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

6 months to
18 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 106 145
Rank change year-on-year -34 +39 -2
Contract jobs citing Kafka 952 743 714
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.89% 2.50% 1.63%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.69% 10.95% 7.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 560 482 521
10th Percentile £376 £400 £400
25th Percentile £425 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.27% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £688 £675
90th Percentile £800 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £475 £493
% change year-on-year -2.11% -3.65% -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 9,826 6,783 9,249
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.50% 22.79% 21.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,451 4,628 6,345
10th Percentile £363 £356 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £515 £535
Median % change year-on-year +1.94% -3.74% -2.73%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 280 127 275
10th Percentile £30.45 £29.18 £22.50
25th Percentile £52.19 £40.42 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £50.00
Median % change year-on-year +13.04% +15.00% -23.08%
75th Percentile £74.26 £68.00 £68.38
90th Percentile £85.00 £81.15 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £55.00
% change year-on-year +4.00% +13.64% -15.38%

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 18 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 18 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 18 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 -27 822 £550 - 117
London -17 515 £588 -6.00% 74
UK excluding London -43 319 £465 -2.11% 82
Work from Home -43 273 £600 +4.35% 67
North of England -25 147 £447 -6.39% 17
Yorkshire -18 71 £463 -15.91% 4
North West -31 63 £447 -5.89% 10
South East -37 51 £488 +10.17% 24
Scotland -19 46 £450 -4.76% 8
Midlands -48 39 £491 +8.09% 3
South West -11 25 £500 -9.09% 11
West Midlands -48 21 £500 - 2
North East -22 20 £425 -8.11% 3
East Midlands -18 18 £407 +14.40% 1
East of England -20 17 £550 +10.00% 5
Northern Ireland -4 2 - - 13
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
1 125 (13.13%) Apache Spark
2 64 (6.72%) Apache
3 52 (5.46%) Apache Airflow
4 14 (1.47%) Confluence
5 7 (0.74%) Camunda
6 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.53%) Apache Pulsar
7 5 (0.53%) 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 (0.11%) JBoss
10 1 (0.11%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 8 (0.84%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.32%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.32%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 552 (57.98%) AWS
2 277 (29.10%) Azure
3 170 (17.86%) GCP
4 134 (14.08%) GitHub
5 121 (12.71%) Serverless
6 100 (10.50%) GitHub Actions
7 94 (9.87%) Amazon S3
8 91 (9.56%) AWS Lambda
9 69 (7.25%) OpenShift
10 64 (6.72%) Amazon EKS
11 60 (6.30%) Azure DevOps
12 56 (5.88%) Power Platform
13 51 (5.36%) Snowflake
14 45 (4.73%) Amazon ECS
15 44 (4.62%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 41 (4.31%) AWS CloudFormation
16 41 (4.31%) dbt
17 39 (4.10%) Amazon SQS
18 32 (3.36%) Amazon Kinesis
19 30 (3.15%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.58%) HTTP
2 14 (1.47%) Firewall
3 10 (1.05%) Network Security
4 8 (0.84%) DNS
5 7 (0.74%) MQTT
6 5 (0.53%) NAS
6 5 (0.53%) SAN
6 5 (0.53%) SMS
6 5 (0.53%) SSL
7 3 (0.32%) Internet
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.11%) 4G
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) FIX Connectivity
9 1 (0.11%) FTP
9 1 (0.11%) MIMO
Database & Business Intelligence
1 184 (19.33%) PostgreSQL
2 153 (16.07%) MongoDB
3 127 (13.34%) NoSQL
4 94 (9.87%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.51%) Big Data
6 55 (5.78%) SQL Server
7 54 (5.67%) Data Warehouse
8 52 (5.46%) Data Lake
9 49 (5.15%) Redis
10 45 (4.73%) Power BI
11 43 (4.52%) Elasticsearch
12 42 (4.41%) Apache Cassandra
13 36 (3.78%) DynamoDB
13 36 (3.78%) MySQL
14 35 (3.68%) Flink
15 33 (3.47%) Hadoop
16 29 (3.05%) Amazon Athena
17 28 (2.94%) Amazon RDS
17 28 (2.94%) BigQuery
18 27 (2.84%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 155 (16.28%) Jenkins
2 126 (13.24%) GitLab
3 124 (13.03%) Git
4 69 (7.25%) JUnit
5 46 (4.83%) Mockito
6 45 (4.73%) JIRA
7 35 (3.68%) Gradle
8 31 (3.26%) Selenium
9 24 (2.52%) Cucumber
10 23 (2.42%) REST Assured
11 20 (2.10%) Gatling
12 17 (1.79%) Liquibase
13 15 (1.58%) Maven
13 15 (1.58%) Postman
13 15 (1.58%) Serenity BDD
14 13 (1.37%) SonarQube
15 7 (0.74%) Jaeger
16 6 (0.63%) Cypress.io
16 6 (0.63%) JMeter
16 6 (0.63%) Snyk
General
1 259 (27.21%) Finance
2 178 (18.70%) Social Skills
3 127 (13.34%) Banking
4 84 (8.82%) Public Sector
5 80 (8.40%) Analytical Skills
6 45 (4.73%) Front Office
7 35 (3.68%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.84%) Documentation Skills
9 22 (2.31%) Financial Institution
10 20 (2.10%) Retail
11 14 (1.47%) Law
12 13 (1.37%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 11 (1.16%) Marketing
14 10 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (1.05%) Telecoms
15 9 (0.95%) Publishing
16 8 (0.84%) Corporate Banking
16 8 (0.84%) Military
17 7 (0.74%) Automotive
17 7 (0.74%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 311 (32.67%) Developer
2 200 (21.01%) Senior
3 159 (16.70%) Java Developer
4 151 (15.86%) Data Engineer
5 117 (12.29%) Lead
6 114 (11.97%) Architect
7 99 (10.40%) Software Engineer
8 84 (8.82%) Senior Developer
9 80 (8.40%) Java Engineer
10 55 (5.78%) AWS Architect
11 49 (5.15%) Senior Java Developer
12 43 (4.52%) Solutions Architect
13 40 (4.20%) DevOps Engineer
13 40 (4.20%) Full-Stack Developer
14 36 (3.78%) Developer/Software Engineer
15 33 (3.47%) Lead Developer
16 32 (3.36%) Java Software Engineer
16 32 (3.36%) Principal Engineer
17 31 (3.26%) Senior Java Engineer
18 30 (3.15%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 240 (25.21%) Spring
2 230 (24.16%) Spring Boot
3 140 (14.71%) REST
4 131 (13.76%) RESTful
5 128 (13.45%) React
6 100 (10.50%) RabbitMQ
7 90 (9.45%) Node.js
8 63 (6.62%) GraphQL
9 58 (6.09%) OpenTelemetry
10 51 (5.36%) gRPC
10 51 (5.36%) JSON
11 50 (5.25%) Redux
12 43 (4.52%) Middleware
13 41 (4.31%) OAuth
14 40 (4.20%) AngularJS
14 40 (4.20%) Apache Avro
15 39 (4.10%) Swagger
16 38 (3.99%) OpenAPI
17 36 (3.78%) OAuth2
18 35 (3.68%) PySpark
Miscellaneous
1 191 (20.06%) Distributed Systems
2 174 (18.28%) Cloud Native
3 39 (4.10%) Fixed Income
4 38 (3.99%) Management Information System
5 37 (3.89%) Product Ownership
6 33 (3.47%) Data Structures
7 23 (2.42%) Algorithms
7 23 (2.42%) Enterprise Software
7 23 (2.42%) Onboarding
8 18 (1.89%) Legacy Systems
9 15 (1.58%) Hybrid Cloud
9 15 (1.58%) Self-Motivation
10 14 (1.47%) Clustering
10 14 (1.47%) Data Protection Act
10 14 (1.47%) Derivative
10 14 (1.47%) Equities
11 13 (1.37%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 13 (1.37%) Public Cloud
12 10 (1.05%) CMDB
12 10 (1.05%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 86 (9.03%) Linux
2 51 (5.36%) Unix
3 27 (2.84%) Windows
4 8 (0.84%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.74%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.53%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.32%) VMS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.21%) zOS
9 1 (0.11%) Android
9 1 (0.11%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 430 (45.17%) CI/CD
2 361 (37.92%) Microservices
3 310 (32.56%) Agile
4 288 (30.25%) DevOps
5 285 (29.94%) Event-Driven
6 221 (23.21%) Observability
7 202 (21.22%) Containerisation
8 193 (20.27%) Event-Driven Architecture
9 189 (19.85%) Software Engineering
10 169 (17.75%) Data Pipeline
11 157 (16.49%) Data Modelling
12 156 (16.39%) Infrastructure as Code
13 151 (15.86%) Problem-Solving
14 148 (15.55%) Test Automation
15 147 (15.44%) Analytics
16 137 (14.39%) Data Engineering
17 133 (13.97%) ETL
18 117 (12.29%) AI
19 106 (11.13%) TDD
20 105 (11.03%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 443 (46.53%) Java
2 323 (33.93%) Python
3 296 (31.09%) SQL
4 118 (12.39%) TypeScript
5 87 (9.14%) Go
6 85 (8.93%) JavaScript
7 55 (5.78%) C#
8 39 (4.10%) Bash
9 25 (2.63%) Scala
10 19 (2.00%) PowerShell
10 19 (2.00%) Rust
11 17 (1.79%) PL/SQL
12 14 (1.47%) C++
13 12 (1.26%) Bicep
13 12 (1.26%) Kotlin
13 12 (1.26%) Shell Script
14 10 (1.05%) Search Processing Language
15 8 (0.84%) Groovy
16 7 (0.74%) PHP
17 6 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 194 (20.38%) Security Cleared
2 150 (15.76%) SC Cleared
3 50 (5.25%) Degree
4 28 (2.94%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.89%) AWS Certification
5 18 (1.89%) DV Cleared
6 16 (1.68%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (1.26%) Master's Degree
8 9 (0.95%) Azure Certification
9 8 (0.84%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.74%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.32%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.11%) CISSP
13 1 (0.11%) PhD
13 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 98 (10.29%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.88%) QA
3 36 (3.78%) GDPR
4 34 (3.57%) Accessibility
5 18 (1.89%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.05%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.95%) NIST
8 8 (0.84%) PCI DSS
9 7 (0.74%) SEPA
10 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
10 3 (0.32%) PSD2
10 3 (0.32%) WCAG
11 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.21%) EMIR
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) NCSC
12 1 (0.11%) IFRS
12 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
12 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 318 (33.40%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 4 (0.42%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 2 (0.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) HDFS
5 1 (0.11%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 373 (39.18%) Kubernetes
2 194 (20.38%) Terraform
3 121 (12.71%) Prometheus
4 118 (12.39%) Grafana
5 56 (5.88%) Ansible
6 18 (1.89%) Argo
7 10 (1.05%) Kibana
8 9 (0.95%) Control-M
8 9 (0.95%) Istio
8 9 (0.95%) Puppet
9 8 (0.84%) Podman
10 7 (0.74%) Fluentd
11 6 (0.63%) Kiali
11 6 (0.63%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.53%) logstash
12 5 (0.53%) Rancher
13 3 (0.32%) NetBackup
14 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
14 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
14 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 81 (8.51%) Databricks
2 68 (7.14%) Oracle
3 65 (6.83%) Splunk
4 40 (4.20%) Microsoft
5 36 (3.78%) Google
6 27 (2.84%) Confluent
7 23 (2.42%) Informatica
8 18 (1.89%) IBM
9 15 (1.58%) Dynatrace
10 13 (1.37%) Salesforce
11 11 (1.16%) Solace
12 10 (1.05%) MuleSoft
13 9 (0.95%) OpenAI
13 9 (0.95%) Sybase
13 9 (0.95%) Talend
14 8 (0.84%) Red Hat
14 8 (0.84%) ServiceNow
15 6 (0.63%) AppDynamics
15 6 (0.63%) SAP
15 6 (0.63%) Tenable