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

6 months to
13 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 122 109 162
Rank change year-on-year -13 +53 -33
Contract jobs citing Kafka 911 730 657
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.28% 2.36% 1.47%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.24% 10.44% 7.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 585 449 512
10th Percentile £361 £377 £401
25th Percentile £415 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -10.26% +6.36% -15.38%
75th Percentile £653 £738 £675
90th Percentile £745 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £475 £503
% change year-on-year -2.84% -5.47% -12.61%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 4 3
10th Percentile £40.00 £52.23 £44.88
25th Percentile £52.00 £71.69 £52.42
Median hourly rate £68.00 £88.75 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -23.38% +36.54% -13.33%
75th Percentile £87.00 £93.75 £71.50
90th Percentile £95.00 - £75.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £85.00 £71.50
% change year-on-year -24.71% +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 8,900 6,991 9,240
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.25% 22.57% 20.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,938 4,502 6,513
10th Percentile £358 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £535 £534
Median % change year-on-year -4.21% +0.19% -7.13%
75th Percentile £621 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 218 85 189
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.65 £23.75
25th Percentile £51.44 £39.25 £45.00
Median hourly rate £64.75 £62.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.60% +13.64% -15.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.15 £77.96 £76.72
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 13 February 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 13 February 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 13 February 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 -11 802 £540 -11.84% 143
London -6 513 £600 -5.88% 82
Work from Home +13 330 £575 -6.12% 102
UK excluding London -19 260 £462 -2.84% 103
North of England -24 114 £488 -11.36% 34
South East -7 62 £433 -21.36% 41
North West -24 55 £449 -11.63% 21
Yorkshire -32 50 £563 -19.64% 9
Midlands -29 45 £500 +40.45% 5
West Midlands -29 28 £550 - 3
Scotland -3 27 £463 +22.03% 10
South West -4 24 £550 -12.00% 10
East Midlands -23 17 £402 +12.92% 2
North East -5 15 £475 -12.38% 4
East of England -31 5 £500 +57.23% 2
Wales -6 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 95 (10.43%) Apache Spark
2 57 (6.26%) Apache
3 46 (5.05%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (4.06%) Confluence
5 8 (0.88%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.66%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.66%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.55%) Camunda
8 4 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.33%) CMS
9 3 (0.33%) MQSeries
9 3 (0.33%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.22%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.22%) JBoss
10 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.11%) IIS
11 1 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
Applications
1 4 (0.44%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.11%) Maya
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.44%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.33%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.33%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.33%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.22%) Actimize
3 2 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.22%) Shopify
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 531 (58.29%) AWS
2 241 (26.45%) Azure
3 161 (17.67%) GitHub
4 153 (16.79%) GCP
5 125 (13.72%) Serverless
6 113 (12.40%) GitHub Actions
7 106 (11.64%) Amazon S3
8 94 (10.32%) AWS Lambda
9 75 (8.23%) AWS CloudFormation
10 74 (8.12%) Amazon EKS
11 52 (5.71%) Amazon ECS
12 49 (5.38%) OpenShift
13 48 (5.27%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 43 (4.72%) Amazon Kinesis
14 43 (4.72%) Power Platform
15 42 (4.61%) Amazon SQS
16 40 (4.39%) Azure DevOps
17 36 (3.95%) Azure Data Factory
18 31 (3.40%) Amazon EC2
19 28 (3.07%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.76%) Firewall
2 13 (1.43%) HTTP
3 12 (1.32%) DNS
4 11 (1.21%) SSL
5 6 (0.66%) FTP
5 6 (0.66%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.66%) SMS
5 6 (0.66%) SSH
6 4 (0.44%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.33%) VPN
8 2 (0.22%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) NAS
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 178 (19.54%) PostgreSQL
2 159 (17.45%) MongoDB
3 136 (14.93%) NoSQL
4 79 (8.67%) Apache Cassandra
5 62 (6.81%) Relational Database
6 52 (5.71%) Data Warehouse
7 51 (5.60%) Elasticsearch
8 48 (5.27%) Amazon RDS
9 47 (5.16%) Big Data
9 47 (5.16%) Data Lake
10 45 (4.94%) DynamoDB
10 45 (4.94%) Redis
11 41 (4.50%) SQL Server
12 32 (3.51%) Amazon Athena
12 32 (3.51%) Hadoop
12 32 (3.51%) Power BI
13 31 (3.40%) Amazon Redshift
13 31 (3.40%) MySQL
14 30 (3.29%) BigQuery
15 28 (3.07%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 158 (17.34%) Jenkins
2 136 (14.93%) GitLab
3 104 (11.42%) Git
4 80 (8.78%) JUnit
5 59 (6.48%) JIRA
6 45 (4.94%) Mockito
7 24 (2.63%) Cucumber
7 24 (2.63%) JMeter
7 24 (2.63%) Sonatype Nexus
8 21 (2.31%) Gradle
9 15 (1.65%) Gatling
10 14 (1.54%) Maven
11 11 (1.21%) Selenium
12 10 (1.10%) Artifactory
12 10 (1.10%) CircleCI
13 9 (0.99%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.99%) REST Assured
13 9 (0.99%) SoapUI
14 8 (0.88%) Postman
15 7 (0.77%) SonarQube
General
1 245 (26.89%) Finance
2 206 (22.61%) Social Skills
3 126 (13.83%) Banking
4 74 (8.12%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (7.35%) Public Sector
6 47 (5.16%) Investment Banking
7 31 (3.40%) Front Office
8 24 (2.63%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.87%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.10%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (0.99%) Marketing
12 7 (0.77%) Retail
13 5 (0.55%) Law
13 5 (0.55%) Telecoms
14 4 (0.44%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 3 (0.33%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.33%) Legal
15 3 (0.33%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.33%) Military
Job Titles
1 342 (37.54%) Developer
2 268 (29.42%) Senior
3 194 (21.30%) Java Developer
4 135 (14.82%) Senior Developer
5 123 (13.50%) Data Engineer
6 100 (10.98%) Lead
7 83 (9.11%) Senior Java Developer
8 80 (8.78%) Software Engineer
9 79 (8.67%) Architect
10 59 (6.48%) DevOps Engineer
11 44 (4.83%) Full-Stack Developer
11 44 (4.83%) Kafka Developer
12 40 (4.39%) AWS Engineer
13 38 (4.17%) AWS Developer
14 37 (4.06%) AWS Architect
15 35 (3.84%) Kafka Engineer
16 32 (3.51%) Java Engineer
17 31 (3.40%) Senior Data Engineer
18 28 (3.07%) Platform Engineer
19 25 (2.74%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 217 (23.82%) Spring
2 183 (20.09%) Spring Boot
3 108 (11.86%) REST
4 99 (10.87%) gRPC
5 85 (9.33%) RESTful
6 81 (8.89%) React
7 79 (8.67%) Node.js
8 69 (7.57%) RabbitMQ
9 41 (4.50%) AngularJS
10 36 (3.95%) Middleware
11 35 (3.84%) OpenTelemetry
12 34 (3.73%) JSON
13 33 (3.62%) ActiveMQ
13 33 (3.62%) Keycloak
14 32 (3.51%) Hibernate
15 30 (3.29%) OAuth
15 30 (3.29%) PySpark
16 28 (3.07%) JAX-RS
16 28 (3.07%) JMS
16 28 (3.07%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 138 (15.15%) Distributed Systems
2 119 (13.06%) Cloud Native
3 43 (4.72%) Management Information System
4 37 (4.06%) Product Ownership
5 28 (3.07%) Data Structures
6 25 (2.74%) Equities
6 25 (2.74%) Fixed Income
7 23 (2.52%) Derivative
8 20 (2.20%) Hybrid Cloud
9 18 (1.98%) Market Risk
10 17 (1.87%) Replication
11 14 (1.54%) Legacy Applications
12 12 (1.32%) Algorithms
12 12 (1.32%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (1.32%) Onboarding
13 11 (1.21%) Legacy Systems
14 10 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
15 8 (0.88%) Data Protection Act
15 8 (0.88%) SWIFT Messaging Network
16 7 (0.77%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 161 (17.67%) Linux
2 85 (9.33%) Unix
3 30 (3.29%) Windows
4 16 (1.76%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.55%) AIX
6 5 (0.55%) CentOS
7 3 (0.33%) zOS
8 2 (0.22%) VMS
9 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 389 (42.70%) CI/CD
2 361 (39.63%) Microservices
3 306 (33.59%) Agile
4 254 (27.88%) DevOps
5 226 (24.81%) Software Engineering
6 189 (20.75%) Problem-Solving
7 186 (20.42%) Containerisation
8 180 (19.76%) Event-Driven
9 173 (18.99%) Observability
10 155 (17.01%) Infrastructure as Code
11 138 (15.15%) Analytics
11 138 (15.15%) Data Pipeline
12 133 (14.60%) Test Automation
13 122 (13.39%) Data Engineering
14 117 (12.84%) ETL
15 113 (12.40%) Data Modelling
16 109 (11.96%) Open Source
17 108 (11.86%) TDD
18 103 (11.31%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 90 (9.88%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 437 (47.97%) Java
2 317 (34.80%) Python
3 264 (28.98%) SQL
4 126 (13.83%) Go
5 69 (7.57%) C#
6 68 (7.46%) JavaScript
7 51 (5.60%) TypeScript
8 43 (4.72%) Shell Script
9 42 (4.61%) C++
10 40 (4.39%) Bash
11 29 (3.18%) Scala
12 17 (1.87%) Rust
13 12 (1.32%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.10%) PowerShell
15 9 (0.99%) Bicep
16 7 (0.77%) Korn
16 7 (0.77%) Perl
17 6 (0.66%) Groovy
17 6 (0.66%) R
18 5 (0.55%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 205 (22.50%) Security Cleared
2 182 (19.98%) SC Cleared
3 43 (4.72%) Degree
4 36 (3.95%) BPSS Clearance
5 27 (2.96%) Azure Certification
6 24 (2.63%) AWS Certification
7 21 (2.31%) DV Cleared
8 20 (2.20%) Computer Science Degree
9 15 (1.65%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.88%) OCP
10 8 (0.88%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.66%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
13 2 (0.22%) AWS Certified Developer
13 2 (0.22%) CBAP
13 2 (0.22%) CSPO
13 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.22%) TOGAF Certification
14 1 (0.11%) SAFe Agilist
14 1 (0.11%) SnowPro
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 88 (9.66%) Data Quality
2 43 (4.72%) QA
3 35 (3.84%) GDPR
4 14 (1.54%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.10%) ISO 20022
5 10 (1.10%) NCSC
6 9 (0.99%) PCI DSS
7 7 (0.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 7 (0.77%) NIST
8 6 (0.66%) SEPA
9 5 (0.55%) SLA
10 3 (0.33%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.33%) HL7
10 3 (0.33%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.22%) MiFID
11 2 (0.22%) PSD2
11 2 (0.22%) WCAG
12 1 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
System Software
1 323 (35.46%) Docker
2 8 (0.88%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.44%) HDFS
3 4 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 372 (40.83%) Kubernetes
2 220 (24.15%) Terraform
3 109 (11.96%) Grafana
4 103 (11.31%) Prometheus
5 63 (6.92%) Ansible
6 26 (2.85%) Argo
7 15 (1.65%) Progress Chef
8 9 (0.99%) Istio
8 9 (0.99%) Kiali
9 8 (0.88%) linkerd
9 8 (0.88%) Packer
10 7 (0.77%) logstash
11 5 (0.55%) Kibana
11 5 (0.55%) Puppet
11 5 (0.55%) Rancher
12 4 (0.44%) Fluentd
12 4 (0.44%) Jamf Pro
12 4 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (0.33%) Hadoop YARN
14 2 (0.22%) rkt
Vendors
1 77 (8.45%) Oracle
2 70 (7.68%) Databricks
3 66 (7.24%) Splunk
4 39 (4.28%) Confluent
5 38 (4.17%) Google
6 35 (3.84%) Microsoft
7 29 (3.18%) IBM
8 24 (2.63%) VMware
9 18 (1.98%) Dynatrace
9 18 (1.98%) Sybase
10 17 (1.87%) Informatica
11 13 (1.43%) Cloudera
12 12 (1.32%) Red Hat
13 9 (0.99%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.99%) Talend
14 8 (0.88%) Atlassian
14 8 (0.88%) Foundry
14 8 (0.88%) Palantir
14 8 (0.88%) SAP
15 7 (0.77%) PagerDuty