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

6 months to
30 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 119 104 162
Rank change year-on-year -15 +58 -31
Contract jobs citing Kafka 954 743 654
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.15% 2.54% 1.48%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.16% 11.20% 7.26%
Number of daily rates quoted 608 462 502
10th Percentile £363 £383 £400
25th Percentile £416 £457 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £539
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +2.09% -17.12%
75th Percentile £651 £734 £675
90th Percentile £791 £838 £774
UK excluding London median daily rate £464 £470 £490
% change year-on-year -1.33% -4.08% -14.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 4 7
10th Percentile £52.00 £51.09 £22.34
25th Percentile £64.75 £68.84 £24.88
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +144.57% -53.33%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £42.39
90th Percentile £92.50 - £54.22
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £78.70 £31.50
% change year-on-year -11.41% +149.84% -59.62%

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 9,386 6,633 9,003
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.14% 22.65% 20.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,253 4,530 6,282
10th Percentile £358 £363 £331
25th Percentile £415 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £495 £500
% change year-on-year +1.01% -1.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 260 98 186
10th Percentile £35.00 £26.25 £20.64
25th Percentile £52.50 £40.19 £36.77
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £47.97
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +30.30% -26.21%
75th Percentile £71.62 £68.75 £63.75
90th Percentile £81.00 £85.05 £74.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £48.43
% change year-on-year - +34.21% -23.43%

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 30 March 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 30 March 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 16 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 30 March 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 -12 842 £540 -7.69% 194
London -11 535 £600 -5.88% 123
Work from Home 0 346 £600 - 90
UK excluding London -44 276 £464 -1.33% 101
North of England -41 119 £458 -4.19% 33
South East -17 64 £450 -11.55% 31
North West -39 57 £465 -2.11% 22
Yorkshire -27 54 £458 -36.90% 6
Midlands -42 47 £500 +40.45% 5
South West -10 32 £550 -12.00% 16
West Midlands -35 30 £550 -8.33% 4
Scotland -17 21 £475 +9.83% 7
East Midlands -31 17 £407 +14.40% 1
North East -10 14 £450 -3.23% 5
East of England -33 11 £475 +48.44% 9
Wales -13 1 £250 - 2

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
1 120 (12.58%) Apache Spark
2 64 (6.71%) Apache
3 47 (4.93%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (3.14%) Confluence
5 6 (0.63%) Camunda
5 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
5 6 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.52%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.42%) WebSphere
8 3 (0.31%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 5 (0.52%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.21%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.10%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.42%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.42%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.31%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.10%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 595 (62.37%) AWS
2 276 (28.93%) Azure
3 170 (17.82%) GCP
4 167 (17.51%) GitHub
5 129 (13.52%) Serverless
6 120 (12.58%) Amazon S3
7 116 (12.16%) GitHub Actions
8 94 (9.85%) AWS Lambda
9 75 (7.86%) Amazon EKS
10 72 (7.55%) AWS CloudFormation
11 63 (6.60%) OpenShift
12 59 (6.18%) Power Platform
13 53 (5.56%) Amazon ECS
13 53 (5.56%) Azure DevOps
14 52 (5.45%) Amazon SQS
15 46 (4.82%) Amazon Kinesis
16 43 (4.51%) Azure Data Factory
17 41 (4.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 40 (4.19%) Snowflake
19 37 (3.88%) Amazon EC2
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.10%) Firewall
2 16 (1.68%) HTTP
3 12 (1.26%) SSL
4 10 (1.05%) DNS
5 6 (0.63%) FTP
5 6 (0.63%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.63%) SMS
5 6 (0.63%) SSH
6 5 (0.52%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.31%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.10%) 4G
9 1 (0.10%) 5G
9 1 (0.10%) Internet
9 1 (0.10%) MQTT
9 1 (0.10%) NAS
9 1 (0.10%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 195 (20.44%) PostgreSQL
2 138 (14.47%) MongoDB
3 133 (13.94%) NoSQL
4 75 (7.86%) Apache Cassandra
5 68 (7.13%) Relational Database
6 64 (6.71%) Data Warehouse
7 60 (6.29%) Data Lake
8 50 (5.24%) Big Data
8 50 (5.24%) Elasticsearch
9 47 (4.93%) DynamoDB
9 47 (4.93%) Power BI
10 43 (4.51%) SQL Server
11 40 (4.19%) Amazon RDS
11 40 (4.19%) Redis
12 39 (4.09%) Flink
13 36 (3.77%) Amazon Athena
13 36 (3.77%) MySQL
14 35 (3.67%) Hadoop
14 35 (3.67%) Metadata
15 33 (3.46%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 154 (16.14%) Jenkins
2 136 (14.26%) GitLab
3 111 (11.64%) Git
4 77 (8.07%) JUnit
5 62 (6.50%) JIRA
6 32 (3.35%) Mockito
7 30 (3.14%) Cucumber
8 21 (2.20%) JMeter
9 20 (2.10%) Gradle
10 19 (1.99%) Gatling
11 17 (1.78%) Sonatype Nexus
12 11 (1.15%) Artifactory
12 11 (1.15%) Maven
13 10 (1.05%) CircleCI
13 10 (1.05%) REST Assured
13 10 (1.05%) Selenium
14 9 (0.94%) Jaeger
14 9 (0.94%) Postman
15 6 (0.63%) Liquibase
15 6 (0.63%) Serenity BDD
General
1 265 (27.78%) Finance
2 189 (19.81%) Social Skills
3 124 (13.00%) Banking
4 74 (7.76%) Analytical Skills
5 71 (7.44%) Public Sector
6 57 (5.97%) Front Office
7 35 (3.67%) Investment Banking
8 24 (2.52%) Documentation Skills
9 19 (1.99%) Financial Institution
10 9 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
10 9 (0.94%) Marketing
10 9 (0.94%) Telecoms
11 8 (0.84%) Law
12 6 (0.63%) Retail
13 5 (0.52%) Automotive
14 4 (0.42%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.42%) Billing
15 3 (0.31%) Military
15 3 (0.31%) Organisational Skills
15 3 (0.31%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 343 (35.95%) Developer
2 246 (25.79%) Senior
3 170 (17.82%) Java Developer
4 152 (15.93%) Data Engineer
5 120 (12.58%) Lead
6 115 (12.05%) Senior Developer
7 100 (10.48%) Software Engineer
8 99 (10.38%) Architect
9 60 (6.29%) Senior Java Developer
10 52 (5.45%) Java Engineer
11 49 (5.14%) DevOps Engineer
12 46 (4.82%) Full-Stack Developer
13 45 (4.72%) AWS Architect
14 39 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
14 39 (4.09%) Solutions Architect
15 38 (3.98%) Kafka Developer
16 37 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
17 33 (3.46%) Developer/Software Engineer
18 32 (3.35%) AWS Developer
18 32 (3.35%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 209 (21.91%) Spring
2 188 (19.71%) Spring Boot
3 123 (12.89%) REST
4 112 (11.74%) Node.js
5 107 (11.22%) React
6 93 (9.75%) gRPC
6 93 (9.75%) RESTful
7 82 (8.60%) RabbitMQ
8 48 (5.03%) GraphQL
9 47 (4.93%) AngularJS
10 45 (4.72%) JSON
10 45 (4.72%) OpenTelemetry
11 43 (4.51%) Middleware
12 41 (4.30%) PySpark
13 34 (3.56%) Redux
14 31 (3.25%) OAuth
15 30 (3.14%) Keycloak
16 29 (3.04%) Apache Avro
17 27 (2.83%) OAuth2
17 27 (2.83%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 158 (16.56%) Distributed Systems
2 140 (14.68%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.24%) Fixed Income
4 47 (4.93%) Management Information System
5 35 (3.67%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.41%) Hybrid Cloud
7 20 (2.10%) Data Structures
7 20 (2.10%) Derivative
7 20 (2.10%) Equities
8 19 (1.99%) Onboarding
9 16 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
10 14 (1.47%) Market Risk
11 12 (1.26%) Clustering
11 12 (1.26%) Data Protection Act
11 12 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (1.15%) Algorithms
12 11 (1.15%) Replication
13 10 (1.05%) Legacy Applications
14 8 (0.84%) Greenfield Project
14 8 (0.84%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 118 (12.37%) Linux
2 57 (5.97%) Unix
3 33 (3.46%) Windows
4 7 (0.73%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.52%) AIX
6 3 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 3 (0.31%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) CentOS
7 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
7 2 (0.21%) VMS
8 1 (0.10%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 421 (44.13%) CI/CD
2 334 (35.01%) Microservices
3 328 (34.38%) Agile
4 285 (29.87%) DevOps
5 221 (23.17%) Software Engineering
6 212 (22.22%) Event-Driven
7 202 (21.17%) Observability
8 187 (19.60%) Containerisation
9 177 (18.55%) Problem-Solving
10 172 (18.03%) Analytics
11 167 (17.51%) Infrastructure as Code
12 165 (17.30%) Data Pipeline
13 154 (16.14%) Data Modelling
14 152 (15.93%) Data Engineering
15 147 (15.41%) ETL
16 132 (13.84%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 131 (13.73%) Test Automation
18 115 (12.05%) Full-Stack Development
19 108 (11.32%) Open Source
20 102 (10.69%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 452 (47.38%) Java
2 337 (35.32%) Python
3 274 (28.72%) SQL
4 136 (14.26%) Go
5 96 (10.06%) JavaScript
6 92 (9.64%) TypeScript
7 65 (6.81%) C#
8 41 (4.30%) Bash
9 30 (3.14%) Scala
10 24 (2.52%) C++
11 22 (2.31%) Shell Script
12 17 (1.78%) PowerShell
13 16 (1.68%) Rust
14 12 (1.26%) Bicep
15 9 (0.94%) PL/SQL
16 8 (0.84%) Perl
17 6 (0.63%) Korn
17 6 (0.63%) Search Processing Language
18 5 (0.52%) Groovy
19 4 (0.42%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 218 (22.85%) Security Cleared
2 180 (18.87%) SC Cleared
3 46 (4.82%) Degree
4 31 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (2.73%) Azure Certification
6 22 (2.31%) AWS Certification
7 19 (1.99%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (1.89%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.36%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.84%) OCP
10 8 (0.84%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.63%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 5 (0.52%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
13 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
13 3 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
14 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.10%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
15 1 (0.10%) MySQL Certification
15 1 (0.10%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 119 (12.47%) Data Quality
2 51 (5.35%) QA
3 47 (4.93%) GDPR
4 20 (2.10%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.94%) ISO 20022
5 9 (0.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (0.94%) NCSC
6 8 (0.84%) NIST
7 7 (0.73%) PCI DSS
8 5 (0.52%) SEPA
9 4 (0.42%) HL7
9 4 (0.42%) SLA
9 4 (0.42%) WCAG
10 3 (0.31%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.31%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 1 (0.10%) PMO
System Software
1 327 (34.28%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
2 6 (0.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (0.21%) HDFS
3 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 386 (40.46%) Kubernetes
2 216 (22.64%) Terraform
3 120 (12.58%) Grafana
4 118 (12.37%) Prometheus
5 56 (5.87%) Ansible
6 28 (2.94%) Argo
7 10 (1.05%) Fluentd
7 10 (1.05%) Istio
8 9 (0.94%) Kiali
8 9 (0.94%) Progress Chef
9 8 (0.84%) linkerd
10 7 (0.73%) Rancher
11 5 (0.52%) Puppet
12 4 (0.42%) Kibana
12 4 (0.42%) logstash
12 4 (0.42%) Packer
12 4 (0.42%) Podman
13 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
13 2 (0.21%) QRadar
13 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 85 (8.91%) Databricks
2 78 (8.18%) Oracle
3 69 (7.23%) Splunk
4 47 (4.93%) Microsoft
5 43 (4.51%) Google
6 34 (3.56%) Confluent
7 27 (2.83%) IBM
7 27 (2.83%) Informatica
8 20 (2.10%) VMware
9 15 (1.57%) Dynatrace
9 15 (1.57%) Red Hat
10 13 (1.36%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.26%) Sybase
11 12 (1.26%) Talend
12 11 (1.15%) Cloudera
13 9 (0.94%) AppDynamics
14 8 (0.84%) Salesforce
14 8 (0.84%) SAP
15 7 (0.73%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.73%) PagerDuty