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 27 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 115 111 165
Rank change year-on-year -4 +54 -39
Contract jobs citing Kafka 928 750 640
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.23% 2.45% 1.45%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.12% 10.75% 7.02%
Number of daily rates quoted 598 456 491
10th Percentile £363 £376 £400
25th Percentile £417 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £537 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.16% +6.36% -15.38%
75th Percentile £675 £738 £675
90th Percentile £775 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £466 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -0.80% -6.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 4 3
10th Percentile £44.80 £52.23 £25.35
25th Percentile £64.00 £71.69 £30.79
Median hourly rate £70.00 £88.75 £42.19
Median % change year-on-year -21.13% +110.36% -43.75%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £54.77
90th Percentile £95.00 - £60.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.72 £85.00 £43.37
% change year-on-year -21.51% +96.01% -40.60%

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 9,171 6,974 9,113
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.08% 22.76% 20.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,129 4,541 6,371
10th Percentile £358 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% -1.69% -7.13%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -2.68%
Number of hourly rates quoted 232 91 219
10th Percentile £35.03 £26.25 £21.63
25th Percentile £52.50 £38.88 £42.50
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +28.28% -25.05%
75th Percentile £72.36 £68.00 £66.25
90th Percentile £81.00 £81.01 £76.53
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 27 February 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 27 February 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 27 February 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 -6 814 £550 -8.33% 137
London -17 523 £603 -5.49% 80
Work from Home +12 341 £600 -3.03% 58
UK excluding London -33 263 £466 -0.80% 73
North of England -29 117 £488 -7.14% 32
South East -1 61 £433 -24.78% 18
North West -18 60 £453 -6.22% 21
Yorkshire -37 48 £520 -28.31% 8
Midlands -31 44 £500 +40.45% 5
South West -9 27 £550 -13.73% 9
West Midlands -30 27 £550 -8.33% 3
Scotland +1 26 £475 +22.34% 8
East Midlands -21 17 £402 +12.92% 2
North East -9 14 £506 -6.62% 3
East of England -41 5 £500 +57.23%
Wales -6 1 £250 - 1

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
1 103 (11.10%) Apache Spark
2 58 (6.25%) Apache
3 42 (4.53%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (3.77%) Confluence
5 8 (0.86%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.65%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.65%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.54%) Camunda
8 4 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.32%) CMS
9 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
9 3 (0.32%) OpenStack
9 3 (0.32%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.22%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.22%) JBoss
10 2 (0.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.22%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
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%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 556 (59.91%) AWS
2 243 (26.19%) Azure
3 163 (17.56%) GitHub
4 157 (16.92%) GCP
5 126 (13.58%) Serverless
6 115 (12.39%) GitHub Actions
7 105 (11.31%) Amazon S3
8 92 (9.91%) AWS Lambda
9 76 (8.19%) Amazon EKS
10 73 (7.87%) AWS CloudFormation
11 55 (5.93%) Amazon ECS
12 50 (5.39%) OpenShift
13 45 (4.85%) Power Platform
14 44 (4.74%) Amazon SQS
15 41 (4.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 39 (4.20%) Amazon Kinesis
17 37 (3.99%) Azure Data Factory
17 37 (3.99%) Azure DevOps
18 34 (3.66%) Amazon EC2
19 30 (3.23%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.72%) Firewall
2 13 (1.40%) HTTP
3 11 (1.19%) SSL
4 10 (1.08%) DNS
5 6 (0.65%) FTP
5 6 (0.65%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.65%) SMS
5 6 (0.65%) SSH
6 3 (0.32%) TCP/IP
6 3 (0.32%) VPN
7 2 (0.22%) MQTT
8 1 (0.11%) 4G
8 1 (0.11%) 5G
8 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.11%) Internet
8 1 (0.11%) NaaS
8 1 (0.11%) NAS
8 1 (0.11%) Reverse Proxy
8 1 (0.11%) SAN
8 1 (0.11%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 184 (19.83%) PostgreSQL
2 158 (17.03%) MongoDB
3 138 (14.87%) NoSQL
4 78 (8.41%) Apache Cassandra
5 68 (7.33%) Relational Database
6 55 (5.93%) Data Warehouse
7 54 (5.82%) Elasticsearch
8 46 (4.96%) Big Data
8 46 (4.96%) Data Lake
9 43 (4.63%) DynamoDB
9 43 (4.63%) SQL Server
10 42 (4.53%) Amazon RDS
10 42 (4.53%) Redis
11 35 (3.77%) Hadoop
12 33 (3.56%) Amazon Athena
12 33 (3.56%) Power BI
13 32 (3.45%) Flink
13 32 (3.45%) MySQL
14 30 (3.23%) Amazon Redshift
15 29 (3.13%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 152 (16.38%) Jenkins
2 134 (14.44%) GitLab
3 102 (10.99%) Git
4 86 (9.27%) JUnit
5 62 (6.68%) JIRA
6 38 (4.09%) Mockito
7 31 (3.34%) Cucumber
8 25 (2.69%) JMeter
9 24 (2.59%) Sonatype Nexus
10 21 (2.26%) Gradle
11 18 (1.94%) Gatling
12 14 (1.51%) Maven
13 11 (1.19%) Selenium
14 10 (1.08%) CircleCI
14 10 (1.08%) REST Assured
15 9 (0.97%) Artifactory
15 9 (0.97%) Jaeger
16 8 (0.86%) Postman
17 6 (0.65%) Serenity BDD
17 6 (0.65%) SoapUI
General
1 267 (28.77%) Finance
2 208 (22.41%) Social Skills
3 137 (14.76%) Banking
4 76 (8.19%) Analytical Skills
5 63 (6.79%) Public Sector
6 51 (5.50%) Front Office
7 47 (5.06%) Investment Banking
8 25 (2.69%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.83%) Financial Institution
10 11 (1.19%) Influencing Skills
11 10 (1.08%) Marketing
12 7 (0.75%) Retail
12 7 (0.75%) Telecoms
13 5 (0.54%) Law
14 4 (0.43%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 4 (0.43%) Military
15 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.32%) Legal
16 2 (0.22%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 354 (38.15%) Developer
2 264 (28.45%) Senior
3 194 (20.91%) Java Developer
4 129 (13.90%) Data Engineer
5 128 (13.79%) Senior Developer
6 115 (12.39%) Lead
7 94 (10.13%) Software Engineer
8 84 (9.05%) Architect
9 76 (8.19%) Senior Java Developer
10 49 (5.28%) DevOps Engineer
11 46 (4.96%) Full-Stack Developer
12 45 (4.85%) Java Engineer
13 42 (4.53%) AWS Architect
13 42 (4.53%) Kafka Developer
14 39 (4.20%) AWS Engineer
15 38 (4.09%) AWS Developer
16 35 (3.77%) Kafka Engineer
17 34 (3.66%) Senior Data Engineer
18 31 (3.34%) Solutions Architect
19 28 (3.02%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 222 (23.92%) Spring
2 189 (20.37%) Spring Boot
3 111 (11.96%) REST
4 97 (10.45%) Node.js
4 97 (10.45%) React
5 96 (10.34%) gRPC
6 88 (9.48%) RESTful
7 74 (7.97%) RabbitMQ
8 46 (4.96%) AngularJS
9 43 (4.63%) Middleware
10 39 (4.20%) GraphQL
11 36 (3.88%) JSON
12 34 (3.66%) OpenTelemetry
13 31 (3.34%) Hibernate
14 30 (3.23%) Keycloak
14 30 (3.23%) PySpark
15 27 (2.91%) OAuth
16 26 (2.80%) JMS
17 25 (2.69%) .NET
17 25 (2.69%) Redux
Miscellaneous
1 139 (14.98%) Distributed Systems
2 124 (13.36%) Cloud Native
3 43 (4.63%) Management Information System
4 41 (4.42%) Fixed Income
5 34 (3.66%) Product Ownership
6 28 (3.02%) Data Structures
7 24 (2.59%) Derivative
7 24 (2.59%) Equities
8 21 (2.26%) Hybrid Cloud
9 17 (1.83%) Market Risk
10 15 (1.62%) Legacy Applications
11 14 (1.51%) Replication
12 13 (1.40%) Algorithms
13 12 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (1.29%) Legacy Systems
13 12 (1.29%) Onboarding
14 10 (1.08%) Distributed Computing
14 10 (1.08%) Greenfield Project
15 8 (0.86%) Distributed Architecture
15 8 (0.86%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 149 (16.06%) Linux
2 73 (7.87%) Unix
3 28 (3.02%) Windows
4 11 (1.19%) 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
1 393 (42.35%) CI/CD
2 357 (38.47%) Microservices
3 322 (34.70%) Agile
4 255 (27.48%) DevOps
5 232 (25.00%) Software Engineering
6 192 (20.69%) Event-Driven
7 191 (20.58%) Problem-Solving
8 182 (19.61%) Containerisation
9 175 (18.86%) Observability
10 154 (16.59%) Infrastructure as Code
11 145 (15.63%) Analytics
12 135 (14.55%) Data Pipeline
13 133 (14.33%) Test Automation
14 129 (13.90%) Data Engineering
15 118 (12.72%) ETL
16 117 (12.61%) Data Modelling
17 115 (12.39%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 109 (11.75%) Open Source
19 105 (11.31%) TDD
20 104 (11.21%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 464 (50.00%) Java
2 320 (34.48%) Python
3 265 (28.56%) SQL
4 139 (14.98%) Go
5 86 (9.27%) JavaScript
6 69 (7.44%) TypeScript
7 68 (7.33%) C#
8 36 (3.88%) Bash
8 36 (3.88%) C++
8 36 (3.88%) Shell Script
9 27 (2.91%) Scala
10 19 (2.05%) Rust
11 12 (1.29%) PL/SQL
12 10 (1.08%) PowerShell
13 8 (0.86%) Bicep
14 7 (0.75%) Korn
14 7 (0.75%) Perl
15 6 (0.65%) R
16 5 (0.54%) Kotlin
16 5 (0.54%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 209 (22.52%) Security Cleared
2 184 (19.83%) SC Cleared
3 47 (5.06%) Degree
4 35 (3.77%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (3.02%) Azure Certification
6 25 (2.69%) AWS Certification
7 22 (2.37%) DV Cleared
8 21 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
9 14 (1.51%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.86%) OCP
10 8 (0.86%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.75%) 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%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.22%) Postgraduate
14 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMP
14 1 (0.11%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 94 (10.13%) Data Quality
2 47 (5.06%) QA
3 35 (3.77%) GDPR
4 15 (1.62%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.19%) NCSC
6 9 (0.97%) ISO 20022
7 8 (0.86%) NIST
8 7 (0.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 7 (0.75%) 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%) JSP 440
System Software
1 315 (33.94%) Docker
2 8 (0.86%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
3 2 (0.22%) HDFS
3 2 (0.22%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 369 (39.76%) Kubernetes
2 214 (23.06%) Terraform
3 111 (11.96%) Grafana
4 104 (11.21%) Prometheus
5 60 (6.47%) Ansible
6 26 (2.80%) Argo
7 15 (1.62%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.08%) Istio
9 9 (0.97%) Kiali
10 8 (0.86%) linkerd
11 6 (0.65%) logstash
11 6 (0.65%) Packer
12 5 (0.54%) Puppet
13 4 (0.43%) Kibana
13 4 (0.43%) Rancher
14 3 (0.32%) Fluentd
14 3 (0.32%) Jamf Pro
14 3 (0.32%) Podman
15 2 (0.22%) QRadar
15 2 (0.22%) rkt
Vendors
1 79 (8.51%) Oracle
2 75 (8.08%) Databricks
3 63 (6.79%) Splunk
4 39 (4.20%) Google
5 34 (3.66%) Microsoft
6 32 (3.45%) Confluent
7 28 (3.02%) IBM
8 24 (2.59%) VMware
9 18 (1.94%) Informatica
9 18 (1.94%) Sybase
10 17 (1.83%) Dynatrace
11 13 (1.40%) Cloudera
12 11 (1.19%) Red Hat
13 10 (1.08%) ServiceNow
14 9 (0.97%) Talend
15 8 (0.86%) Atlassian
15 8 (0.86%) Foundry
15 8 (0.86%) Palantir
16 7 (0.75%) Bloomberg
16 7 (0.75%) SAP