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

6 months to
22 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 125 109 167
Rank change year-on-year -16 +58 -39
Contract jobs citing Kafka 906 751 651
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.22% 2.44% 1.46%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.11% 10.78% 7.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 586 457 503
10th Percentile £363 £365 £403
25th Percentile £416 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -10.26% +6.36% -15.38%
75th Percentile £673 £738 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.70% -6.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 4 3
10th Percentile £44.80 £52.23 £25.35
25th Percentile £64.00 £71.69 £30.79
Median hourly rate £70.00 £88.75 £42.19
Median % change year-on-year -21.13% +110.36% -43.75%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £54.77
90th Percentile £95.00 - £60.91
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.72 £85.00 £43.37
% change year-on-year -21.51% +96.01% -40.60%

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 8,960 6,968 9,247
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.98% 22.67% 20.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,998 4,517 6,478
10th Percentile £358 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -1.87% -6.96%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -3.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 217 88 213
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.95 £21.88
25th Percentile £52.50 £38.44 £43.75
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +28.28% -25.05%
75th Percentile £74.26 £67.63 £66.75
90th Percentile £81.20 £80.30 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £48.72
% change year-on-year - +33.42% -25.05%

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 22 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 22 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 22 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 -11 796 £545 -9.24% 177
London -11 511 £600 -5.33% 110
Work from Home +7 329 £575 -7.07% 92
UK excluding London -38 257 £462 -1.70% 100
North of England -33 112 £475 -9.52% 36
South East +4 61 £433 -21.36% 39
North West -18 58 £453 -6.22% 23
Midlands -29 45 £500 +40.45% 7
Yorkshire -35 45 £515 -29.03% 9
West Midlands -44 27 £550 -8.33% 5
South West -10 26 £550 -13.73% 10
Scotland -17 25 £481 +25.98% 7
East Midlands -22 18 £402 +12.92% 2
North East -13 14 £506 -6.62% 4
East of England -34 5 £500 +57.23% 1
Wales -7 1 £250 - 1

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
1 103 (11.37%) Apache Spark
2 59 (6.51%) Apache
3 43 (4.75%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (3.86%) 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
9 3 (0.33%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.22%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.22%) JBoss
10 2 (0.22%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.22%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
Applications
1 5 (0.55%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.22%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.44%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.44%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.44%) Oracle 11i
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
1 544 (60.04%) AWS
2 241 (26.60%) Azure
3 162 (17.88%) GitHub
4 155 (17.11%) GCP
5 128 (14.13%) Serverless
6 116 (12.80%) GitHub Actions
7 109 (12.03%) Amazon S3
8 98 (10.82%) AWS Lambda
9 75 (8.28%) Amazon EKS
9 75 (8.28%) AWS CloudFormation
10 55 (6.07%) Amazon ECS
11 51 (5.63%) OpenShift
12 45 (4.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
12 45 (4.97%) Power Platform
13 43 (4.75%) Amazon Kinesis
13 43 (4.75%) Amazon SQS
14 37 (4.08%) Azure DevOps
15 36 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
16 33 (3.64%) Amazon EC2
17 28 (3.09%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.77%) Firewall
2 13 (1.43%) HTTP
3 11 (1.21%) SSL
4 10 (1.10%) DNS
5 6 (0.66%) FTP
5 6 (0.66%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.66%) SMS
5 6 (0.66%) SSH
6 3 (0.33%) TCP/IP
6 3 (0.33%) VPN
7 2 (0.22%) MQTT
8 1 (0.11%) 4G
8 1 (0.11%) 5G
8 1 (0.11%) Broadband
8 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.11%) Internet
8 1 (0.11%) NAS
8 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 173 (19.09%) PostgreSQL
2 150 (16.56%) MongoDB
3 134 (14.79%) NoSQL
4 75 (8.28%) Apache Cassandra
5 63 (6.95%) Relational Database
6 55 (6.07%) Data Warehouse
7 53 (5.85%) Elasticsearch
8 47 (5.19%) Big Data
8 47 (5.19%) Data Lake
9 44 (4.86%) DynamoDB
10 43 (4.75%) Amazon RDS
11 42 (4.64%) Redis
11 42 (4.64%) SQL Server
12 36 (3.97%) Hadoop
13 33 (3.64%) Amazon Athena
13 33 (3.64%) Power BI
14 32 (3.53%) Amazon Redshift
15 31 (3.42%) Flink
16 30 (3.31%) MySQL
17 29 (3.20%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 154 (17.00%) Jenkins
2 136 (15.01%) GitLab
3 100 (11.04%) Git
4 85 (9.38%) JUnit
5 61 (6.73%) JIRA
6 35 (3.86%) Mockito
7 29 (3.20%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.65%) JMeter
8 24 (2.65%) Sonatype Nexus
9 21 (2.32%) Gradle
10 16 (1.77%) Gatling
11 13 (1.43%) Maven
12 10 (1.10%) CircleCI
12 10 (1.10%) Selenium
13 9 (0.99%) Artifactory
13 9 (0.99%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.99%) REST Assured
14 7 (0.77%) Postman
15 6 (0.66%) Serenity BDD
15 6 (0.66%) SoapUI
General
1 254 (28.04%) Finance
2 205 (22.63%) Social Skills
3 133 (14.68%) Banking
4 79 (8.72%) Analytical Skills
5 63 (6.95%) Public Sector
6 47 (5.19%) Investment Banking
7 43 (4.75%) Front Office
8 25 (2.76%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.88%) Financial Institution
10 9 (0.99%) Influencing Skills
10 9 (0.99%) Marketing
11 6 (0.66%) Retail
11 6 (0.66%) Telecoms
12 5 (0.55%) Law
13 4 (0.44%) Aerospace
13 4 (0.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
13 4 (0.44%) Military
14 3 (0.33%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.33%) Legal
15 2 (0.22%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 340 (37.53%) Developer
2 254 (28.04%) Senior
3 190 (20.97%) Java Developer
4 129 (14.24%) Data Engineer
5 123 (13.58%) Senior Developer
6 108 (11.92%) Lead
7 86 (9.49%) Software Engineer
8 83 (9.16%) Architect
9 74 (8.17%) Senior Java Developer
10 52 (5.74%) DevOps Engineer
11 45 (4.97%) Full-Stack Developer
12 42 (4.64%) Kafka Developer
13 40 (4.42%) Java Engineer
14 39 (4.30%) AWS Architect
14 39 (4.30%) AWS Developer
14 39 (4.30%) AWS Engineer
15 35 (3.86%) Kafka Engineer
16 32 (3.53%) Senior Data Engineer
17 29 (3.20%) Solutions Architect
18 27 (2.98%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (24.17%) Spring
2 185 (20.42%) Spring Boot
3 107 (11.81%) REST
4 91 (10.04%) gRPC
5 89 (9.82%) Node.js
6 88 (9.71%) React
7 87 (9.60%) RESTful
8 72 (7.95%) RabbitMQ
9 43 (4.75%) AngularJS
10 40 (4.42%) Middleware
11 34 (3.75%) JSON
12 33 (3.64%) OpenTelemetry
13 31 (3.42%) Hibernate
13 31 (3.42%) Keycloak
14 30 (3.31%) PySpark
15 29 (3.20%) GraphQL
16 27 (2.98%) JMS
16 27 (2.98%) OAuth
17 25 (2.76%) OAuth2
18 24 (2.65%) .NET
Miscellaneous
1 135 (14.90%) Distributed Systems
2 123 (13.58%) Cloud Native
3 42 (4.64%) Management Information System
4 36 (3.97%) Product Ownership
5 33 (3.64%) Fixed Income
6 27 (2.98%) Data Structures
7 24 (2.65%) Equities
8 23 (2.54%) Derivative
9 21 (2.32%) Hybrid Cloud
10 17 (1.88%) Market Risk
11 16 (1.77%) Replication
12 15 (1.66%) Legacy Applications
13 13 (1.43%) Algorithms
14 12 (1.32%) Onboarding
15 11 (1.21%) Data Protection Act
15 11 (1.21%) Distributed Computing
15 11 (1.21%) Legacy Systems
16 10 (1.10%) Greenfield Project
17 8 (0.88%) SWIFT Messaging Network
18 7 (0.77%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 150 (16.56%) Linux
2 74 (8.17%) Unix
3 28 (3.09%) Windows
4 10 (1.10%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.55%) AIX
6 4 (0.44%) CentOS
6 4 (0.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 3 (0.33%) zOS
8 2 (0.22%) VMS
9 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 393 (43.38%) CI/CD
2 350 (38.63%) Microservices
3 311 (34.33%) Agile
4 251 (27.70%) DevOps
5 219 (24.17%) Software Engineering
6 190 (20.97%) Problem-Solving
7 187 (20.64%) Event-Driven
8 186 (20.53%) Containerisation
9 173 (19.09%) Observability
10 152 (16.78%) Infrastructure as Code
11 145 (16.00%) Analytics
12 139 (15.34%) Data Pipeline
13 128 (14.13%) Data Engineering
14 124 (13.69%) Test Automation
15 117 (12.91%) ETL
16 115 (12.69%) Data Modelling
17 109 (12.03%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 103 (11.37%) Open Source
19 102 (11.26%) TDD
20 96 (10.60%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 451 (49.78%) Java
2 316 (34.88%) Python
3 259 (28.59%) SQL
4 127 (14.02%) Go
5 77 (8.50%) JavaScript
6 67 (7.40%) C#
7 60 (6.62%) TypeScript
8 37 (4.08%) Bash
8 37 (4.08%) Shell Script
9 36 (3.97%) C++
10 28 (3.09%) Scala
11 17 (1.88%) Rust
12 12 (1.32%) PL/SQL
13 10 (1.10%) PowerShell
14 8 (0.88%) Bicep
15 7 (0.77%) Korn
15 7 (0.77%) Perl
16 6 (0.66%) R
17 5 (0.55%) Kotlin
17 5 (0.55%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 204 (22.52%) Security Cleared
2 182 (20.09%) SC Cleared
3 44 (4.86%) Degree
4 35 (3.86%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (3.09%) Azure Certification
6 26 (2.87%) AWS Certification
7 22 (2.43%) DV Cleared
8 19 (2.10%) Computer Science Degree
9 14 (1.55%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.88%) OCP
10 8 (0.88%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.77%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.33%) AWS Certified Developer
12 3 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.22%) CBAP
13 2 (0.22%) CSPO
13 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 93 (10.26%) Data Quality
2 45 (4.97%) QA
3 36 (3.97%) GDPR
4 15 (1.66%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.21%) ISO 20022
5 11 (1.21%) NCSC
6 9 (0.99%) PCI DSS
7 8 (0.88%) NIST
8 7 (0.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 6 (0.66%) SEPA
10 5 (0.55%) SLA
11 3 (0.33%) Def Stans
11 3 (0.33%) HL7
11 3 (0.33%) ISO 8583
12 2 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.22%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.22%) MiFID
12 2 (0.22%) PSD2
12 2 (0.22%) WCAG
13 1 (0.11%) SOC 2
System Software
1 314 (34.66%) Docker
2 8 (0.88%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (0.33%) HDFS
3 3 (0.33%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 363 (40.07%) Kubernetes
2 213 (23.51%) Terraform
3 108 (11.92%) Grafana
4 102 (11.26%) Prometheus
5 62 (6.84%) Ansible
6 26 (2.87%) Argo
7 15 (1.66%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.10%) Istio
9 9 (0.99%) Kiali
10 8 (0.88%) linkerd
11 7 (0.77%) Packer
12 6 (0.66%) logstash
13 5 (0.55%) Puppet
14 4 (0.44%) Fluentd
14 4 (0.44%) Kibana
14 4 (0.44%) Rancher
15 3 (0.33%) Jamf Pro
16 2 (0.22%) QRadar
16 2 (0.22%) rkt
16 2 (0.22%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 75 (8.28%) Oracle
2 74 (8.17%) Databricks
3 64 (7.06%) Splunk
4 36 (3.97%) Google
5 35 (3.86%) Microsoft
6 33 (3.64%) Confluent
7 32 (3.53%) IBM
8 24 (2.65%) VMware
9 18 (1.99%) Sybase
10 17 (1.88%) Informatica
11 16 (1.77%) Dynatrace
12 13 (1.43%) Cloudera
13 10 (1.10%) Red Hat
14 9 (0.99%) ServiceNow
14 9 (0.99%) Talend
15 8 (0.88%) Atlassian
15 8 (0.88%) Foundry
15 8 (0.88%) Palantir
16 7 (0.77%) Bloomberg
16 7 (0.77%) SAP