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 21 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
21 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 130 113 157
Rank change year-on-year -17 +44 -23
Contract jobs citing Kafka 947 706 653
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.96% 2.43% 1.54%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.01% 10.71% 7.33%
Number of daily rates quoted 579 462 487
10th Percentile £364 £400 £400
25th Percentile £420 £458 £460
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +1.85% -16.92%
75th Percentile £650 £712 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £755
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £475 £490
% change year-on-year -2.11% -3.06% -10.91%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 4 6
10th Percentile £48.38 £51.09 £22.24
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £23.81
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +171.75% -59.62%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £38.94
90th Percentile £92.50 - £54.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £31.50
% change year-on-year -11.05% +149.84% -59.62%

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 9,462 6,589 8,907
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.61% 22.64% 20.94%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,236 4,514 6,186
10th Percentile £363 £363 £350
25th Percentile £419 £419 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -1.87% -2.73%
75th Percentile £623 £645 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 271 110 247
10th Percentile £32.50 £30.15 £21.25
25th Percentile £51.25 £50.00 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year - +36.84% -26.92%
75th Percentile £71.75 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.00 £82.19 £74.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -26.92%

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 21 May 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 21 May 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 21 May 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 -16 819 £545 -5.22% 175
London -10 519 £600 -7.69% 107
UK excluding London -35 303 £465 -2.11% 93
Work from Home -14 294 £600 - 87
North of England -36 133 £455 -9.00% 31
Yorkshire -10 71 £463 -15.91% 9
North West -46 51 £447 -10.60% 16
South East -31 50 £488 +1.99% 34
Midlands -37 47 £488 +32.83% 4
Scotland -10 41 £450 -4.76% 4
South West -10 31 £538 -5.49% 12
West Midlands -43 26 £514 -6.55% 3
East Midlands -20 21 £402 +12.92% 1
North East -11 20 £450 -2.70% 6
East of England -17 15 £550 +71.14% 3
Wales -9 1 £250 - 2

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
1 136 (14.36%) Apache Spark
2 68 (7.18%) Apache
3 48 (5.07%) Apache Airflow
4 20 (2.11%) Confluence
5 6 (0.63%) Camunda
5 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.53%) WebSphere
7 3 (0.32%) Apache Pulsar
7 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
8 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
8 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
9 1 (0.11%) JBoss
Applications
1 4 (0.42%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
Business Applications
1 3 (0.32%) Bloomberg AIM
1 3 (0.32%) Fidessa
1 3 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 2 (0.21%) Shopify
2 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.11%) Actimize
3 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.11%) Endur
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
3 1 (0.11%) SAP BRIM
Cloud Services
1 558 (58.92%) AWS
2 269 (28.41%) Azure
3 160 (16.90%) GCP
4 147 (15.52%) GitHub
5 126 (13.31%) Serverless
6 104 (10.98%) Amazon S3
7 101 (10.67%) GitHub Actions
8 93 (9.82%) AWS Lambda
9 72 (7.60%) Amazon EKS
10 66 (6.97%) Power Platform
11 63 (6.65%) Azure DevOps
11 63 (6.65%) OpenShift
12 55 (5.81%) AWS CloudFormation
13 47 (4.96%) Amazon ECS
13 47 (4.96%) Snowflake
14 44 (4.65%) Amazon SQS
15 40 (4.22%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 40 (4.22%) Amazon Kinesis
16 37 (3.91%) dbt
17 36 (3.80%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.90%) Firewall
2 14 (1.48%) HTTP
3 13 (1.37%) SSL
4 9 (0.95%) DNS
5 6 (0.63%) Network Security
5 6 (0.63%) SMS
6 5 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.42%) NAS
7 4 (0.42%) SAN
8 3 (0.32%) MQTT
8 3 (0.32%) SSH
8 3 (0.32%) VPN
9 2 (0.21%) FTP
9 2 (0.21%) NaaS
9 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
9 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (0.21%) WAN
10 1 (0.11%) 4G
10 1 (0.11%) 5G
10 1 (0.11%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 193 (20.38%) PostgreSQL
2 154 (16.26%) MongoDB
3 132 (13.94%) NoSQL
4 88 (9.29%) Relational Database
5 63 (6.65%) Big Data
6 58 (6.12%) Data Lake
7 57 (6.02%) Data Warehouse
8 53 (5.60%) Apache Cassandra
8 53 (5.60%) Power BI
8 53 (5.60%) SQL Server
9 50 (5.28%) Redis
10 46 (4.86%) Elasticsearch
11 39 (4.12%) Flink
12 38 (4.01%) DynamoDB
13 37 (3.91%) Amazon Athena
14 36 (3.80%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.70%) MySQL
16 31 (3.27%) Amazon Redshift
16 31 (3.27%) Metadata
17 30 (3.17%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 145 (15.31%) Jenkins
2 133 (14.04%) GitLab
3 128 (13.52%) Git
4 62 (6.55%) JUnit
5 57 (6.02%) JIRA
6 41 (4.33%) Mockito
7 27 (2.85%) Selenium
8 25 (2.64%) Gradle
9 22 (2.32%) REST Assured
10 20 (2.11%) Gatling
11 19 (2.01%) Cucumber
12 15 (1.58%) Serenity BDD
13 14 (1.48%) Liquibase
14 13 (1.37%) Maven
14 13 (1.37%) Postman
15 10 (1.06%) Jaeger
16 9 (0.95%) SonarQube
17 7 (0.74%) JMeter
17 7 (0.74%) Snyk
18 6 (0.63%) Artifactory
General
1 256 (27.03%) Finance
2 173 (18.27%) Social Skills
3 122 (12.88%) Banking
4 78 (8.24%) Public Sector
5 77 (8.13%) Analytical Skills
6 46 (4.86%) Front Office
7 35 (3.70%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.85%) Documentation Skills
9 25 (2.64%) Financial Institution
10 12 (1.27%) Marketing
11 11 (1.16%) Influencing Skills
11 11 (1.16%) Law
11 11 (1.16%) Retail
12 10 (1.06%) Telecoms
13 9 (0.95%) Publishing
14 7 (0.74%) Corporate Banking
15 6 (0.63%) Automotive
15 6 (0.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
16 5 (0.53%) Military
16 5 (0.53%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 316 (33.37%) Developer
2 207 (21.86%) Senior
3 161 (17.00%) Data Engineer
4 150 (15.84%) Java Developer
5 119 (12.57%) Lead
6 110 (11.62%) Architect
7 94 (9.93%) Senior Developer
8 90 (9.50%) Software Engineer
9 65 (6.86%) Java Engineer
10 53 (5.60%) AWS Architect
11 50 (5.28%) Senior Java Developer
12 46 (4.86%) DevOps Engineer
13 44 (4.65%) Full-Stack Developer
14 39 (4.12%) Solutions Architect
15 36 (3.80%) Senior Data Engineer
16 35 (3.70%) Principal Engineer
17 33 (3.48%) Developer/Software Engineer
18 32 (3.38%) Data Architect
18 32 (3.38%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 30 (3.17%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 227 (23.97%) Spring
2 210 (22.18%) Spring Boot
3 130 (13.73%) REST
4 118 (12.46%) RESTful
5 114 (12.04%) React
6 108 (11.40%) Node.js
7 82 (8.66%) RabbitMQ
8 58 (6.12%) GraphQL
8 58 (6.12%) gRPC
8 58 (6.12%) OpenTelemetry
9 51 (5.39%) JSON
10 45 (4.75%) Middleware
10 45 (4.75%) PySpark
11 42 (4.44%) Apache Avro
12 39 (4.12%) Redux
13 38 (4.01%) AngularJS
14 37 (3.91%) OAuth
15 34 (3.59%) Swagger
16 33 (3.48%) OpenAPI
17 32 (3.38%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 166 (17.53%) Distributed Systems
2 153 (16.16%) Cloud Native
3 44 (4.65%) Management Information System
4 42 (4.44%) Fixed Income
5 32 (3.38%) Product Ownership
6 27 (2.85%) Data Structures
7 19 (2.01%) Onboarding
8 17 (1.80%) Equities
8 17 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
9 16 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
10 14 (1.48%) Algorithms
10 14 (1.48%) Clustering
10 14 (1.48%) Derivative
10 14 (1.48%) Enterprise Software
11 12 (1.27%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 11 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 11 (1.16%) Hedge funds
13 10 (1.06%) CMDB
14 9 (0.95%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 98 (10.35%) Linux
2 56 (5.91%) Unix
3 33 (3.48%) Windows
4 8 (0.84%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (0.53%) Ubuntu
6 3 (0.32%) VMS
6 3 (0.32%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) AIX
7 2 (0.21%) Debian
7 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 1 (0.11%) Android
8 1 (0.11%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.11%) CentOS
8 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 429 (45.30%) CI/CD
2 343 (36.22%) Microservices
3 299 (31.57%) Agile
4 290 (30.62%) DevOps
5 247 (26.08%) Event-Driven
6 218 (23.02%) Observability
7 199 (21.01%) Containerisation
8 190 (20.06%) Software Engineering
9 174 (18.37%) Data Pipeline
10 167 (17.63%) Data Modelling
11 160 (16.90%) Infrastructure as Code
12 159 (16.79%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 158 (16.68%) Analytics
14 151 (15.95%) Data Engineering
14 151 (15.95%) Problem-Solving
15 144 (15.21%) Test Automation
16 143 (15.10%) ETL
17 111 (11.72%) Full-Stack Development
18 103 (10.88%) AI
19 99 (10.45%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 425 (44.88%) Java
2 324 (34.21%) Python
3 290 (30.62%) SQL
4 112 (11.83%) TypeScript
5 102 (10.77%) Go
6 96 (10.14%) JavaScript
7 57 (6.02%) C#
8 42 (4.44%) Bash
9 29 (3.06%) Scala
10 19 (2.01%) Rust
11 18 (1.90%) PowerShell
12 16 (1.69%) C++
12 16 (1.69%) Shell Script
13 13 (1.37%) Bicep
14 10 (1.06%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.06%) Search Processing Language
15 7 (0.74%) Perl
16 6 (0.63%) PHP
17 5 (0.53%) C
17 5 (0.53%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 214 (22.60%) Security Cleared
2 169 (17.85%) SC Cleared
3 48 (5.07%) Degree
4 27 (2.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.90%) AWS Certification
6 16 (1.69%) Azure Certification
6 16 (1.69%) DV Cleared
7 13 (1.37%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (1.37%) Master's Degree
8 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 7 (0.74%) SnowPro
9 4 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
9 4 (0.42%) TOGAF Certification
10 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
10 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
10 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
11 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
11 1 (0.11%) OCP
11 1 (0.11%) Oracle Certification
11 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 108 (11.40%) Data Quality
2 51 (5.39%) QA
3 44 (4.65%) GDPR
4 28 (2.96%) Accessibility
5 19 (2.01%) ISO 20022
6 11 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.95%) NIST
8 8 (0.84%) SEPA
9 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 6 (0.63%) NCSC
11 4 (0.42%) SLA
11 4 (0.42%) WCAG
12 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
12 3 (0.32%) MiFID
13 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
13 2 (0.21%) EMIR
13 2 (0.21%) HL7
13 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
13 2 (0.21%) PSD2
14 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 329 (34.74%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 3 (0.32%) HDFS
3 3 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.21%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 372 (39.28%) Kubernetes
2 195 (20.59%) Terraform
3 125 (13.20%) Grafana
3 125 (13.20%) Prometheus
4 58 (6.12%) Ansible
5 27 (2.85%) Argo
6 11 (1.16%) Istio
6 11 (1.16%) Kibana
7 9 (0.95%) Kiali
8 7 (0.74%) Fluentd
8 7 (0.74%) linkerd
8 7 (0.74%) Puppet
9 6 (0.63%) logstash
9 6 (0.63%) Podman
9 6 (0.63%) Rancher
10 5 (0.53%) Kustomize
11 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
11 2 (0.21%) NetBackup
11 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
11 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 96 (10.14%) Databricks
2 76 (8.03%) Splunk
3 69 (7.29%) Oracle
4 46 (4.86%) Microsoft
5 36 (3.80%) Google
6 29 (3.06%) Confluent
7 21 (2.22%) Informatica
8 16 (1.69%) IBM
9 13 (1.37%) Dynatrace
9 13 (1.37%) Red Hat
10 12 (1.27%) Salesforce
11 11 (1.16%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.95%) Solace
12 9 (0.95%) Talend
13 8 (0.84%) VMware
14 7 (0.74%) AppDynamics
14 7 (0.74%) MuleSoft
14 7 (0.74%) Pega
15 6 (0.63%) Sybase
16 5 (0.53%) SAP