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 24 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 121 117 181
Rank change year-on-year -4 +64 -68
Contract jobs citing Kafka 864 760 669
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.43% 2.08% 1.45%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.70% 9.57% 6.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 564 457 509
10th Percentile £372 £385 £450
25th Percentile £431 £489 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% -
75th Percentile £675 £725 £775
90th Percentile £750 £810 £828
UK excluding London median daily rate £469 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -1.26% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 4 9
10th Percentile £37.63 £25.88 £59.97
25th Percentile £43.25 £26.60 £75.00
Median hourly rate £59.25 £32.75 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year +80.92% -57.74% +5.80%
75th Percentile £68.44 £50.94 £78.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £72.88 £87.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £56.50 £78.00
% change year-on-year -29.20% -27.56% +6.85%

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 8,076 7,944 10,256
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.72% 21.71% 22.17%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,358 5,004 7,308
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 190 122 189
10th Percentile £30.70 £22.00 £35.55
25th Percentile £43.00 £37.13 £46.18
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +18.18% -13.73%
75th Percentile £65.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £74.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.50 £65.00 £54.56
% change year-on-year -2.31% +19.13% -16.06%

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 24 November 2025.

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 24 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 15 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 24 November 2025. 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 +1 758 £550 -10.20% 170
London +3 499 £600 -4.76% 89
Work from Home +39 311 £588 +6.82% 157
UK excluding London +5 254 £469 -1.26% 128
North of England -20 94 £500 -10.91% 25
South East +11 56 £435 -9.75% 58
Scotland +26 52 £458 +21.35% 10
North West -6 51 £455 -5.80% 20
Midlands 0 44 £500 +17.65% 11
Yorkshire -29 38 £586 -9.81% 5
West Midlands 0 27 £525 +23.53% 9
South West +12 17 £550 -15.38% 15
East Midlands +1 17 £420 +17.98% 2
North East -4 7 £575 -7.89%
East of England -26 2 £519 +63.90% 4

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 67 (7.75%) Apache Spark
2 49 (5.67%) Apache
3 41 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
4 34 (3.94%) Confluence
5 11 (1.27%) Mule
6 9 (1.04%) Anypoint
7 7 (0.81%) Camunda
7 7 (0.81%) JBoss
7 7 (0.81%) MQSeries
8 6 (0.69%) CMS
8 6 (0.69%) WebSphere
9 4 (0.46%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.35%) Luigi
10 3 (0.35%) OpenStack
10 3 (0.35%) WebSphere Application Server
11 2 (0.23%) Alfresco
11 2 (0.23%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.23%) SAS
11 2 (0.23%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.23%) WebLogic
Applications
1 4 (0.46%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.23%) MS Visio
2 2 (0.23%) Sketch
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (0.46%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.35%) Oracle 11i
3 2 (0.23%) SAP BRIM
4 1 (0.12%) Actimize
4 1 (0.12%) Bloomberg AIM
4 1 (0.12%) Endur
4 1 (0.12%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 432 (50.00%) AWS
2 208 (24.07%) Azure
3 121 (14.00%) GCP
4 117 (13.54%) GitHub
5 87 (10.07%) Serverless
6 76 (8.80%) GitHub Actions
7 65 (7.52%) Amazon S3
8 64 (7.41%) AWS Lambda
9 49 (5.67%) OpenShift
10 43 (4.98%) AWS CloudFormation
11 42 (4.86%) Azure DevOps
12 36 (4.17%) Amazon EKS
13 34 (3.94%) Amazon ECS
14 33 (3.82%) Amazon SQS
15 32 (3.70%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 31 (3.59%) Amazon Kinesis
17 30 (3.47%) Azure Data Factory
18 28 (3.24%) Snowflake
19 26 (3.01%) Amazon EC2
20 17 (1.97%) Datadog
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.93%) DNS
1 8 (0.93%) HTTP
2 7 (0.81%) AMQP
2 7 (0.81%) DSL
2 7 (0.81%) SSL
3 6 (0.69%) Firewall
3 6 (0.69%) Kerberos
4 5 (0.58%) SSH
5 4 (0.46%) FTP
6 3 (0.35%) MQTT
7 2 (0.23%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.12%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 174 (20.14%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (20.02%) MongoDB
3 118 (13.66%) NoSQL
4 74 (8.56%) Apache Cassandra
5 70 (8.10%) Relational Database
6 61 (7.06%) Big Data
7 48 (5.56%) Redis
8 40 (4.63%) Amazon RDS
8 40 (4.63%) DB2
8 40 (4.63%) SQL Server
9 37 (4.28%) DynamoDB
9 37 (4.28%) Elasticsearch
10 35 (4.05%) Data Warehouse
11 34 (3.94%) Hadoop
12 28 (3.24%) Data Lake
13 23 (2.66%) Metadata
14 22 (2.55%) MySQL
15 21 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
16 18 (2.08%) Flink
17 17 (1.97%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 177 (20.49%) Jenkins
2 114 (13.19%) GitLab
3 111 (12.85%) JUnit
4 104 (12.04%) Git
5 56 (6.48%) JIRA
6 49 (5.67%) Mockito
7 29 (3.36%) Cucumber
8 25 (2.89%) Gradle
9 24 (2.78%) JMeter
9 24 (2.78%) Sonatype Nexus
10 22 (2.55%) Maven
11 21 (2.43%) SonarQube
12 18 (2.08%) Artifactory
13 15 (1.74%) Liquibase
14 11 (1.27%) Gatling
14 11 (1.27%) Subversion
15 10 (1.16%) Bitbucket
15 10 (1.16%) SoapUI
16 7 (0.81%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 7 (0.81%) Cypress.io
General
1 244 (28.24%) Finance
2 242 (28.01%) Social Skills
3 143 (16.55%) Banking
4 101 (11.69%) Analytical Skills
5 71 (8.22%) Investment Banking
6 68 (7.87%) Public Sector
7 50 (5.79%) Front Office
8 12 (1.39%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 9 (1.04%) Retail
10 8 (0.93%) Financial Institution
11 7 (0.81%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.81%) Military
11 7 (0.81%) Telecoms
12 4 (0.46%) Aerospace
12 4 (0.46%) Retail Banking
13 3 (0.35%) Back Office
13 3 (0.35%) Law
13 3 (0.35%) Marketing
14 2 (0.23%) Games
Job Titles
1 351 (40.63%) Developer
2 241 (27.89%) Senior
3 227 (26.27%) Java Developer
4 122 (14.12%) Senior Developer
5 84 (9.72%) Data Engineer
5 84 (9.72%) Senior Java Developer
6 82 (9.49%) Lead
6 82 (9.49%) Software Engineer
7 70 (8.10%) Architect
8 64 (7.41%) DevOps Engineer
9 40 (4.63%) Kafka Developer
10 39 (4.51%) Platform Engineer
11 38 (4.40%) AWS Developer
12 37 (4.28%) AWS Engineer
12 37 (4.28%) Python Engineer
13 35 (4.05%) Kafka Engineer
14 33 (3.82%) Full-Stack Developer
15 31 (3.59%) Java Engineer
15 31 (3.59%) SQL Developer
16 30 (3.47%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 202 (23.38%) Spring
2 135 (15.63%) Spring Boot
3 102 (11.81%) React
3 102 (11.81%) REST
4 98 (11.34%) gRPC
5 87 (10.07%) RabbitMQ
6 71 (8.22%) RESTful
7 50 (5.79%) JMS
8 48 (5.56%) ActiveMQ
9 47 (5.44%) Node.js
10 41 (4.75%) AngularJS
11 38 (4.40%) .NET
12 37 (4.28%) GraphQL
13 34 (3.94%) Hibernate
13 34 (3.94%) OAuth
14 33 (3.82%) Keycloak
15 30 (3.47%) Apache NiFi
15 30 (3.47%) Middleware
15 30 (3.47%) SOAP
16 28 (3.24%) JSON
Miscellaneous
1 114 (13.19%) Distributed Systems
2 84 (9.72%) Cloud Native
3 45 (5.21%) Equities
4 37 (4.28%) Data Structures
5 30 (3.47%) Management Information System
6 27 (3.13%) Fixed Income
7 26 (3.01%) Product Ownership
7 26 (3.01%) Replication
8 23 (2.66%) Derivative
9 22 (2.55%) Market Risk
10 13 (1.50%) PKI
11 12 (1.39%) Distributed Computing
12 11 (1.27%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.27%) Hybrid Cloud
13 10 (1.16%) Algorithms
13 10 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
14 9 (1.04%) Legacy Applications
14 9 (1.04%) Onboarding
15 8 (0.93%) Legacy Systems
15 8 (0.93%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 161 (18.63%) Linux
2 76 (8.80%) Unix
3 20 (2.31%) Windows
4 13 (1.50%) Mac OS X
4 13 (1.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 7 (0.81%) CentOS
6 3 (0.35%) AIX
7 1 (0.12%) Debian
7 1 (0.12%) Ubuntu
7 1 (0.12%) VMS
7 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 356 (41.20%) Agile
2 354 (40.97%) Microservices
3 341 (39.47%) CI/CD
4 249 (28.82%) Software Engineering
5 234 (27.08%) DevOps
6 206 (23.84%) Problem-Solving
7 153 (17.71%) Containerisation
8 132 (15.28%) TDD
9 129 (14.93%) Open Source
10 127 (14.70%) Event-Driven
11 122 (14.12%) Infrastructure as Code
12 118 (13.66%) Observability
13 117 (13.54%) Test Automation
14 105 (12.15%) SDLC
15 100 (11.57%) Data Pipeline
16 92 (10.65%) Scrum
17 88 (10.19%) Analytics
18 83 (9.61%) Mentoring
19 80 (9.26%) ETL
20 79 (9.14%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 440 (50.93%) Java
2 316 (36.57%) Python
3 237 (27.43%) SQL
4 131 (15.16%) Go
5 62 (7.18%) C#
6 60 (6.94%) JavaScript
7 59 (6.83%) Shell Script
8 51 (5.90%) C++
9 48 (5.56%) Bash
10 42 (4.86%) TypeScript
11 34 (3.94%) Scala
12 15 (1.74%) Perl
13 10 (1.16%) Groovy
13 10 (1.16%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.93%) DataWeave
14 8 (0.93%) T-SQL
15 6 (0.69%) Korn
15 6 (0.69%) R
16 5 (0.58%) RPG IV
16 5 (0.58%) Rust
Qualifications
1 163 (18.87%) Security Cleared
2 144 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 52 (6.02%) Degree
4 34 (3.94%) Computer Science Degree
5 25 (2.89%) DV Cleared
6 21 (2.43%) BPSS Clearance
7 20 (2.31%) Azure Certification
8 18 (2.08%) AWS Certification
9 17 (1.97%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.81%) OCP
10 7 (0.81%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.69%) Numerate Degree
12 5 (0.58%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.23%) CBAP
13 2 (0.23%) CSPO
13 2 (0.23%) IBM Certification
14 1 (0.12%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.12%) SAFe Agilist
14 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
14 1 (0.12%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 49 (5.67%) Data Quality
2 38 (4.40%) QA
3 20 (2.31%) GDPR
4 9 (1.04%) NCSC
5 6 (0.69%) WCAG
6 5 (0.58%) HIPAA
7 4 (0.46%) Accessibility
7 4 (0.46%) HL7
7 4 (0.46%) MiFID
8 3 (0.35%) Def Stans
8 3 (0.35%) EMIR
8 3 (0.35%) SEPA
8 3 (0.35%) SLA
9 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
9 2 (0.23%) ISO 20022
9 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.23%) Section 508
10 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.12%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 1 (0.12%) JSP 440
System Software
1 285 (32.99%) Docker
2 7 (0.81%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.46%) HDFS
4 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 332 (38.43%) Kubernetes
2 173 (20.02%) Terraform
3 88 (10.19%) Grafana
4 78 (9.03%) Prometheus
5 73 (8.45%) Ansible
6 17 (1.97%) Argo
6 17 (1.97%) Progress Chef
7 15 (1.74%) Packer
8 9 (1.04%) logstash
9 8 (0.93%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.81%) Jamf Pro
11 6 (0.69%) Kibana
12 5 (0.58%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.46%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.46%) Hadoop YARN
13 4 (0.46%) Puppet
13 4 (0.46%) Rancher
14 3 (0.35%) Istio
14 3 (0.35%) Oozie
15 2 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 75 (8.68%) Oracle
2 51 (5.90%) Splunk
3 37 (4.28%) Databricks
4 36 (4.17%) Sybase
5 35 (4.05%) Microsoft
6 29 (3.36%) Google
6 29 (3.36%) IBM
7 28 (3.24%) Confluent
8 27 (3.13%) Dynatrace
9 18 (2.08%) Cloudera
9 18 (2.08%) VMware
10 16 (1.85%) MuleSoft
11 15 (1.74%) CA Agile Central
11 15 (1.74%) Red Hat
12 13 (1.50%) Foundry
12 13 (1.50%) Palantir
13 12 (1.39%) ServiceNow
13 12 (1.39%) TIBCO
14 10 (1.16%) Informatica
14 10 (1.16%) SAP