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 5 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 114 119 177
Rank change year-on-year +5 +58 -64
Contract jobs citing Kafka 893 756 643
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.45% 2.09% 1.43%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.86% 9.58% 6.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 589 450 493
10th Percentile £363 £383 £450
25th Percentile £425 £491 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% -
75th Percentile £656 £725 £750
90th Percentile £738 £810 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £452 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -4.79% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 4 8
10th Percentile £38.10 £28.65 £57.45
25th Percentile £40.00 £33.54 £72.50
Median hourly rate £56.00 £61.25 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year -8.57% -20.97% +5.80%
75th Percentile £66.88 £89.06 £80.70
90th Percentile £86.00 £91.88 £87.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £85.00 £71.50
% change year-on-year -52.94% +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 8,221 7,894 9,958
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.53% 21.85% 22.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,461 4,981 7,083
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £445
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £624 £650 £650
90th Percentile £716 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £480 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -4.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 185 113 183
10th Percentile £30.10 £22.00 £32.60
25th Percentile £43.00 £38.50 £46.18
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +18.18% -15.38%
75th Percentile £65.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £74.35 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £65.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year -1.54% +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 5 December 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 5 December 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 5 December 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 +3 780 £550 -11.58% 412
London +7 513 £600 -5.88% 102
Work from Home +35 320 £600 +9.09% 285
UK excluding London +2 259 £452 -4.79% 377
North of England -23 98 £473 -17.47% 78
North West -2 57 £435 -11.33% 44
South East +7 56 £433 -12.27% 110
Scotland +27 51 £450 +20.00% 23
Midlands +1 45 £500 +17.65% 65
Yorkshire -27 35 £598 -8.08% 28
West Midlands -9 28 £545 -3.11% 39
South West +3 21 £550 -15.38% 40
East Midlands -1 17 £420 +17.98% 21
North East -3 8 £556 -10.90% 6
East of England -31 1 £538 +69.83% 49

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 71 (7.95%) Apache Spark
2 52 (5.82%) Apache
3 40 (4.48%) Apache Airflow
4 38 (4.26%) Confluence
5 10 (1.12%) Mule
6 8 (0.90%) Anypoint
6 8 (0.90%) MQSeries
7 6 (0.67%) CMS
8 5 (0.56%) Camunda
8 5 (0.56%) JBoss
8 5 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.34%) Luigi
9 3 (0.34%) OpenStack
9 3 (0.34%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.22%) Tomcat
10 2 (0.22%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.11%) IIS
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.22%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.11%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.45%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.34%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.22%) Actimize
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
1 452 (50.62%) AWS
2 221 (24.75%) Azure
3 129 (14.45%) GitHub
4 122 (13.66%) GCP
5 95 (10.64%) Serverless
6 82 (9.18%) GitHub Actions
7 69 (7.73%) Amazon S3
8 67 (7.50%) AWS Lambda
9 51 (5.71%) AWS CloudFormation
10 47 (5.26%) Azure DevOps
11 45 (5.04%) Amazon EKS
12 43 (4.82%) OpenShift
13 40 (4.48%) Amazon SQS
14 38 (4.26%) Amazon ECS
15 34 (3.81%) Azure Data Factory
16 32 (3.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 32 (3.58%) Amazon Kinesis
17 28 (3.14%) Amazon EC2
17 28 (3.14%) Snowflake
18 22 (2.46%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.12%) SSL
2 9 (1.01%) HTTP
3 8 (0.90%) DNS
4 7 (0.78%) AMQP
4 7 (0.78%) DSL
5 6 (0.67%) Firewall
5 6 (0.67%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.67%) SSH
6 5 (0.56%) FTP
7 4 (0.45%) MQTT
8 3 (0.34%) VPN
9 2 (0.22%) TCP/IP
10 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 178 (19.93%) MongoDB
1 178 (19.93%) PostgreSQL
2 132 (14.78%) NoSQL
3 79 (8.85%) Apache Cassandra
4 70 (7.84%) Relational Database
5 60 (6.72%) Big Data
6 51 (5.71%) Redis
7 44 (4.93%) SQL Server
8 41 (4.59%) Amazon RDS
9 38 (4.26%) Data Warehouse
9 38 (4.26%) DB2
10 37 (4.14%) Elasticsearch
11 36 (4.03%) DynamoDB
12 34 (3.81%) Hadoop
13 33 (3.70%) Data Lake
14 25 (2.80%) Metadata
15 21 (2.35%) Power BI
16 20 (2.24%) Amazon Redshift
16 20 (2.24%) MySQL
17 19 (2.13%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 178 (19.93%) Jenkins
2 126 (14.11%) GitLab
3 116 (12.99%) Git
4 108 (12.09%) JUnit
5 62 (6.94%) JIRA
6 49 (5.49%) Mockito
7 31 (3.47%) Cucumber
8 25 (2.80%) Gradle
9 24 (2.69%) JMeter
9 24 (2.69%) Sonatype Nexus
10 21 (2.35%) SonarQube
11 20 (2.24%) Maven
12 15 (1.68%) Artifactory
13 12 (1.34%) Liquibase
13 12 (1.34%) SoapUI
14 11 (1.23%) Gatling
14 11 (1.23%) Subversion
15 8 (0.90%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 7 (0.78%) Bitbucket
16 7 (0.78%) TeamCity
General
1 247 (27.66%) Finance
2 242 (27.10%) Social Skills
3 140 (15.68%) Banking
4 100 (11.20%) Analytical Skills
5 76 (8.51%) Public Sector
6 68 (7.61%) Investment Banking
7 49 (5.49%) Front Office
8 12 (1.34%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 8 (0.90%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.78%) Military
12 6 (0.67%) Financial Institution
12 6 (0.67%) Retail
13 5 (0.56%) Telecoms
14 4 (0.45%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.45%) Retail Banking
15 3 (0.34%) Back Office
15 3 (0.34%) Law
15 3 (0.34%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.34%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 368 (41.21%) Developer
2 245 (27.44%) Senior
3 225 (25.20%) Java Developer
4 125 (14.00%) Senior Developer
5 89 (9.97%) Data Engineer
6 86 (9.63%) Software Engineer
7 83 (9.29%) Lead
8 81 (9.07%) Senior Java Developer
9 63 (7.05%) Architect
9 63 (7.05%) DevOps Engineer
10 41 (4.59%) Kafka Developer
11 40 (4.48%) AWS Engineer
11 40 (4.48%) Platform Engineer
12 39 (4.37%) AWS Developer
13 38 (4.26%) Python Engineer
14 37 (4.14%) Kafka Engineer
15 36 (4.03%) Full-Stack Developer
16 32 (3.58%) Java Engineer
17 30 (3.36%) SQL Developer
18 28 (3.14%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (23.29%) Spring
2 148 (16.57%) Spring Boot
3 105 (11.76%) REST
4 104 (11.65%) gRPC
5 103 (11.53%) React
6 89 (9.97%) RabbitMQ
7 80 (8.96%) RESTful
8 56 (6.27%) Node.js
9 46 (5.15%) ActiveMQ
9 46 (5.15%) JMS
10 42 (4.70%) AngularJS
11 39 (4.37%) .NET
12 35 (3.92%) GraphQL
13 34 (3.81%) Hibernate
13 34 (3.81%) Keycloak
14 33 (3.70%) JSON
15 32 (3.58%) OAuth
16 30 (3.36%) Middleware
16 30 (3.36%) SOAP
17 29 (3.25%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 118 (13.21%) Distributed Systems
2 86 (9.63%) Cloud Native
3 45 (5.04%) Equities
4 39 (4.37%) Data Structures
5 31 (3.47%) Management Information System
6 30 (3.36%) Fixed Income
7 29 (3.25%) Product Ownership
8 26 (2.91%) Replication
9 23 (2.58%) Derivative
10 22 (2.46%) Market Risk
11 13 (1.46%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (1.34%) Hybrid Cloud
13 11 (1.23%) Data Protection Act
13 11 (1.23%) PKI
14 10 (1.12%) Algorithms
14 10 (1.12%) Greenfield Project
14 10 (1.12%) Legacy Systems
15 9 (1.01%) Legacy Applications
15 9 (1.01%) Onboarding
16 8 (0.90%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 167 (18.70%) Linux
2 80 (8.96%) Unix
3 23 (2.58%) Windows
4 13 (1.46%) Mac OS X
5 12 (1.34%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (0.78%) CentOS
7 5 (0.56%) AIX
8 1 (0.11%) Debian
8 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.11%) VMS
8 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
8 1 (0.11%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 366 (40.99%) Microservices
2 365 (40.87%) Agile
3 356 (39.87%) CI/CD
4 260 (29.12%) Software Engineering
5 249 (27.88%) DevOps
6 208 (23.29%) Problem-Solving
7 167 (18.70%) Containerisation
8 137 (15.34%) Event-Driven
9 135 (15.12%) Infrastructure as Code
10 128 (14.33%) Open Source
10 128 (14.33%) TDD
11 125 (14.00%) Observability
12 123 (13.77%) Test Automation
13 108 (12.09%) Data Pipeline
14 104 (11.65%) SDLC
15 97 (10.86%) Analytics
16 90 (10.08%) Scrum
17 87 (9.74%) Data Engineering
18 85 (9.52%) Mentoring
19 84 (9.41%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 447 (50.06%) Java
2 327 (36.62%) Python
3 249 (27.88%) SQL
4 138 (15.45%) Go
5 68 (7.61%) JavaScript
6 66 (7.39%) C#
7 59 (6.61%) Shell Script
8 51 (5.71%) C++
9 47 (5.26%) Bash
10 42 (4.70%) TypeScript
11 33 (3.70%) Scala
12 14 (1.57%) Perl
13 12 (1.34%) PL/SQL
14 9 (1.01%) Groovy
15 8 (0.90%) Korn
15 8 (0.90%) T-SQL
16 7 (0.78%) DataWeave
17 6 (0.67%) R
17 6 (0.67%) Rust
18 5 (0.56%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 177 (19.82%) Security Cleared
2 154 (17.25%) SC Cleared
3 49 (5.49%) Degree
4 32 (3.58%) Computer Science Degree
5 27 (3.02%) BPSS Clearance
6 26 (2.91%) DV Cleared
7 25 (2.80%) Azure Certification
8 18 (2.02%) AWS Certification
9 16 (1.79%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.90%) OCP
10 8 (0.90%) Oracle Certification
11 5 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 5 (0.56%) Numerate Degree
12 2 (0.22%) CBAP
12 2 (0.22%) CSPO
12 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
13 1 (0.11%) PMP
13 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 57 (6.38%) Data Quality
2 42 (4.70%) QA
3 23 (2.58%) GDPR
4 10 (1.12%) NCSC
5 5 (0.56%) MiFID
5 5 (0.56%) WCAG
6 4 (0.45%) Accessibility
6 4 (0.45%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.45%) HL7
6 4 (0.45%) SEPA
7 3 (0.34%) Def Stans
7 3 (0.34%) EMIR
7 3 (0.34%) SLA
8 2 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.22%) ISO 20022
8 2 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.22%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
9 1 (0.11%) Section 508
System Software
1 307 (34.38%) Docker
2 8 (0.90%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (0.56%) HDFS
4 3 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 350 (39.19%) Kubernetes
2 185 (20.72%) Terraform
3 92 (10.30%) Grafana
4 80 (8.96%) Prometheus
5 72 (8.06%) Ansible
6 20 (2.24%) Argo
7 17 (1.90%) Progress Chef
8 14 (1.57%) Packer
9 9 (1.01%) logstash
10 7 (0.78%) Jamf Pro
11 6 (0.67%) Kibana
12 5 (0.56%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.56%) Puppet
12 5 (0.56%) Rancher
12 5 (0.56%) Single Sign-On
13 4 (0.45%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.45%) Hadoop YARN
13 4 (0.45%) Istio
14 3 (0.34%) linkerd
14 3 (0.34%) Oozie
Vendors
1 80 (8.96%) Oracle
2 50 (5.60%) Splunk
3 41 (4.59%) Databricks
4 37 (4.14%) Microsoft
5 34 (3.81%) Sybase
6 30 (3.36%) Google
7 29 (3.25%) Confluent
8 28 (3.14%) IBM
9 22 (2.46%) Dynatrace
10 20 (2.24%) VMware
11 17 (1.90%) Cloudera
12 14 (1.57%) CA Agile Central
13 13 (1.46%) Foundry
13 13 (1.46%) MuleSoft
13 13 (1.46%) Palantir
14 12 (1.34%) Red Hat
14 12 (1.34%) ServiceNow
15 11 (1.23%) SAP
16 10 (1.12%) Informatica
16 10 (1.12%) TIBCO