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 1 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 109 132
Rank change year-on-year -31 +23 +40
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,104 841 704
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.01% 2.54% 1.86%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.27% 9.75% 7.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 706 541 456
10th Percentile £376 £375 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £488
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £725
90th Percentile £753 £750 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £497
% change year-on-year +6.38% -5.34% -17.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 4 5
10th Percentile £42.93 £40.58 £26.04
25th Percentile £55.00 £48.56 £27.00
Median hourly rate £74.75 £59.25 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +26.16% +111.61% -64.10%
75th Percentile £85.50 £75.31 £38.75
90th Percentile £94.20 £96.13 £68.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 - £28.00
% change year-on-year - - -64.10%

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 11,905 8,624 9,384
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.68% 26.09% 24.81%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,826 5,738 6,104
10th Percentile £375 £355 £356
25th Percentile £438 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £638 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -4.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 283 188 187
10th Percentile £29.07 £31.25 £25.60
25th Percentile £49.50 £41.25 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.35 £62.50
Median % change year-on-year +19.60% -13.04% +4.17%
75th Percentile £76.50 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £70.60 £74.92
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.47 £58.75 £65.00
% change year-on-year +14.84% -9.62% +10.94%

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 1 October 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 1 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
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 Kafka within the UK over the 6 months to 1 October 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 -43 918 £550 - 918
London -25 562 £575 -4.17% 622
UK excluding London -27 392 £500 +6.38% 401
Work from Home -53 281 £550 -4.43% 402
North of England -11 195 £501 +0.20% 143
Yorkshire +6 97 £500 -16.32% 33
North West -28 78 £550 +17.27% 96
Scotland -30 58 £406 -14.53% 65
South East -45 56 £460 +5.75% 48
Midlands -51 40 £500 +11.11% 33
South West -16 29 £575 +4.55% 48
West Midlands -35 28 £700 +40.00% 22
North East -18 25 £426 -33.25% 14
East of England -6 24 £488 -4.88% 20
East Midlands -19 12 £449 +8.07% 11
Northern Ireland +9 4 - - 31
Wales - 1 £375 - 13

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
1 130 (11.78%) Apache Spark
2 79 (7.16%) Apache Airflow
3 76 (6.88%) Apache
4 26 (2.36%) Confluence
5 15 (1.36%) Camunda
6 7 (0.63%) OpenStack
6 7 (0.63%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 6 (0.54%) CMS
8 5 (0.45%) Apache Pulsar
8 5 (0.45%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.36%) MQSeries
9 4 (0.36%) nginx
9 4 (0.36%) PowerExchange
10 3 (0.27%) Anypoint
10 3 (0.27%) Mule
11 2 (0.18%) Apache Pig
11 2 (0.18%) JBoss
11 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
12 1 (0.091%) CICS
12 1 (0.091%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 6 (0.54%) CPLEX
2 3 (0.27%) Mingle
3 1 (0.091%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.091%) Gliffy
3 1 (0.091%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.091%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 6 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.36%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 3 (0.27%) Finacle
3 3 (0.27%) FLEXCUBE
3 3 (0.27%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.18%) Endur
4 2 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
5 1 (0.091%) Actimize
5 1 (0.091%) Distributed Ledger
5 1 (0.091%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.091%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.091%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.091%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.091%) SAP IS-U
5 1 (0.091%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 634 (57.43%) AWS
2 401 (36.32%) Azure
3 262 (23.73%) GCP
4 182 (16.49%) GitHub
5 122 (11.05%) GitHub Actions
6 108 (9.78%) Serverless
7 91 (8.24%) Amazon S3
8 90 (8.15%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (7.70%) Amazon EKS
10 78 (7.07%) Snowflake
11 69 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
12 66 (5.98%) OpenShift
13 53 (4.80%) dbt
14 51 (4.62%) Amazon SQS
15 49 (4.44%) Amazon ECS
16 45 (4.08%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 36 (3.26%) Power Platform
18 35 (3.17%) Azure Data Factory
19 31 (2.81%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 28 (2.54%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (2.72%) HTTP
2 21 (1.90%) DNS
3 13 (1.18%) Network Security
4 9 (0.82%) TCP/IP
5 8 (0.72%) Firewall
6 7 (0.63%) MQTT
6 7 (0.63%) SSH
6 7 (0.63%) SSL
7 6 (0.54%) SAN
8 5 (0.45%) 4G
8 5 (0.45%) 5G
9 4 (0.36%) NAS
10 3 (0.27%) Internet
10 3 (0.27%) VPN
11 2 (0.18%) Broadband
11 2 (0.18%) Kerberos
12 1 (0.091%) FIX Connectivity
12 1 (0.091%) MIMO
12 1 (0.091%) RTP
12 1 (0.091%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 193 (17.48%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (15.67%) MongoDB
3 139 (12.59%) NoSQL
4 94 (8.51%) Relational Database
5 77 (6.97%) Data Warehouse
6 64 (5.80%) SQL Server
7 62 (5.62%) Redis
8 52 (4.71%) MySQL
9 51 (4.62%) Big Data
10 47 (4.26%) Data Lake
11 45 (4.08%) Elasticsearch
12 39 (3.53%) BigQuery
13 38 (3.44%) Flink
14 34 (3.08%) Power BI
15 30 (2.72%) Metadata
16 27 (2.45%) Delta Lake
17 26 (2.36%) Amazon Redshift
18 24 (2.17%) Hadoop
19 23 (2.08%) Amazon RDS
19 23 (2.08%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 221 (20.02%) Jenkins
2 195 (17.66%) Git
3 170 (15.40%) GitLab
4 71 (6.43%) JUnit
5 70 (6.34%) Gradle
6 60 (5.43%) Mockito
7 57 (5.16%) Selenium
8 48 (4.35%) Maven
9 47 (4.26%) JIRA
10 39 (3.53%) Cucumber
11 34 (3.08%) SonarQube
12 27 (2.45%) Postman
13 26 (2.36%) REST Assured
14 22 (1.99%) JMeter
15 21 (1.90%) Bitbucket
16 18 (1.63%) Gatling
17 17 (1.54%) SoapUI
18 16 (1.45%) LoadRunner
19 15 (1.36%) Sonatype Nexus
20 14 (1.27%) Cypress.io
General
1 280 (25.36%) Finance
2 211 (19.11%) Social Skills
3 184 (16.67%) Banking
4 112 (10.14%) Analytical Skills
5 102 (9.24%) Public Sector
6 43 (3.89%) Retail
7 31 (2.81%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 22 (1.99%) Front Office
10 18 (1.63%) Telecoms
11 17 (1.54%) Financial Institution
12 12 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
13 11 (1.00%) Law
14 10 (0.91%) Organisational Skills
15 9 (0.82%) Documentation Skills
15 9 (0.82%) Military
16 8 (0.72%) Billing
16 8 (0.72%) Retail Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Corporate Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 334 (30.25%) Developer
2 239 (21.65%) Senior
3 187 (16.94%) Java Developer
4 176 (15.94%) Architect
5 130 (11.78%) Data Engineer
6 100 (9.06%) Lead
7 74 (6.70%) Java Engineer
8 71 (6.43%) Senior Developer
9 70 (6.34%) Solutions Architect
10 63 (5.71%) DevOps Engineer
10 63 (5.71%) Software Engineer
11 47 (4.26%) Full-Stack Developer
12 44 (3.99%) Senior Data Engineer
13 43 (3.89%) Senior Java Developer
14 40 (3.62%) Kafka Engineer
15 39 (3.53%) Python Engineer
16 38 (3.44%) AWS Engineer
16 38 (3.44%) Python Developer
17 37 (3.35%) Test Engineer
18 35 (3.17%) Senior Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 301 (27.26%) Spring Boot
2 300 (27.17%) Spring
3 252 (22.83%) REST
4 238 (21.56%) Terraform
5 156 (14.13%) RESTful
6 134 (12.14%) React
7 118 (10.69%) RabbitMQ
8 70 (6.34%) JSON
8 70 (6.34%) OAuth
9 58 (5.25%) HTML
10 57 (5.16%) Node.js
11 51 (4.62%) PySpark
12 48 (4.35%) GraphQL
12 48 (4.35%) SOAP
13 47 (4.26%) Elastic Stack
14 46 (4.17%) .NET
14 46 (4.17%) Middleware
15 44 (3.99%) CSS
15 44 (3.99%) OpenTelemetry
15 44 (3.99%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 260 (23.55%) Cloud Native
2 231 (20.92%) Distributed Systems
3 79 (7.16%) Product Ownership
4 47 (4.26%) Enterprise Software
5 43 (3.89%) Data Structures
6 37 (3.35%) AI Agents
7 36 (3.26%) Onboarding
8 34 (3.08%) Self-Motivation
9 27 (2.45%) Greenfield Project
9 27 (2.45%) Replication
9 27 (2.45%) SWIFT Messaging Network
10 26 (2.36%) Algorithms
10 26 (2.36%) Legacy Systems
11 21 (1.90%) Public Cloud
12 20 (1.81%) Distributed Architecture
12 20 (1.81%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 18 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
13 18 (1.63%) Private Cloud
14 17 (1.54%) PKI
15 15 (1.36%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 148 (13.41%) Linux
2 73 (6.61%) Unix
3 25 (2.26%) Windows
4 13 (1.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 8 (0.72%) Ubuntu
6 6 (0.54%) Mac OS X
7 4 (0.36%) CentOS
8 3 (0.27%) VMS
9 2 (0.18%) Android
9 2 (0.18%) Debian
10 1 (0.091%) Apple iOS
10 1 (0.091%) Mac OS
10 1 (0.091%) Windows Server
10 1 (0.091%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 622 (56.34%) CI/CD
2 462 (41.85%) Event-Driven
3 459 (41.58%) Microservices
4 399 (36.14%) DevOps
5 389 (35.24%) Agile
6 324 (29.35%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 288 (26.09%) Observability
8 262 (23.73%) Test Automation
9 246 (22.28%) Infrastructure as Code
10 233 (21.11%) Containerisation
11 200 (18.12%) Software Engineering
12 186 (16.85%) AI
13 165 (14.95%) Data Pipeline
14 153 (13.86%) Problem-Solving
15 145 (13.13%) Continuous Improvement
16 142 (12.86%) Data Modelling
17 140 (12.68%) Technical Leadership
18 131 (11.87%) ETL
19 124 (11.23%) Analytics
19 124 (11.23%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 492 (44.57%) Java
2 380 (34.42%) Python
3 360 (32.61%) SQL
4 111 (10.05%) JavaScript
5 95 (8.61%) TypeScript
6 87 (7.88%) Bash
7 67 (6.07%) C#
8 55 (4.98%) Go
9 43 (3.89%) Scala
10 30 (2.72%) PowerShell
11 29 (2.63%) PL/SQL
12 28 (2.54%) Shell Script
13 25 (2.26%) Kotlin
14 11 (1.00%) Groovy
15 10 (0.91%) C++
16 8 (0.72%) Perl
16 8 (0.72%) PHP
17 7 (0.63%) Rust
18 6 (0.54%) Bicep
18 6 (0.54%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 270 (24.46%) Security Cleared
2 224 (20.29%) SC Cleared
3 64 (5.80%) Degree
4 43 (3.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 42 (3.80%) BPSS Clearance
6 28 (2.54%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.36%) Azure Certification
8 13 (1.18%) AWS Certification
9 12 (1.09%) Master's Degree
10 11 (1.00%) ISTQB
11 7 (0.63%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.63%) ISEB
11 7 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 5 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 5 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
13 3 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.27%) PhD
13 3 (0.27%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.091%) CISSP
14 1 (0.091%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 88 (7.97%) QA
2 84 (7.61%) Data Quality
3 45 (4.08%) Accessibility
4 35 (3.17%) ISO 20022
5 20 (1.81%) GDPR
6 15 (1.36%) SEPA
7 6 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 5 (0.45%) ISO 15022
8 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) NIST
8 5 (0.45%) PSD2
8 5 (0.45%) SLA
9 4 (0.36%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) Basel III
10 2 (0.18%) EMIR
10 2 (0.18%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.18%) IFRS
10 2 (0.18%) IFRS 17
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 394 (35.69%) Docker
2 17 (1.54%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (0.72%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 3 (0.27%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.18%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.18%) HDFS
6 1 (0.091%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 509 (46.11%) Kubernetes
2 150 (13.59%) Grafana
3 128 (11.59%) Prometheus
4 71 (6.43%) Ansible
5 30 (2.72%) Argo
6 26 (2.36%) Control-M
7 17 (1.54%) Kibana
8 15 (1.36%) Istio
8 15 (1.36%) Puppet
9 14 (1.27%) Kustomize
10 9 (0.82%) logstash
10 9 (0.82%) Podman
11 7 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
12 6 (0.54%) HP Fortify
12 6 (0.54%) Rancher
13 5 (0.45%) Check_MK
14 4 (0.36%) Bosun
14 4 (0.36%) Consul
14 4 (0.36%) Progress Chef
15 3 (0.27%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 120 (10.87%) Oracle
2 104 (9.42%) Databricks
3 64 (5.80%) Splunk
4 61 (5.53%) IBM
5 55 (4.98%) Google
5 55 (4.98%) Microsoft
6 39 (3.53%) Dynatrace
7 32 (2.90%) Confluent
8 26 (2.36%) Informatica
9 21 (1.90%) VMware
10 19 (1.72%) MuleSoft
10 19 (1.72%) OpenAI
10 19 (1.72%) SAP
11 14 (1.27%) Solace
11 14 (1.27%) TIBCO
12 13 (1.18%) New Relic
12 13 (1.18%) Salesforce
13 10 (0.91%) Veracode
14 9 (0.82%) Sybase
14 9 (0.82%) WSO2