% -31.51%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK

Kafka falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 9,229 6,756 9,082
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.75% 22.85% 20.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,171 4,490 6,316
10th Percentile £358 £361 £336
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -7.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £498
% change year-on-year - +0.50% -2.93%
Number of hourly rates quoted 230 94 222
10th Percentile £35.00 £26.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £52.50 £39.75 £39.94
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +28.28% -25.62%
75th Percentile £73.09 £68.56 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £81.88 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £48.72
% change year-on-year - +33.42% -25.05%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all contract IT jobs advertised.

Kafka job vacancy trend in the UK

Kafka
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka

Kafka
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 10 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Kafka

Kafka
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 10 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
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 Kafka within the UK over the 6 months to 10 March 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 -15 808 £550 -8.33% 175
London -11 521 £603 -7.31% 67
Work from Home +1 348 £601 -1.84% 98
UK excluding London -45 257 £462 -1.70% 102
North of England -35 112 £475 -9.52% 30
South East -14 60 £434 -15.37% 43
North West -31 56 £475 - 16
Yorkshire -29 46 £460 -36.55% 11
Midlands -43 46 £500 +38.31% 10
West Midlands -40 30 £550 -8.33% 7
South West -14 27 £550 -12.00% 12
Scotland -8 26 £475 +16.42% 4
North East -3 17 £475 -12.38% 3
East Midlands -28 16 £402 +12.92% 3
East of England -43 5 £500 +57.23% 1
Wales -5 1 £250 - 3

Kafka
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
1 109 (11.78%) Apache Spark
2 58 (6.27%) Apache
3 41 (4.43%) Apache Airflow
4 32 (3.46%) Confluence
5 6 (0.65%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.65%) Hyperledger
5 6 (0.65%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.54%) Camunda
6 5 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.54%) OpenStack
7 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
7 3 (0.32%) WebSphere
8 2 (0.22%) Apache Pulsar
8 2 (0.22%) CMS
8 2 (0.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.22%) WebLogic
9 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
9 1 (0.11%) JBoss
9 1 (0.11%) Luigi
Applications
1 5 (0.54%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.22%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.43%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.43%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.43%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.22%) Actimize
3 2 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.22%) Shopify
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 569 (61.51%) AWS
2 243 (26.27%) Azure
3 167 (18.05%) GitHub
4 155 (16.76%) GCP
5 126 (13.62%) Serverless
6 118 (12.76%) GitHub Actions
7 114 (12.32%) Amazon S3
8 91 (9.84%) AWS Lambda
9 80 (8.65%) Amazon EKS
10 70 (7.57%) AWS CloudFormation
11 57 (6.16%) Amazon ECS
12 56 (6.05%) OpenShift
13 50 (5.41%) Power Platform
14 49 (5.30%) Amazon SQS
15 40 (4.32%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 40 (4.32%) Amazon Kinesis
15 40 (4.32%) Azure DevOps
16 39 (4.22%) Azure Data Factory
17 37 (4.00%) Amazon EC2
18 33 (3.57%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 17 (1.84%) Firewall
2 13 (1.41%) HTTP
3 10 (1.08%) DNS
3 10 (1.08%) SSL
4 6 (0.65%) FTP
4 6 (0.65%) Kerberos
4 6 (0.65%) SMS
4 6 (0.65%) SSH
5 3 (0.32%) TCP/IP
5 3 (0.32%) VPN
6 2 (0.22%) MQTT
6 2 (0.22%) OpenVPN
7 1 (0.11%) 4G
7 1 (0.11%) 5G
7 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.11%) Internet
7 1 (0.11%) NaaS
7 1 (0.11%) NAS
7 1 (0.11%) Reverse Proxy
7 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 192 (20.76%) PostgreSQL
2 152 (16.43%) MongoDB
3 132 (14.27%) NoSQL
4 79 (8.54%) Apache Cassandra
5 67 (7.24%) Relational Database
6 57 (6.16%) Data Warehouse
7 54 (5.84%) Data Lake
8 51 (5.51%) Elasticsearch
9 45 (4.86%) Big Data
9 45 (4.86%) DynamoDB
10 42 (4.54%) Amazon RDS
10 42 (4.54%) SQL Server
11 41 (4.43%) Redis
12 38 (4.11%) Power BI
13 35 (3.78%) Amazon Athena
14 34 (3.68%) Hadoop
15 32 (3.46%) Flink
15 32 (3.46%) MySQL
16 31 (3.35%) BigQuery
17 29 (3.14%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 158 (17.08%) Jenkins
2 138 (14.92%) GitLab
3 104 (11.24%) Git
4 81 (8.76%) JUnit
5 61 (6.59%) JIRA
6 32 (3.46%) Cucumber
7 30 (3.24%) Mockito
8 25 (2.70%) JMeter
9 24 (2.59%) Sonatype Nexus
10 18 (1.95%) Gatling
10 18 (1.95%) Gradle
11 13 (1.41%) Maven
12 11 (1.19%) Artifactory
13 10 (1.08%) CircleCI
13 10 (1.08%) REST Assured
13 10 (1.08%) Selenium
14 9 (0.97%) Jaeger
15 8 (0.86%) Postman
16 6 (0.65%) Serenity BDD
16 6 (0.65%) SonarQube
General
1 268 (28.97%) Finance
2 201 (21.73%) Social Skills
3 133 (14.38%) Banking
4 74 (8.00%) Analytical Skills
5 66 (7.14%) Public Sector
6 59 (6.38%) Front Office
7 42 (4.54%) Investment Banking
8 23 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.84%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (0.97%) Marketing
12 7 (0.76%) Retail
12 7 (0.76%) Telecoms
13 5 (0.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.54%) Law
14 4 (0.43%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.43%) Military
15 3 (0.32%) Billing
15 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 351 (37.95%) Developer
2 257 (27.78%) Senior
3 186 (20.11%) Java Developer
4 131 (14.16%) Data Engineer
5 125 (13.51%) Lead
6 123 (13.30%) Senior Developer
7 104 (11.24%) Software Engineer
8 87 (9.41%) Architect
9 70 (7.57%) Senior Java Developer
10 50 (5.41%) Java Engineer
11 46 (4.97%) DevOps Engineer
11 46 (4.97%) Full-Stack Developer
12 43 (4.65%) AWS Architect
13 41 (4.43%) Kafka Developer
14 39 (4.22%) AWS Engineer
15 37 (4.00%) AWS Developer
16 35 (3.78%) Senior Data Engineer
17 34 (3.68%) Kafka Engineer
18 33 (3.57%) Developer/Software Engineer
18 33 (3.57%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 217 (23.46%) Spring
2 186 (20.11%) Spring Boot
3 116 (12.54%) REST
4 106 (11.46%) Node.js
5 102 (11.03%) React
6 95 (10.27%) gRPC
7 86 (9.30%) RESTful
8 76 (8.22%) RabbitMQ
9 48 (5.19%) AngularJS
10 46 (4.97%) GraphQL
11 42 (4.54%) Middleware
12 37 (4.00%) JSON
13 36 (3.89%) OpenTelemetry
14 33 (3.57%) PySpark
14 33 (3.57%) Redux
15 31 (3.35%) Keycloak
16 29 (3.14%) OAuth
17 28 (3.03%) Hibernate
18 27 (2.92%) OAuth2
19 25 (2.70%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 142 (15.35%) Distributed Systems
2 125 (13.51%) Cloud Native
3 49 (5.30%) Fixed Income
4 43 (4.65%) Management Information System
5 36 (3.89%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.49%) Data Structures
7 22 (2.38%) Derivative
7 22 (2.38%) Hybrid Cloud
8 21 (2.27%) Equities
9 16 (1.73%) Market Risk
10 15 (1.62%) Legacy Applications
11 14 (1.51%) Onboarding
12 13 (1.41%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (1.30%) Legacy Systems
14 11 (1.19%) Replication
15 10 (1.08%) Algorithms
15 10 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
16 8 (0.86%) Distributed Computing
16 8 (0.86%) Public Cloud
16 8 (0.86%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 136 (14.70%) Linux
2 65 (7.03%) Unix
3 29 (3.14%) Windows
4 8 (0.86%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.54%) AIX
6 4 (0.43%) CentOS
6 4 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 3 (0.32%) zOS
8 2 (0.22%) VMS
9 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 399 (43.14%) CI/CD
2 342 (36.97%) Microservices
3 322 (34.81%) Agile
4 259 (28.00%) DevOps
5 234 (25.30%) Software Engineering
6 194 (20.97%) Event-Driven
7 187 (20.22%) Problem-Solving
8 182 (19.68%) Observability
9 177 (19.14%) Containerisation
10 157 (16.97%) Infrastructure as Code
11 156 (16.86%) Analytics
12 137 (14.81%) Data Pipeline
13 136 (14.70%) Data Engineering
14 128 (13.84%) Test Automation
15 127 (13.73%) Data Modelling
16 126 (13.62%) ETL
17 116 (12.54%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 108 (11.68%) Full-Stack Development
19 107 (11.57%) Open Source
20 100 (10.81%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 460 (49.73%) Java
2 318 (34.38%) Python
3 267 (28.86%) SQL
4 147 (15.89%) Go
5 97 (10.49%) JavaScript
6 79 (8.54%) TypeScript
7 67 (7.24%) C#
8 38 (4.11%) Bash
9 31 (3.35%) C++
10 29 (3.14%) Shell Script
11 26 (2.81%) Scala
12 18 (1.95%) Rust
13 14 (1.51%) PowerShell
14 10 (1.08%) Bicep
14 10 (1.08%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.76%) Korn
15 7 (0.76%) Perl
16 5 (0.54%) Groovy
16 5 (0.54%) R
16 5 (0.54%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 208 (22.49%) Security Cleared
2 179 (19.35%) SC Cleared
3 48 (5.19%) Degree
4 33 (3.57%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (2.81%) Azure Certification
6 23 (2.49%) AWS Certification
7 20 (2.16%) Computer Science Degree
8 19 (2.05%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.41%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.86%) OCP
10 8 (0.86%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.76%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.32%) AWS Certified Developer
12 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.22%) Postgraduate
14 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (10.70%) Data Quality
2 48 (5.19%) QA
3 43 (4.65%) GDPR
4 17 (1.84%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.19%) NCSC
6 9 (0.97%) ISO 20022
6 9 (0.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 8 (0.86%) NIST
8 7 (0.76%) PCI DSS
9 5 (0.54%) SEPA
9 5 (0.54%) SLA
10 3 (0.32%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.32%) HL7
10 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.22%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.22%) MiFID
11 2 (0.22%) PSD2
11 2 (0.22%) WCAG
12 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 319 (34.49%) Docker
2 9 (0.97%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (0.22%) etcd
3 2 (0.22%) HDFS
3 2 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 369 (39.89%) Kubernetes
2 213 (23.03%) Terraform
3 110 (11.89%) Grafana
4 105 (11.35%) Prometheus
5 58 (6.27%) Ansible
6 26 (2.81%) Argo
7 14 (1.51%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.08%) Istio
9 9 (0.97%) Kiali
10 8 (0.86%) linkerd
11 6 (0.65%) Packer
11 6 (0.65%) Rancher
12 5 (0.54%) Fluentd
12 5 (0.54%) Puppet
13 4 (0.43%) Kibana
13 4 (0.43%) logstash
14 3 (0.32%) Jamf Pro
14 3 (0.32%) Podman
15 2 (0.22%) rkt
15 2 (0.22%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 79 (8.54%) Databricks
2 75 (8.11%) Oracle
3 64 (6.92%) Splunk
4 38 (4.11%) Google
5 35 (3.78%) Microsoft
6 28 (3.03%) Confluent
7 25 (2.70%) VMware
8 24 (2.59%) IBM
9 21 (2.27%) Informatica
10 16 (1.73%) Dynatrace
10 16 (1.73%) Sybase
11 12 (1.30%) ServiceNow
12 11 (1.19%) Red Hat
13 10 (1.08%) Cloudera
14 9 (0.97%) Talend
15 8 (0.86%) Atlassian
16 7 (0.76%) AppDynamics
16 7 (0.76%) Bloomberg
16 7 (0.76%) PagerDuty
16 7 (0.76%) SAP