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 20 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 148 106 136
Rank change year-on-year -42 +30 +16
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,019 822 670
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.90% 2.50% 1.73%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 8.68% 9.88% 7.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 636 530 464
10th Percentile £370 £385 £400
25th Percentile £425 £451 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £536 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £721
90th Percentile £775 £758 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £470 £493
% change year-on-year +1.06% -4.67% -17.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 3 9
10th Percentile £56.25 £54.65 £24.87
25th Percentile £60.88 £57.13 £27.00
Median hourly rate £72.50 £62.50 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.00% +123.21% -64.10%
75th Percentile £87.50 £71.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £75.71 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -2.16% +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 11,739 8,318 9,505
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.94% 25.33% 24.51%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,720 5,624 6,459
10th Percentile £375 £355 £356
25th Percentile £431 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £514 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.14% -6.55% -
75th Percentile £638 £630 £651
90th Percentile £738 £738 £780
UK excluding London median daily rate £503 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.79% -5.00% -0.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 284 181 231
10th Percentile £29.07 £30.00 £22.50
25th Percentile £45.94 £40.75 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.37% -1.82% -12.00%
75th Percentile £75.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £87.16 £81.01 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.47 £55.00 £61.60
% change year-on-year +22.67% -10.71% +4.35%

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 20 August 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 20 August 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 20 August 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 -45 862 £550 - 530
London -34 515 £575 -7.26% 387
UK excluding London -32 378 £475 +1.06% 220
Work from Home -68 261 £550 -4.35% 227
North of England -4 177 £475 +1.17% 66
Yorkshire +13 92 £495 -10.00% 18
North West -29 66 £430 -8.32% 34
South East -27 63 £489 +12.36% 63
Scotland -27 53 £430 -8.99% 24
Midlands -52 37 £500 +17.51% 20
East of England 0 26 £550 +7.32% 9
North East -17 26 £425 -8.55% 14
South West -24 26 £500 -9.09% 25
West Midlands -51 22 £514 +2.80% 15
East Midlands -16 15 £470 +22.40% 5
Northern Ireland +4 4 - - 11
Wales -15 1 £375 - 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
1 132 (12.95%) Apache Spark
2 69 (6.77%) Apache
3 67 (6.58%) Apache Airflow
4 19 (1.86%) Confluence
5 9 (0.88%) Camunda
6 6 (0.59%) CMS
6 6 (0.59%) OpenStack
7 5 (0.49%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 5 (0.49%) SharePoint
8 4 (0.39%) Apache Pulsar
8 4 (0.39%) PowerExchange
8 4 (0.39%) WebSphere
9 3 (0.29%) Anypoint
9 3 (0.29%) Mule
10 2 (0.20%) Apache Pig
10 2 (0.20%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.20%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.20%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 7 (0.69%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.098%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.098%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.39%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 2 (0.20%) Endur
2 2 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.098%) Actimize
3 1 (0.098%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.098%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.098%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.098%) SAP IS-U
3 1 (0.098%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 596 (58.49%) AWS
2 360 (35.33%) Azure
3 227 (22.28%) GCP
4 170 (16.68%) GitHub
5 121 (11.87%) GitHub Actions
6 104 (10.21%) Serverless
7 79 (7.75%) AWS Lambda
8 76 (7.46%) Amazon S3
9 73 (7.16%) Azure DevOps
10 70 (6.87%) Snowflake
11 69 (6.77%) Amazon EKS
12 64 (6.28%) OpenShift
13 52 (5.10%) Amazon SQS
13 52 (5.10%) dbt
14 46 (4.51%) Power Platform
15 42 (4.12%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 38 (3.73%) Amazon ECS
17 32 (3.14%) Azure Data Factory
18 31 (3.04%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 27 (2.65%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 21 (2.06%) HTTP
2 15 (1.47%) DNS
3 11 (1.08%) Firewall
4 10 (0.98%) Network Security
5 7 (0.69%) MQTT
5 7 (0.69%) SSL
6 6 (0.59%) TCP/IP
7 5 (0.49%) SAN
8 4 (0.39%) NAS
8 4 (0.39%) SSH
9 3 (0.29%) Internet
10 2 (0.20%) 4G
10 2 (0.20%) 5G
10 2 (0.20%) NaaS
10 2 (0.20%) OpenVPN
10 2 (0.20%) Reverse Proxy
10 2 (0.20%) WAN
11 1 (0.098%) FIX Connectivity
11 1 (0.098%) MIMO
11 1 (0.098%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 188 (18.45%) PostgreSQL
2 159 (15.60%) MongoDB
3 135 (13.25%) NoSQL
4 97 (9.52%) Relational Database
5 70 (6.87%) Data Warehouse
6 61 (5.99%) SQL Server
7 59 (5.79%) Big Data
8 52 (5.10%) Data Lake
9 51 (5.00%) Redis
10 45 (4.42%) Power BI
11 40 (3.93%) BigQuery
12 39 (3.83%) MySQL
13 36 (3.53%) Metadata
14 34 (3.34%) Elasticsearch
14 34 (3.34%) Flink
15 32 (3.14%) Apache Cassandra
16 30 (2.94%) DynamoDB
17 28 (2.75%) Amazon Redshift
17 28 (2.75%) Delta Lake
18 26 (2.55%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 206 (20.22%) Jenkins
2 173 (16.98%) Git
3 145 (14.23%) GitLab
4 69 (6.77%) JUnit
5 59 (5.79%) Mockito
6 56 (5.50%) Gradle
7 46 (4.51%) Selenium
8 44 (4.32%) JIRA
9 32 (3.14%) Maven
10 28 (2.75%) Cucumber
11 25 (2.45%) SonarQube
12 23 (2.26%) Postman
13 20 (1.96%) REST Assured
14 18 (1.77%) JMeter
14 18 (1.77%) Liquibase
15 17 (1.67%) Gatling
16 16 (1.57%) Bitbucket
17 13 (1.28%) Cypress.io
18 11 (1.08%) LoadRunner
18 11 (1.08%) SoapUI
General
1 254 (24.93%) Finance
2 191 (18.74%) Social Skills
3 134 (13.15%) Banking
4 106 (10.40%) Analytical Skills
5 101 (9.91%) Public Sector
6 35 (3.43%) Retail
7 32 (3.14%) Front Office
8 24 (2.36%) Investment Banking
9 19 (1.86%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 18 (1.77%) Financial Institution
11 17 (1.67%) Telecoms
12 15 (1.47%) Law
13 12 (1.18%) Documentation Skills
14 11 (1.08%) Organisational Skills
15 10 (0.98%) Billing
16 9 (0.88%) Publishing
17 8 (0.79%) Games
17 8 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
18 7 (0.69%) Marketing
18 7 (0.69%) Military
Job Titles
1 311 (30.52%) Developer
2 204 (20.02%) Senior
3 163 (16.00%) Java Developer
4 143 (14.03%) Architect
4 143 (14.03%) Data Engineer
5 108 (10.60%) Lead
6 80 (7.85%) Software Engineer
7 74 (7.26%) Java Engineer
8 67 (6.58%) Senior Developer
9 61 (5.99%) Solutions Architect
10 53 (5.20%) DevOps Engineer
11 40 (3.93%) Senior Data Engineer
12 38 (3.73%) AWS Architect
12 38 (3.73%) Full-Stack Developer
12 38 (3.73%) Senior Java Developer
13 37 (3.63%) Python Engineer
14 36 (3.53%) AWS Engineer
14 36 (3.53%) Kafka Engineer
15 33 (3.24%) Data Architect
15 33 (3.24%) Java Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 244 (23.95%) Spring
2 235 (23.06%) Spring Boot
3 212 (20.80%) Terraform
4 208 (20.41%) REST
5 147 (14.43%) RESTful
6 143 (14.03%) React
7 124 (12.17%) RabbitMQ
8 71 (6.97%) JSON
9 65 (6.38%) Node.js
10 60 (5.89%) GraphQL
11 56 (5.50%) OAuth
12 52 (5.10%) PySpark
13 50 (4.91%) OpenTelemetry
14 45 (4.42%) .NET
15 44 (4.32%) Redux
16 42 (4.12%) Swagger
17 41 (4.02%) OAuth2
18 40 (3.93%) Middleware
18 40 (3.93%) OpenAPI
18 40 (3.93%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 205 (20.12%) Cloud Native
2 203 (19.92%) Distributed Systems
3 48 (4.71%) Product Ownership
4 42 (4.12%) Data Structures
5 38 (3.73%) Enterprise Software
6 34 (3.34%) Onboarding
7 29 (2.85%) Algorithms
8 27 (2.65%) Self-Motivation
9 26 (2.55%) Legacy Systems
10 24 (2.36%) AI Agents
11 23 (2.26%) Fixed Income
12 21 (2.06%) Management Information System
13 20 (1.96%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 19 (1.86%) SWIFT Messaging Network
15 18 (1.77%) Replication
16 17 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
17 15 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
17 15 (1.47%) Public Cloud
18 14 (1.37%) Equities
19 13 (1.28%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 120 (11.78%) Linux
2 67 (6.58%) Unix
3 27 (2.65%) Windows
4 9 (0.88%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.59%) Mac OS X
6 5 (0.49%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.29%) VMS
8 2 (0.20%) Android
8 2 (0.20%) Debian
8 2 (0.20%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.20%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.20%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.098%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.098%) CentOS
9 1 (0.098%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.098%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 533 (52.31%) CI/CD
2 391 (38.37%) Microservices
3 379 (37.19%) Event-Driven
4 364 (35.72%) Agile
5 357 (35.03%) DevOps
6 265 (26.01%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 251 (24.63%) Observability
8 219 (21.49%) Containerisation
9 208 (20.41%) Test Automation
10 201 (19.73%) Infrastructure as Code
11 192 (18.84%) Software Engineering
12 187 (18.35%) Data Pipeline
13 165 (16.19%) AI
14 154 (15.11%) Data Modelling
15 144 (14.13%) Problem-Solving
16 140 (13.74%) ETL
17 134 (13.15%) Analytics
18 126 (12.37%) Data Engineering
19 120 (11.78%) Continuous Improvement
20 115 (11.29%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 438 (42.98%) Java
2 359 (35.23%) Python
3 332 (32.58%) SQL
4 114 (11.19%) TypeScript
5 104 (10.21%) JavaScript
6 71 (6.97%) Bash
7 62 (6.08%) C#
8 61 (5.99%) Go
9 40 (3.93%) Scala
10 35 (3.43%) PowerShell
11 28 (2.75%) PL/SQL
12 23 (2.26%) Shell Script
13 18 (1.77%) Kotlin
14 11 (1.08%) Rust
15 10 (0.98%) Bicep
15 10 (0.98%) C++
15 10 (0.98%) Groovy
15 10 (0.98%) Search Processing Language
16 7 (0.69%) PHP
17 6 (0.59%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 234 (22.96%) Security Cleared
2 182 (17.86%) SC Cleared
3 53 (5.20%) Degree
4 29 (2.85%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (2.75%) Computer Science Degree
6 18 (1.77%) DV Cleared
7 11 (1.08%) Master's Degree
8 10 (0.98%) AWS Certification
8 10 (0.98%) ISTQB
9 8 (0.79%) Azure Certification
10 7 (0.69%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.59%) ISEB
12 5 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 4 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 3 (0.29%) DBS Check
14 3 (0.29%) PhD
14 3 (0.29%) TOGAF Certification
15 2 (0.20%) Microsoft Certification
15 2 (0.20%) Postgraduate
16 1 (0.098%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 98 (9.62%) Data Quality
2 62 (6.08%) QA
3 42 (4.12%) Accessibility
4 29 (2.85%) GDPR
5 25 (2.45%) ISO 20022
6 11 (1.08%) SEPA
7 8 (0.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.59%) Actionable Recommendations
8 6 (0.59%) WCAG
9 4 (0.39%) SLA
10 3 (0.29%) ISO 15022
10 3 (0.29%) NIST
11 2 (0.20%) EMIR
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS 17
11 2 (0.20%) MiFID
11 2 (0.20%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.098%) HIPAA
12 1 (0.098%) HL7
12 1 (0.098%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 363 (35.62%) Docker
2 7 (0.69%) Apache ZooKeeper
2 7 (0.69%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (0.59%) etcd
4 3 (0.29%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.20%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.20%) HDFS
6 1 (0.098%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 445 (43.67%) Kubernetes
2 128 (12.56%) Grafana
3 113 (11.09%) Prometheus
4 64 (6.28%) Ansible
5 29 (2.85%) Argo
6 25 (2.45%) Control-M
7 12 (1.18%) Kibana
8 11 (1.08%) Istio
8 11 (1.08%) Kustomize
8 11 (1.08%) Podman
8 11 (1.08%) Puppet
9 7 (0.69%) Fluentd
9 7 (0.69%) logstash
10 5 (0.49%) Check_MK
10 5 (0.49%) HP Fortify
10 5 (0.49%) Rancher
11 3 (0.29%) Bosun
11 3 (0.29%) NetBackup
11 3 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
12 2 (0.20%) Amdocs OSS
Vendors
1 108 (10.60%) Oracle
2 97 (9.52%) Databricks
3 56 (5.50%) Splunk
4 54 (5.30%) Google
4 54 (5.30%) Microsoft
5 39 (3.83%) IBM
6 34 (3.34%) Informatica
7 33 (3.24%) Confluent
7 33 (3.24%) Dynatrace
8 18 (1.77%) Salesforce
9 17 (1.67%) MuleSoft
10 16 (1.57%) SAP
11 15 (1.47%) OpenAI
11 15 (1.47%) Solace
12 11 (1.08%) VMware
13 10 (0.98%) New Relic
13 10 (0.98%) Red Hat
13 10 (0.98%) TIBCO
14 8 (0.79%) ServiceNow
15 6 (0.59%) ForgeRock