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

6 months to
28 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 127 111 164
Rank change year-on-year -16 +53 -41
Contract jobs citing Kafka 851 706 642
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.22% 2.26% 1.45%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.96% 10.07% 6.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 548 431 508
10th Percentile £363 £378 £413
25th Percentile £416 £469 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £590 £575
Median % change year-on-year -10.17% +2.61% -11.54%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £703
90th Percentile £738 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £475 £524
% change year-on-year -2.63% -9.31% -10.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 4 4
10th Percentile £39.05 £42.53 £47.39
25th Percentile £40.00 £68.22 £58.71
Median hourly rate £68.00 £88.75 £71.50
Median % change year-on-year -23.38% +24.13% -4.67%
75th Percentile £95.00 £93.75 £81.00
90th Percentile £98.00 - £86.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £52.00 £85.00 £71.50
% change year-on-year -38.82% +18.88% -2.05%

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 8,543 7,010 9,269
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.26% 22.39% 21.00%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,689 4,448 6,566
10th Percentile £356 £356 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £535 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.21% -0.47% -6.52%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £770 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 212 89 190
10th Percentile £35.00 £24.47 £25.98
25th Percentile £49.06 £38.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £62.50 £62.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year - +13.64% -15.38%
75th Percentile £69.44 £67.50 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.95 £77.45 £76.63
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year - +18.18% -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 28 January 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 28 January 2026.

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 January 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 -9 745 £550 -10.20% 270
London -5 492 £600 -4.76% 108
Work from Home +12 304 £575 -4.17% 214
UK excluding London -16 226 £463 -2.63% 220
North of England -29 101 £500 -9.09% 39
South East +5 53 £433 -26.38% 92
North West -24 49 £449 -14.57% 26
Yorkshire -23 44 £586 -16.25% 7
Midlands -26 38 £500 +40.45% 11
Scotland +1 29 £463 +22.03% 14
West Midlands -23 22 £550 +21.55% 7
South West -9 21 £550 -15.38% 26
East Midlands -22 16 £402 +12.92% 4
North East -8 12 £463 -25.91% 6
East of England -24 1 £450 +41.07% 27

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 80 (9.40%) Apache Spark
2 46 (5.41%) Apache
3 42 (4.94%) Apache Airflow
4 38 (4.47%) Confluence
5 5 (0.59%) Camunda
5 5 (0.59%) Ethereum
5 5 (0.59%) Hyperledger
6 4 (0.47%) CMS
6 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
7 3 (0.35%) MQSeries
7 3 (0.35%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.24%) JBoss
8 2 (0.24%) Luigi
8 2 (0.24%) SharePoint
9 1 (0.12%) Anypoint
9 1 (0.12%) Apache Synapse
9 1 (0.12%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.12%) Mule ESB
9 1 (0.12%) SAS
9 1 (0.12%) Tomcat
Applications
1 4 (0.47%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.24%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (0.47%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.24%) Actimize
3 2 (0.24%) Bloomberg AIM
3 2 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.24%) Shopify
4 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.12%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.12%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 484 (56.87%) AWS
2 224 (26.32%) Azure
3 156 (18.33%) GitHub
4 132 (15.51%) GCP
5 122 (14.34%) Serverless
6 111 (13.04%) GitHub Actions
7 99 (11.63%) Amazon S3
8 90 (10.58%) AWS Lambda
9 68 (7.99%) Amazon EKS
9 68 (7.99%) AWS CloudFormation
10 45 (5.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
10 45 (5.29%) Amazon ECS
11 42 (4.94%) Amazon Kinesis
11 42 (4.94%) Amazon SQS
11 42 (4.94%) Power Platform
12 39 (4.58%) OpenShift
13 36 (4.23%) Azure Data Factory
13 36 (4.23%) Azure DevOps
14 32 (3.76%) Amazon EC2
15 26 (3.06%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 14 (1.65%) Firewall
2 12 (1.41%) DNS
2 12 (1.41%) HTTP
2 12 (1.41%) SSL
3 7 (0.82%) Kerberos
3 7 (0.82%) SSH
4 6 (0.71%) FTP
4 6 (0.71%) SMS
5 5 (0.59%) TCP/IP
6 3 (0.35%) VPN
7 2 (0.24%) MQTT
8 1 (0.12%) Broadband
8 1 (0.12%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.12%) Internet
8 1 (0.12%) NAS
8 1 (0.12%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 170 (19.98%) PostgreSQL
2 156 (18.33%) MongoDB
3 131 (15.39%) NoSQL
4 77 (9.05%) Apache Cassandra
5 52 (6.11%) Relational Database
6 49 (5.76%) Amazon RDS
7 46 (5.41%) Data Warehouse
8 45 (5.29%) Elasticsearch
9 44 (5.17%) Redis
10 43 (5.05%) Big Data
10 43 (5.05%) DynamoDB
11 40 (4.70%) Data Lake
11 40 (4.70%) SQL Server
12 32 (3.76%) Amazon Athena
12 32 (3.76%) Power BI
13 30 (3.53%) Amazon Redshift
14 27 (3.17%) Hadoop
15 26 (3.06%) DB2
15 26 (3.06%) MySQL
16 24 (2.82%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 156 (18.33%) Jenkins
2 136 (15.98%) GitLab
3 105 (12.34%) Git
4 82 (9.64%) JUnit
5 58 (6.82%) JIRA
6 41 (4.82%) Mockito
7 25 (2.94%) JMeter
8 24 (2.82%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.82%) Sonatype Nexus
9 21 (2.47%) Gradle
10 14 (1.65%) Gatling
10 14 (1.65%) Maven
11 10 (1.18%) Artifactory
11 10 (1.18%) CircleCI
12 9 (1.06%) Jaeger
12 9 (1.06%) Selenium
12 9 (1.06%) SoapUI
12 9 (1.06%) SonarQube
13 8 (0.94%) Postman
14 6 (0.71%) Terragrunt
General
1 227 (26.67%) Finance
2 206 (24.21%) Social Skills
3 124 (14.57%) Banking
4 77 (9.05%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (7.87%) Public Sector
6 48 (5.64%) Investment Banking
7 24 (2.82%) Front Office
8 16 (1.88%) Documentation Skills
9 14 (1.65%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (1.06%) Marketing
12 7 (0.82%) Retail
13 5 (0.59%) Aerospace
13 5 (0.59%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 5 (0.59%) Law
14 3 (0.35%) Manufacturing
14 3 (0.35%) Military
14 3 (0.35%) Telecoms
15 2 (0.24%) Games
15 2 (0.24%) Legal
Job Titles
1 323 (37.96%) Developer
2 252 (29.61%) Senior
3 186 (21.86%) Java Developer
4 128 (15.04%) Senior Developer
5 105 (12.34%) Data Engineer
6 84 (9.87%) Lead
7 78 (9.17%) Senior Java Developer
8 75 (8.81%) Software Engineer
9 67 (7.87%) Architect
10 58 (6.82%) DevOps Engineer
11 43 (5.05%) Full-Stack Developer
11 43 (5.05%) Kafka Developer
12 42 (4.94%) AWS Engineer
13 39 (4.58%) Kafka Engineer
14 38 (4.47%) AWS Developer
15 32 (3.76%) AWS Architect
16 31 (3.64%) Java Engineer
17 29 (3.41%) Senior Data Engineer
18 28 (3.29%) Platform Engineer
18 28 (3.29%) Python Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (24.21%) Spring
2 171 (20.09%) Spring Boot
3 101 (11.87%) REST
4 98 (11.52%) gRPC
5 78 (9.17%) RESTful
6 72 (8.46%) React
7 68 (7.99%) RabbitMQ
8 67 (7.87%) Node.js
9 42 (4.94%) AngularJS
10 35 (4.11%) Middleware
11 33 (3.88%) Hibernate
12 32 (3.76%) JMS
12 32 (3.76%) Keycloak
13 30 (3.53%) ActiveMQ
13 30 (3.53%) PySpark
14 29 (3.41%) .NET
15 28 (3.29%) JSON
16 26 (3.06%) OAuth
17 24 (2.82%) JAX-RS
17 24 (2.82%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 117 (13.75%) Distributed Systems
2 104 (12.22%) Cloud Native
3 42 (4.94%) Management Information System
4 35 (4.11%) Product Ownership
5 30 (3.53%) Equities
6 28 (3.29%) Data Structures
7 23 (2.70%) Derivative
8 21 (2.47%) Replication
9 19 (2.23%) Market Risk
10 16 (1.88%) Fixed Income
11 14 (1.65%) Legacy Applications
12 13 (1.53%) Distributed Computing
12 13 (1.53%) Hybrid Cloud
13 11 (1.29%) Greenfield Project
13 11 (1.29%) Legacy Systems
13 11 (1.29%) Onboarding
14 8 (0.94%) Algorithms
14 8 (0.94%) Data Protection Act
14 8 (0.94%) Public Cloud
14 8 (0.94%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 156 (18.33%) Linux
2 80 (9.40%) Unix
3 25 (2.94%) Windows
4 13 (1.53%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.82%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.59%) AIX
6 5 (0.59%) CentOS
7 3 (0.35%) VMS
8 2 (0.24%) zOS
9 1 (0.12%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 363 (42.66%) CI/CD
2 342 (40.19%) Microservices
3 293 (34.43%) Agile
4 249 (29.26%) DevOps
5 217 (25.50%) Software Engineering
6 178 (20.92%) Problem-Solving
7 175 (20.56%) Containerisation
8 166 (19.51%) Event-Driven
9 146 (17.16%) Infrastructure as Code
10 145 (17.04%) Observability
11 125 (14.69%) Test Automation
12 119 (13.98%) Data Pipeline
13 112 (13.16%) Analytics
14 110 (12.93%) Open Source
15 102 (11.99%) TDD
16 97 (11.40%) Data Engineering
17 96 (11.28%) ETL
18 90 (10.58%) Data Modelling
18 90 (10.58%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 82 (9.64%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 407 (47.83%) Java
2 289 (33.96%) Python
3 246 (28.91%) SQL
4 120 (14.10%) Go
5 72 (8.46%) C#
6 62 (7.29%) JavaScript
7 47 (5.52%) Shell Script
8 44 (5.17%) Bash
9 43 (5.05%) C++
10 39 (4.58%) TypeScript
11 30 (3.53%) Scala
12 17 (2.00%) Rust
13 14 (1.65%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.18%) PowerShell
15 9 (1.06%) Perl
16 7 (0.82%) Korn
17 6 (0.71%) Groovy
17 6 (0.71%) R
18 5 (0.59%) Bicep
18 5 (0.59%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 190 (22.33%) Security Cleared
2 170 (19.98%) SC Cleared
3 38 (4.47%) Degree
4 31 (3.64%) BPSS Clearance
5 27 (3.17%) Azure Certification
6 19 (2.23%) Computer Science Degree
7 18 (2.12%) AWS Certification
8 17 (2.00%) DV Cleared
9 11 (1.29%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.94%) OCP
10 8 (0.94%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.71%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.35%) ITIL Certification
13 2 (0.24%) AWS Certified Developer
13 2 (0.24%) CBAP
13 2 (0.24%) CSPO
13 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.24%) TOGAF Certification
14 1 (0.12%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.12%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 73 (8.58%) Data Quality
2 42 (4.94%) QA
3 34 (4.00%) GDPR
4 10 (1.18%) NCSC
5 9 (1.06%) ISO 20022
6 8 (0.94%) Accessibility
7 7 (0.82%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.71%) NIST
8 6 (0.71%) PCI DSS
8 6 (0.71%) SEPA
9 5 (0.59%) SLA
10 3 (0.35%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.35%) HL7
10 3 (0.35%) WCAG
11 2 (0.24%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.24%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.24%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.24%) MiFID
11 2 (0.24%) PSD2
12 1 (0.12%) SOC 2
System Software
1 311 (36.55%) Docker
2 8 (0.94%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.47%) HDFS
4 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.24%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 347 (40.78%) Kubernetes
2 203 (23.85%) Terraform
3 100 (11.75%) Grafana
4 83 (9.75%) Prometheus
5 64 (7.52%) Ansible
6 29 (3.41%) Argo
7 15 (1.76%) Progress Chef
8 9 (1.06%) Kiali
9 8 (0.94%) Istio
9 8 (0.94%) Packer
10 7 (0.82%) linkerd
10 7 (0.82%) logstash
11 5 (0.59%) Puppet
11 5 (0.59%) Rancher
12 4 (0.47%) Fluentd
12 4 (0.47%) Jamf Pro
12 4 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (0.35%) Hadoop YARN
14 2 (0.24%) Kibana
14 2 (0.24%) rkt
Vendors
1 76 (8.93%) Oracle
2 59 (6.93%) Databricks
3 57 (6.70%) Splunk
4 35 (4.11%) Confluent
5 33 (3.88%) Google
6 31 (3.64%) Microsoft
7 28 (3.29%) IBM
8 24 (2.82%) VMware
9 22 (2.59%) Sybase
10 19 (2.23%) Dynatrace
11 13 (1.53%) Cloudera
11 13 (1.53%) Informatica
12 11 (1.29%) Red Hat
13 9 (1.06%) ServiceNow
14 8 (0.94%) Foundry
14 8 (0.94%) Palantir
14 8 (0.94%) SAP
15 7 (0.82%) Atlassian
16 6 (0.71%) CA Agile Central
16 6 (0.71%) PagerDuty