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

6 months to
28 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 115 109 178
Rank change year-on-year -6 +69 -64
Contract jobs citing Kafka 888 764 654
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.46% 2.09% 1.43%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.78% 9.59% 6.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 582 457 501
10th Percentile £363 £385 £450
25th Percentile £425 £493 £500
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 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -2.84% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 9
10th Percentile £37.63 £26.04 £59.97
25th Percentile £43.25 £27.00 £75.00
Median hourly rate £59.25 £37.50 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year +58.00% -51.61% +5.80%
75th Percentile £68.44 £87.50 £78.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £91.25 £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 8,234 7,964 10,109
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.81% 21.76% 22.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,461 5,008 7,214
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £720 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £481 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.75% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 192 122 186
10th Percentile £30.80 £22.00 £35.00
25th Percentile £43.00 £37.13 £46.18
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £54.78
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +18.66% -12.82%
75th Percentile £65.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £74.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.75 £65.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year -1.92% +23.81% -19.23%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 +9 777 £550 -11.58% 158
London +2 513 £600 -7.69% 103
Work from Home +37 322 £600 +9.09% 97
UK excluding London +7 261 £462 -2.84% 128
North of England -23 98 £480 -14.48% 18
North West -1 56 £455 -5.80% 11
South East +10 55 £435 -9.75% 68
Scotland +22 53 £450 +20.00% 9
Midlands +5 45 £500 +17.65% 10
Yorkshire -37 37 £586 -9.81% 5
West Midlands -20 28 £525 +23.53% 9
South West +8 19 £550 -15.38% 13
East Midlands +1 17 £420 +17.98% 1
North East -3 7 £575 -7.89% 2
East of England -31 2 £519 +63.90% 5

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 70 (7.88%) Apache Spark
2 51 (5.74%) Apache
3 42 (4.73%) Apache Airflow
4 38 (4.28%) Confluence
5 11 (1.24%) Mule
6 9 (1.01%) Anypoint
7 7 (0.79%) JBoss
7 7 (0.79%) MQSeries
8 6 (0.68%) Camunda
8 6 (0.68%) CMS
8 6 (0.68%) WebSphere
9 5 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.34%) Luigi
10 3 (0.34%) OpenStack
10 3 (0.34%) WebSphere Application Server
11 2 (0.23%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.23%) SAS
11 2 (0.23%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.23%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.23%) WebLogic
Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.23%) MS Visio
2 2 (0.23%) Sketch
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.34%) Oracle 11i
3 2 (0.23%) Actimize
3 2 (0.23%) SAP BRIM
4 1 (0.11%) Bloomberg AIM
4 1 (0.11%) Endur
4 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 446 (50.23%) AWS
2 218 (24.55%) Azure
3 124 (13.96%) GCP
4 123 (13.85%) GitHub
5 94 (10.59%) Serverless
6 77 (8.67%) GitHub Actions
7 68 (7.66%) Amazon S3
8 66 (7.43%) AWS Lambda
9 48 (5.41%) AWS CloudFormation
9 48 (5.41%) OpenShift
10 45 (5.07%) Azure DevOps
11 42 (4.73%) Amazon EKS
12 37 (4.17%) Amazon ECS
13 35 (3.94%) Amazon SQS
14 32 (3.60%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 32 (3.60%) Amazon Kinesis
15 31 (3.49%) Azure Data Factory
16 27 (3.04%) Amazon EC2
16 27 (3.04%) Snowflake
17 19 (2.14%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 11 (1.24%) SSL
2 9 (1.01%) HTTP
3 8 (0.90%) DNS
4 7 (0.79%) AMQP
4 7 (0.79%) DSL
5 6 (0.68%) Firewall
5 6 (0.68%) Kerberos
6 5 (0.56%) SSH
7 4 (0.45%) FTP
7 4 (0.45%) MQTT
8 2 (0.23%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.23%) VPN
9 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 180 (20.27%) MongoDB
2 176 (19.82%) PostgreSQL
3 127 (14.30%) NoSQL
4 74 (8.33%) Apache Cassandra
5 73 (8.22%) Relational Database
6 60 (6.76%) Big Data
7 50 (5.63%) Redis
8 42 (4.73%) SQL Server
9 41 (4.62%) Amazon RDS
10 40 (4.50%) DB2
11 37 (4.17%) Data Warehouse
11 37 (4.17%) Elasticsearch
12 36 (4.05%) DynamoDB
13 35 (3.94%) Hadoop
14 31 (3.49%) Data Lake
15 25 (2.82%) Metadata
16 22 (2.48%) Amazon Redshift
17 21 (2.36%) MySQL
18 18 (2.03%) Power BI
18 18 (2.03%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 179 (20.16%) Jenkins
2 120 (13.51%) GitLab
3 111 (12.50%) JUnit
4 110 (12.39%) Git
5 60 (6.76%) JIRA
6 48 (5.41%) Mockito
7 29 (3.27%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.70%) Gradle
8 24 (2.70%) JMeter
8 24 (2.70%) Sonatype Nexus
9 22 (2.48%) Maven
10 21 (2.36%) SonarQube
11 18 (2.03%) Artifactory
12 13 (1.46%) Liquibase
13 11 (1.24%) Gatling
13 11 (1.24%) SoapUI
13 11 (1.24%) Subversion
14 10 (1.13%) Bitbucket
15 7 (0.79%) Atlassian Bamboo
15 7 (0.79%) Cypress.io
General
1 251 (28.27%) Finance
2 248 (27.93%) Social Skills
3 145 (16.33%) Banking
4 104 (11.71%) Analytical Skills
5 72 (8.11%) Investment Banking
6 71 (8.00%) Public Sector
7 50 (5.63%) Front Office
8 12 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 9 (1.01%) Retail
10 8 (0.90%) Financial Institution
10 8 (0.90%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.79%) Military
12 5 (0.56%) Telecoms
13 4 (0.45%) Aerospace
13 4 (0.45%) Retail Banking
14 3 (0.34%) Back Office
14 3 (0.34%) Law
14 3 (0.34%) Marketing
15 2 (0.23%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 363 (40.88%) Developer
2 244 (27.48%) Senior
3 226 (25.45%) Java Developer
4 123 (13.85%) Senior Developer
5 87 (9.80%) Data Engineer
6 85 (9.57%) Software Engineer
7 83 (9.35%) Lead
8 82 (9.23%) Senior Java Developer
9 68 (7.66%) Architect
10 63 (7.09%) DevOps Engineer
11 40 (4.50%) Kafka Developer
11 40 (4.50%) Platform Engineer
12 39 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
13 38 (4.28%) AWS Developer
14 37 (4.17%) Python Engineer
15 35 (3.94%) Kafka Engineer
16 34 (3.83%) Full-Stack Developer
17 32 (3.60%) Java Engineer
17 32 (3.60%) SQL Developer
18 30 (3.38%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (23.42%) Spring
2 143 (16.10%) Spring Boot
3 107 (12.05%) REST
4 101 (11.37%) React
5 100 (11.26%) gRPC
6 90 (10.14%) RabbitMQ
7 80 (9.01%) RESTful
8 52 (5.86%) Node.js
9 50 (5.63%) JMS
10 48 (5.41%) ActiveMQ
11 40 (4.50%) AngularJS
12 39 (4.39%) .NET
13 37 (4.17%) GraphQL
14 34 (3.83%) JSON
14 34 (3.83%) OAuth
15 33 (3.72%) Hibernate
16 32 (3.60%) Keycloak
17 31 (3.49%) Middleware
17 31 (3.49%) SOAP
18 30 (3.38%) Apache NiFi
Miscellaneous
1 117 (13.18%) Distributed Systems
2 88 (9.91%) Cloud Native
3 46 (5.18%) Equities
4 41 (4.62%) Data Structures
5 32 (3.60%) Management Information System
6 28 (3.15%) Fixed Income
6 28 (3.15%) Product Ownership
7 26 (2.93%) Replication
8 23 (2.59%) Derivative
9 22 (2.48%) Market Risk
10 14 (1.58%) Distributed Computing
11 12 (1.35%) PKI
12 11 (1.24%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
12 11 (1.24%) Hybrid Cloud
13 10 (1.13%) Algorithms
14 9 (1.01%) Legacy Applications
14 9 (1.01%) Onboarding
15 8 (0.90%) Legacy Systems
15 8 (0.90%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 167 (18.81%) Linux
2 77 (8.67%) Unix
3 21 (2.36%) Windows
4 13 (1.46%) Mac OS X
4 13 (1.46%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 7 (0.79%) CentOS
6 4 (0.45%) AIX
7 1 (0.11%) Debian
7 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
7 1 (0.11%) VMS
7 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.11%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 363 (40.88%) Agile
1 363 (40.88%) Microservices
2 354 (39.86%) CI/CD
3 253 (28.49%) Software Engineering
4 244 (27.48%) DevOps
5 211 (23.76%) Problem-Solving
6 164 (18.47%) Containerisation
7 136 (15.32%) Event-Driven
8 131 (14.75%) TDD
9 130 (14.64%) Open Source
10 129 (14.53%) Infrastructure as Code
11 123 (13.85%) Observability
12 120 (13.51%) Test Automation
13 106 (11.94%) SDLC
14 105 (11.82%) Data Pipeline
15 95 (10.70%) Analytics
16 92 (10.36%) Scrum
17 87 (9.80%) Mentoring
18 84 (9.46%) Data Engineering
18 84 (9.46%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 443 (49.89%) Java
2 327 (36.82%) Python
3 243 (27.36%) SQL
4 131 (14.75%) Go
5 65 (7.32%) JavaScript
6 64 (7.21%) C#
7 59 (6.64%) Shell Script
8 51 (5.74%) C++
9 48 (5.41%) Bash
10 40 (4.50%) TypeScript
11 34 (3.83%) Scala
12 14 (1.58%) Perl
13 11 (1.24%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.13%) Groovy
15 8 (0.90%) DataWeave
15 8 (0.90%) T-SQL
16 7 (0.79%) Korn
17 6 (0.68%) R
17 6 (0.68%) Rust
18 5 (0.56%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 170 (19.14%) Security Cleared
2 148 (16.67%) SC Cleared
3 51 (5.74%) Degree
4 33 (3.72%) Computer Science Degree
5 26 (2.93%) DV Cleared
6 22 (2.48%) BPSS Clearance
7 20 (2.25%) Azure Certification
8 18 (2.03%) AWS Certification
9 17 (1.91%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.79%) OCP
10 7 (0.79%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.68%) Numerate Degree
12 5 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.23%) CBAP
13 2 (0.23%) CSPO
13 2 (0.23%) IBM Certification
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMP
14 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (6.08%) Data Quality
2 40 (4.50%) QA
3 22 (2.48%) GDPR
4 9 (1.01%) NCSC
5 6 (0.68%) WCAG
6 5 (0.56%) HIPAA
6 5 (0.56%) HL7
6 5 (0.56%) MiFID
7 4 (0.45%) Accessibility
7 4 (0.45%) SEPA
8 3 (0.34%) Def Stans
8 3 (0.34%) EMIR
8 3 (0.34%) SLA
9 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
9 2 (0.23%) ISO 20022
9 2 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.23%) Section 508
10 1 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 298 (33.56%) Docker
2 7 (0.79%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (0.56%) HDFS
4 3 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 344 (38.74%) Kubernetes
2 182 (20.50%) Terraform
3 91 (10.25%) Grafana
4 80 (9.01%) Prometheus
5 74 (8.33%) Ansible
6 17 (1.91%) Argo
6 17 (1.91%) Progress Chef
7 15 (1.69%) Packer
8 9 (1.01%) logstash
9 8 (0.90%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.79%) Jamf Pro
11 6 (0.68%) Kibana
11 6 (0.68%) Puppet
12 5 (0.56%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.45%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.45%) Hadoop YARN
13 4 (0.45%) Rancher
14 3 (0.34%) Istio
14 3 (0.34%) Oozie
15 2 (0.23%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 81 (9.12%) Oracle
2 51 (5.74%) Splunk
3 39 (4.39%) Databricks
4 38 (4.28%) Microsoft
5 36 (4.05%) Sybase
6 30 (3.38%) Google
6 30 (3.38%) IBM
7 29 (3.27%) Confluent
8 27 (3.04%) Dynatrace
9 18 (2.03%) Cloudera
9 18 (2.03%) VMware
10 16 (1.80%) MuleSoft
11 15 (1.69%) CA Agile Central
11 15 (1.69%) Red Hat
12 13 (1.46%) Foundry
12 13 (1.46%) Palantir
13 12 (1.35%) ServiceNow
13 12 (1.35%) TIBCO
14 10 (1.13%) Informatica
14 10 (1.13%) SAP