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

6 months to
10 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 125 103 165
Rank change year-on-year -22 +62 -28
Contract jobs citing Kafka 954 730 635
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.08% 2.50% 1.44%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.98% 11.02% 7.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 598 463 481
10th Percentile £363 £400 £400
25th Percentile £416 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £535
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% +4.67% -17.69%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £468 £479 £489
% change year-on-year -2.40% -2.04% -11.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 4 7
10th Percentile £40.00 £51.09 £22.34
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £24.88
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £35.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +144.57% -54.25%
75th Percentile £87.25 £93.75 £42.39
90th Percentile £91.50 - £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 9,558 6,625 8,942
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 20.84% 22.68% 20.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,369 4,545 6,258
10th Percentile £358 £363 £337
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £514 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.10% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £730 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £496 £500
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.77% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 266 99 178
10th Percentile £35.00 £26.25 £19.43
25th Percentile £52.50 £47.28 £32.75
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £46.84
Median % change year-on-year - +38.77% -27.94%
75th Percentile £71.13 £68.75 £62.85
90th Percentile £81.00 £84.95 £72.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -24.00%

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 10 April 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 10 April 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 10 April 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 -18 835 £530 -9.40% 194
London -11 534 £600 -6.80% 123
Work from Home -6 334 £603 -3.60% 90
UK excluding London -47 280 £468 -2.40% 101
North of England -49 122 £461 -12.14% 33
South East -19 60 £434 -15.37% 31
Yorkshire -19 59 £460 -34.66% 6
North West -36 56 £465 -7.00% 22
Midlands -33 49 £500 +36.24% 5
South West -14 30 £550 -12.00% 16
West Midlands -42 29 £538 -10.42% 4
Scotland -9 24 £469 +4.17% 7
East Midlands -23 20 £425 +19.38% 1
North East -15 13 £450 -3.23% 5
East of England -36 11 £475 +49.28% 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
1 123 (12.89%) Apache Spark
2 66 (6.92%) Apache
3 46 (4.82%) Apache Airflow
4 26 (2.73%) Confluence
5 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.52%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.42%) Camunda
7 4 (0.42%) MQSeries
7 4 (0.42%) Palantir Foundry
7 4 (0.42%) WebSphere
8 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
8 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
8 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
2 3 (0.31%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.31%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.31%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
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
1 587 (61.53%) AWS
2 277 (29.04%) Azure
3 168 (17.61%) GCP
4 157 (16.46%) GitHub
5 128 (13.42%) Serverless
6 121 (12.68%) Amazon S3
7 110 (11.53%) GitHub Actions
8 95 (9.96%) AWS Lambda
9 81 (8.49%) Amazon EKS
10 70 (7.34%) AWS CloudFormation
11 65 (6.81%) OpenShift
12 59 (6.18%) Power Platform
13 57 (5.97%) Azure DevOps
14 53 (5.56%) Amazon ECS
15 49 (5.14%) Amazon SQS
16 47 (4.93%) Amazon Kinesis
17 42 (4.40%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 41 (4.30%) Azure Data Factory
18 41 (4.30%) Snowflake
19 38 (3.98%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.10%) Firewall
2 16 (1.68%) HTTP
3 12 (1.26%) SSL
4 9 (0.94%) DNS
5 6 (0.63%) FTP
5 6 (0.63%) SMS
5 6 (0.63%) SSH
6 5 (0.52%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.31%) Kerberos
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%) Broadband
9 1 (0.10%) MIMO
9 1 (0.10%) MQTT
9 1 (0.10%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 200 (20.96%) PostgreSQL
2 132 (13.84%) MongoDB
3 131 (13.73%) NoSQL
4 72 (7.55%) Relational Database
5 69 (7.23%) Apache Cassandra
6 63 (6.60%) Data Warehouse
7 61 (6.39%) Data Lake
8 51 (5.35%) Big Data
8 51 (5.35%) Elasticsearch
9 49 (5.14%) DynamoDB
10 47 (4.93%) Power BI
11 46 (4.82%) Redis
12 45 (4.72%) SQL Server
13 38 (3.98%) Amazon RDS
13 38 (3.98%) Flink
13 38 (3.98%) MySQL
14 36 (3.77%) Amazon Athena
15 35 (3.67%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.67%) Metadata
16 31 (3.25%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 147 (15.41%) Jenkins
2 126 (13.21%) GitLab
3 114 (11.95%) Git
4 71 (7.44%) JUnit
5 58 (6.08%) JIRA
6 35 (3.67%) Mockito
7 28 (2.94%) Cucumber
8 21 (2.20%) Gradle
9 18 (1.89%) JMeter
10 16 (1.68%) Gatling
11 14 (1.47%) Sonatype Nexus
12 11 (1.15%) Maven
12 11 (1.15%) Postman
12 11 (1.15%) REST Assured
12 11 (1.15%) Selenium
13 10 (1.05%) CircleCI
14 9 (0.94%) Jaeger
15 8 (0.84%) Artifactory
16 7 (0.73%) Liquibase
17 6 (0.63%) Serenity BDD
General
1 272 (28.51%) Finance
2 190 (19.92%) Social Skills
3 123 (12.89%) Banking
4 72 (7.55%) Public Sector
5 71 (7.44%) Analytical Skills
6 56 (5.87%) Front Office
7 34 (3.56%) Investment Banking
8 26 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.89%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.05%) Influencing Skills
10 10 (1.05%) Telecoms
11 9 (0.94%) Marketing
12 7 (0.73%) Law
12 7 (0.73%) Retail
13 6 (0.63%) Automotive
14 5 (0.52%) Publishing
15 4 (0.42%) Billing
15 4 (0.42%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.31%) Military
16 3 (0.31%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 346 (36.27%) Developer
2 241 (25.26%) Senior
3 170 (17.82%) Java Developer
4 153 (16.04%) Data Engineer
5 115 (12.05%) Lead
6 113 (11.84%) Senior Developer
7 105 (11.01%) Architect
8 97 (10.17%) Software Engineer
9 60 (6.29%) Senior Java Developer
10 54 (5.66%) Java Engineer
11 49 (5.14%) AWS Architect
12 47 (4.93%) Full-Stack Developer
13 46 (4.82%) DevOps Engineer
14 41 (4.30%) Solutions Architect
15 40 (4.19%) Senior Data Engineer
16 39 (4.09%) AWS Engineer
17 38 (3.98%) Kafka Developer
18 34 (3.56%) Kafka Engineer
19 33 (3.46%) Developer/Software Engineer
19 33 (3.46%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 212 (22.22%) Spring
2 188 (19.71%) Spring Boot
3 119 (12.47%) REST
4 115 (12.05%) Node.js
5 106 (11.11%) React
6 97 (10.17%) RESTful
7 83 (8.70%) gRPC
8 78 (8.18%) RabbitMQ
9 49 (5.14%) GraphQL
10 48 (5.03%) OpenTelemetry
11 47 (4.93%) JSON
12 44 (4.61%) AngularJS
13 41 (4.30%) PySpark
14 40 (4.19%) Middleware
15 35 (3.67%) OAuth
15 35 (3.67%) Redux
16 34 (3.56%) Apache Avro
17 29 (3.04%) Keycloak
17 29 (3.04%) OAuth2
18 27 (2.83%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 157 (16.46%) Distributed Systems
2 136 (14.26%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.24%) Fixed Income
4 48 (5.03%) Management Information System
5 38 (3.98%) Product Ownership
6 22 (2.31%) Hybrid Cloud
7 20 (2.10%) Data Structures
7 20 (2.10%) Derivative
7 20 (2.10%) Equities
7 20 (2.10%) Onboarding
8 16 (1.68%) Legacy Systems
9 14 (1.47%) Enterprise Software
10 13 (1.36%) Market Risk
11 12 (1.26%) Algorithms
11 12 (1.26%) Clustering
11 12 (1.26%) Data Protection Act
12 10 (1.05%) Replication
13 9 (0.94%) Greenfield Project
13 9 (0.94%) Legacy Applications
14 8 (0.84%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 119 (12.47%) Linux
2 59 (6.18%) Unix
3 32 (3.35%) Windows
4 9 (0.94%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.52%) AIX
6 4 (0.42%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 3 (0.31%) VMS
7 3 (0.31%) zOS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.10%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 427 (44.76%) CI/CD
2 332 (34.80%) Microservices
3 322 (33.75%) Agile
4 282 (29.56%) DevOps
5 215 (22.54%) Event-Driven
6 211 (22.12%) Software Engineering
7 202 (21.17%) Observability
8 195 (20.44%) Containerisation
9 173 (18.13%) Problem-Solving
10 169 (17.71%) Analytics
11 168 (17.61%) Data Pipeline
12 165 (17.30%) Infrastructure as Code
13 153 (16.04%) Data Engineering
13 153 (16.04%) Data Modelling
14 150 (15.72%) ETL
15 139 (14.57%) Event-Driven Architecture
16 129 (13.52%) Test Automation
17 120 (12.58%) Full-Stack Development
18 104 (10.90%) Data Governance
19 100 (10.48%) Open Source
Programming Languages
1 447 (46.86%) Java
2 337 (35.32%) Python
3 277 (29.04%) SQL
4 128 (13.42%) Go
5 96 (10.06%) TypeScript
6 95 (9.96%) JavaScript
7 64 (6.71%) C#
8 42 (4.40%) Bash
9 33 (3.46%) Scala
10 21 (2.20%) C++
11 20 (2.10%) Shell Script
12 18 (1.89%) PowerShell
12 18 (1.89%) Rust
13 12 (1.26%) Bicep
14 8 (0.84%) PL/SQL
15 7 (0.73%) Perl
16 6 (0.63%) Search Processing Language
17 5 (0.52%) Groovy
17 5 (0.52%) Korn
18 3 (0.31%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 209 (21.91%) Security Cleared
2 170 (17.82%) SC Cleared
3 46 (4.82%) Degree
4 31 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 23 (2.41%) Azure Certification
6 22 (2.31%) AWS Certification
7 18 (1.89%) Computer Science Degree
8 15 (1.57%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.36%) Master's Degree
10 7 (0.73%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 6 (0.63%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.52%) OCP
12 5 (0.52%) Oracle Certification
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%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.10%) PMP
15 1 (0.10%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 116 (12.16%) Data Quality
2 48 (5.03%) QA
3 46 (4.82%) GDPR
4 21 (2.20%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.15%) ISO 20022
6 9 (0.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 9 (0.94%) NIST
7 8 (0.84%) NCSC
8 7 (0.73%) PCI DSS
9 5 (0.52%) SEPA
10 4 (0.42%) HL7
10 4 (0.42%) SLA
10 4 (0.42%) WCAG
11 3 (0.31%) ISO 8583
12 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
12 2 (0.21%) PSD2
13 1 (0.10%) Actionable Recommendations
13 1 (0.10%) JSP 440
System Software
1 326 (34.17%) Docker
2 7 (0.73%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (0.63%) etcd
4 2 (0.21%) HDFS
4 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 382 (40.04%) Kubernetes
2 214 (22.43%) Terraform
3 118 (12.37%) Grafana
3 118 (12.37%) Prometheus
4 61 (6.39%) Ansible
5 30 (3.14%) Argo
6 10 (1.05%) Fluentd
6 10 (1.05%) Istio
7 9 (0.94%) Kiali
7 9 (0.94%) Progress Chef
8 8 (0.84%) Kibana
8 8 (0.84%) linkerd
8 8 (0.84%) Rancher
9 6 (0.63%) logstash
9 6 (0.63%) Puppet
10 4 (0.42%) Podman
11 3 (0.31%) Packer
12 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
12 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
12 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 87 (9.12%) Databricks
2 74 (7.76%) Oracle
3 71 (7.44%) Splunk
4 51 (5.35%) Microsoft
5 43 (4.51%) Google
6 34 (3.56%) Confluent
7 26 (2.73%) Informatica
8 25 (2.62%) IBM
9 18 (1.89%) VMware
10 15 (1.57%) Dynatrace
10 15 (1.57%) Red Hat
11 13 (1.36%) ServiceNow
12 12 (1.26%) Talend
13 10 (1.05%) Sybase
14 9 (0.94%) AppDynamics
14 9 (0.94%) Cloudera
14 9 (0.94%) Salesforce
14 9 (0.94%) Solace
15 8 (0.84%) Denodo
16 7 (0.73%) PagerDuty