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

6 months to
26 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 145 102 147
Rank change year-on-year -43 +45 -5
Contract jobs citing Kafka 959 782 707
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.88% 2.59% 1.63%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.66% 11.30% 7.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 564 507 512
10th Percentile £377 £400 £400
25th Percentile £425 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £548 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.45% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £688 £688
90th Percentile £800 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £493
% change year-on-year -1.06% -4.67% -17.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 3 9
10th Percentile £61.10 £47.14 £22.55
25th Percentile £65.00 £58.98 £27.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -64.10%
75th Percentile £90.00 £86.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £95.00 £90.74 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -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 9,924 6,922 9,273
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.50% 22.88% 21.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,524 4,712 6,362
10th Percentile £363 £355 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £514 £538
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -4.37% -2.27%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 279 137 279
10th Percentile £30.00 £29.18 £22.50
25th Percentile £51.25 £37.80 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £75.00 £68.00 £69.38
90th Percentile £85.43 £81.01 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £58.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +7.76% -10.08%

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 26 June 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 26 June 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 26 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 -37 831 £550 - 146
London -19 514 £588 -6.00% 85
UK excluding London -56 328 £465 -1.06% 90
Work from Home -53 273 £575 - 80
North of England -26 156 £439 -6.70% 26
Yorkshire -8 72 £465 -15.45% 4
North West -39 70 £430 -8.52% 19
South East -42 50 £465 +5.08% 28
Scotland -20 45 £450 -4.76% 7
Midlands -58 40 £495 +10.00% 8
South West -21 26 £500 -9.09% 13
North East -16 21 £425 -8.11% 3
West Midlands -55 21 £500 - 6
East Midlands -6 19 £413 +15.55% 2
East of England -22 17 £550 +10.00% 4
Northern Ireland -2 2 - - 3
Wales -13 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
1 128 (13.35%) Apache Spark
2 65 (6.78%) Apache
3 55 (5.74%) Apache Airflow
4 16 (1.67%) Confluence
5 7 (0.73%) Camunda
6 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.52%) Apache Pulsar
7 5 (0.52%) WebSphere
8 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
10 1 (0.10%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.10%) JBoss
Applications
1 8 (0.83%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.31%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.31%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
4 1 (0.10%) Shopify
Cloud Services
1 563 (58.71%) AWS
2 280 (29.20%) Azure
3 178 (18.56%) GCP
4 137 (14.29%) GitHub
5 119 (12.41%) Serverless
6 102 (10.64%) GitHub Actions
7 92 (9.59%) AWS Lambda
8 91 (9.49%) Amazon S3
9 69 (7.19%) OpenShift
10 65 (6.78%) Amazon EKS
11 60 (6.26%) Azure DevOps
12 54 (5.63%) Snowflake
13 52 (5.42%) Power Platform
14 47 (4.90%) Amazon ECS
15 44 (4.59%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 43 (4.48%) dbt
17 40 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
18 39 (4.07%) Amazon SQS
19 30 (3.13%) Amazon Kinesis
20 29 (3.02%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.56%) HTTP
2 12 (1.25%) Firewall
3 10 (1.04%) Network Security
4 9 (0.94%) DNS
5 7 (0.73%) MQTT
6 6 (0.63%) SSL
7 5 (0.52%) NAS
7 5 (0.52%) SAN
8 4 (0.42%) Internet
9 3 (0.31%) SMS
9 3 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 2 (0.21%) NaaS
10 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
10 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
10 2 (0.21%) WAN
11 1 (0.10%) 4G
11 1 (0.10%) 5G
11 1 (0.10%) FIX Connectivity
11 1 (0.10%) MIMO
11 1 (0.10%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 186 (19.40%) PostgreSQL
2 156 (16.27%) MongoDB
3 131 (13.66%) NoSQL
4 100 (10.43%) Relational Database
5 63 (6.57%) Big Data
6 58 (6.05%) Data Warehouse
6 58 (6.05%) SQL Server
7 51 (5.32%) Data Lake
8 48 (5.01%) Redis
9 43 (4.48%) Power BI
10 41 (4.28%) Apache Cassandra
10 41 (4.28%) Elasticsearch
11 37 (3.86%) DynamoDB
11 37 (3.86%) MySQL
12 35 (3.65%) Flink
13 33 (3.44%) Hadoop
14 29 (3.02%) BigQuery
15 28 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
15 28 (2.92%) Metadata
16 27 (2.82%) Amazon Athena
Development Applications
1 163 (17.00%) Jenkins
2 130 (13.56%) Git
3 126 (13.14%) GitLab
4 72 (7.51%) JUnit
5 50 (5.21%) Mockito
6 45 (4.69%) JIRA
7 36 (3.75%) Gradle
8 31 (3.23%) Selenium
9 25 (2.61%) Cucumber
10 23 (2.40%) REST Assured
11 19 (1.98%) Gatling
12 17 (1.77%) Liquibase
12 17 (1.77%) Postman
13 16 (1.67%) Maven
14 15 (1.56%) Serenity BDD
15 14 (1.46%) SonarQube
16 7 (0.73%) JMeter
17 6 (0.63%) Cypress.io
17 6 (0.63%) Snyk
18 5 (0.52%) Jaeger
General
1 261 (27.22%) Finance
2 181 (18.87%) Social Skills
3 128 (13.35%) Banking
4 87 (9.07%) Public Sector
5 82 (8.55%) Analytical Skills
6 46 (4.80%) Front Office
7 35 (3.65%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.82%) Documentation Skills
9 23 (2.40%) Retail
10 20 (2.09%) Financial Institution
11 14 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 14 (1.46%) Law
12 10 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
12 10 (1.04%) Telecoms
13 9 (0.94%) Marketing
13 9 (0.94%) Publishing
14 8 (0.83%) Military
15 7 (0.73%) Automotive
15 7 (0.73%) Corporate Banking
15 7 (0.73%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 313 (32.64%) Developer
2 194 (20.23%) Senior
3 157 (16.37%) Java Developer
4 149 (15.54%) Data Engineer
5 118 (12.30%) Architect
6 114 (11.89%) Lead
7 100 (10.43%) Software Engineer
8 81 (8.45%) Senior Developer
9 78 (8.13%) Java Engineer
10 54 (5.63%) AWS Architect
11 47 (4.90%) Senior Java Developer
12 44 (4.59%) Solutions Architect
13 39 (4.07%) DevOps Engineer
14 38 (3.96%) Full-Stack Developer
15 36 (3.75%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 33 (3.44%) Lead Developer
17 32 (3.34%) Java Software Engineer
17 32 (3.34%) Principal Engineer
18 31 (3.23%) Senior Java Engineer
19 30 (3.13%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 245 (25.55%) Spring
2 233 (24.30%) Spring Boot
3 144 (15.02%) REST
4 135 (14.08%) RESTful
5 130 (13.56%) React
6 103 (10.74%) RabbitMQ
7 88 (9.18%) Node.js
8 66 (6.88%) GraphQL
9 57 (5.94%) JSON
10 56 (5.84%) OpenTelemetry
11 52 (5.42%) Redux
12 49 (5.11%) gRPC
13 41 (4.28%) OAuth
14 39 (4.07%) AngularJS
14 39 (4.07%) Middleware
15 38 (3.96%) Swagger
16 37 (3.86%) Apache Avro
16 37 (3.86%) OpenAPI
17 35 (3.65%) OAuth2
17 35 (3.65%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 192 (20.02%) Distributed Systems
2 175 (18.25%) Cloud Native
3 38 (3.96%) Fixed Income
4 37 (3.86%) Data Structures
4 37 (3.86%) Product Ownership
5 35 (3.65%) Management Information System
6 27 (2.82%) Algorithms
7 26 (2.71%) Enterprise Software
8 22 (2.29%) Onboarding
9 18 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
10 17 (1.77%) Self-Motivation
11 15 (1.56%) Equities
11 15 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
12 14 (1.46%) Clustering
12 14 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
12 14 (1.46%) Derivative
12 14 (1.46%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 13 (1.36%) Public Cloud
14 12 (1.25%) Virtual Team
15 10 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 85 (8.86%) Linux
2 50 (5.21%) Unix
3 25 (2.61%) Windows
4 8 (0.83%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.52%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.31%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.21%) zOS
9 1 (0.10%) Android
9 1 (0.10%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.10%) VMS
9 1 (0.10%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 438 (45.67%) CI/CD
2 363 (37.85%) Microservices
3 320 (33.37%) Agile
4 293 (30.55%) DevOps
5 291 (30.34%) Event-Driven
6 220 (22.94%) Observability
7 202 (21.06%) Containerisation
8 196 (20.44%) Event-Driven Architecture
9 191 (19.92%) Software Engineering
10 178 (18.56%) Data Pipeline
11 158 (16.48%) Infrastructure as Code
12 155 (16.16%) Data Modelling
13 154 (16.06%) Test Automation
14 153 (15.95%) Problem-Solving
15 149 (15.54%) Analytics
16 141 (14.70%) Data Engineering
17 138 (14.39%) ETL
18 125 (13.03%) AI
19 110 (11.47%) TDD
20 104 (10.84%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 445 (46.40%) Java
2 328 (34.20%) Python
3 301 (31.39%) SQL
4 119 (12.41%) TypeScript
5 87 (9.07%) Go
6 83 (8.65%) JavaScript
7 58 (6.05%) C#
8 43 (4.48%) Bash
9 28 (2.92%) Scala
10 24 (2.50%) PowerShell
11 17 (1.77%) PL/SQL
11 17 (1.77%) Rust
12 14 (1.46%) Shell Script
13 13 (1.36%) C++
13 13 (1.36%) Kotlin
14 11 (1.15%) Bicep
15 10 (1.04%) Groovy
15 10 (1.04%) Search Processing Language
16 7 (0.73%) PHP
17 6 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 199 (20.75%) Security Cleared
2 153 (15.95%) SC Cleared
3 50 (5.21%) Degree
4 29 (3.02%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.88%) AWS Certification
5 18 (1.88%) DV Cleared
6 17 (1.77%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (1.36%) Master's Degree
8 9 (0.94%) Azure Certification
9 8 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.73%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.31%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) PhD
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.10%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.10%) CISSP
13 1 (0.10%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (10.32%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.84%) QA
3 39 (4.07%) Accessibility
4 36 (3.75%) GDPR
5 16 (1.67%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.94%) NIST
8 8 (0.83%) PCI DSS
9 6 (0.63%) SEPA
10 4 (0.42%) WCAG
11 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.21%) EMIR
11 2 (0.21%) IFRS
11 2 (0.21%) IFRS 17
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) NCSC
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
11 2 (0.21%) Solvency II
System Software
1 318 (33.16%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 5 (0.52%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 2 (0.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.10%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.10%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.10%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 381 (39.73%) Kubernetes
2 196 (20.44%) Terraform
3 120 (12.51%) Prometheus
4 116 (12.10%) Grafana
5 59 (6.15%) Ansible
6 18 (1.88%) Argo
7 10 (1.04%) Control-M
7 10 (1.04%) Kibana
8 9 (0.94%) Istio
8 9 (0.94%) Puppet
9 8 (0.83%) Podman
10 7 (0.73%) Fluentd
11 6 (0.63%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.52%) logstash
12 5 (0.52%) Rancher
13 4 (0.42%) Kiali
14 3 (0.31%) NetBackup
15 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
15 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
15 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 81 (8.45%) Databricks
2 69 (7.19%) Oracle
3 64 (6.67%) Splunk
4 41 (4.28%) Microsoft
5 38 (3.96%) Google
6 25 (2.61%) Confluent
7 24 (2.50%) Informatica
8 17 (1.77%) Dynatrace
8 17 (1.77%) IBM
9 14 (1.46%) Solace
10 13 (1.36%) Salesforce
11 10 (1.04%) MuleSoft
11 10 (1.04%) OpenAI
12 9 (0.94%) Sybase
12 9 (0.94%) Talend
13 8 (0.83%) Red Hat
13 8 (0.83%) ServiceNow
14 7 (0.73%) SAP
15 6 (0.63%) AppDynamics
15 6 (0.63%) Pega