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 9 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 111 128
Rank change year-on-year -29 +17 +35
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,110 830 737
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.04% 2.50% 1.94%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.38% 9.64% 7.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 713 535 471
10th Percentile £375 £375 £363
25th Percentile £425 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.26% -7.77%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £721
90th Percentile £762 £750 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £463 £488
% change year-on-year +7.93% -4.97% -18.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 4 5
10th Percentile £51.75 £40.58 £26.04
25th Percentile £67.50 £48.56 £27.00
Median hourly rate £81.00 £59.25 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.71% +111.61% -64.10%
75th Percentile £89.06 £75.31 £38.75
90th Percentile £94.50 £96.13 £68.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £82.25 - £28.00
% change year-on-year - - -64.10%

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 11,839 8,614 9,414
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.72% 25.97% 24.79%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,780 5,717 6,085
10th Percentile £380 £356 £355
25th Percentile £440 £413 £430
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £638 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £725 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -4.40%
Number of hourly rates quoted 290 186 183
10th Percentile £29.07 £30.50 £25.60
25th Percentile £50.19 £40.75 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £51.97 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +25.07% -20.05% +8.33%
75th Percentile £77.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £70.00 £74.97
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.47 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +22.67% -15.38% +10.11%

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 9 October 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 9 October 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 17 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 9 October 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 -36 922 £550 - 1,008
London -31 568 £575 -4.17% 752
UK excluding London -17 394 £500 +7.93% 360
Work from Home -66 279 £550 -4.35% 408
North of England 0 198 £503 +6.91% 115
Yorkshire +11 92 £501 -12.96% 25
North West -18 86 £550 +21.61% 78
Scotland -28 61 £410 -13.68% 64
South East -53 53 £460 +5.75% 47
Midlands -49 36 £500 +5.26% 27
South West -12 29 £575 +4.55% 34
East of England -5 27 £475 -7.32% 22
West Midlands -43 27 £700 +40.00% 20
North East -22 25 £426 -26.00% 12
East Midlands -25 9 £400 -3.61% 7
Northern Ireland +9 4 - - 44
Wales - 1 £375 - 7

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
1 128 (11.53%) Apache Spark
2 80 (7.21%) Apache Airflow
3 76 (6.85%) Apache
4 27 (2.43%) Confluence
5 15 (1.35%) Camunda
6 7 (0.63%) nginx
6 7 (0.63%) OpenStack
6 7 (0.63%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 5 (0.45%) Apache Pulsar
7 5 (0.45%) CMS
7 5 (0.45%) SharePoint
8 4 (0.36%) MQSeries
8 4 (0.36%) PowerExchange
9 3 (0.27%) Anypoint
9 3 (0.27%) Mule
9 3 (0.27%) Traefik
10 2 (0.18%) Apache Pig
10 2 (0.18%) JBoss
10 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
11 1 (0.090%) Oracle Workflow
Applications
1 6 (0.54%) CPLEX
2 3 (0.27%) Mingle
3 1 (0.090%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.090%) Gliffy
3 1 (0.090%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.090%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 6 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
2 4 (0.36%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 3 (0.27%) Finacle
3 3 (0.27%) FLEXCUBE
3 3 (0.27%) Temenos T24
4 2 (0.18%) Dynamics CRM
4 2 (0.18%) Endur
4 2 (0.18%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.090%) Actimize
5 1 (0.090%) Distributed Ledger
5 1 (0.090%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.090%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.090%) Payment Gateway
5 1 (0.090%) SAP IS-U
5 1 (0.090%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 639 (57.57%) AWS
2 405 (36.49%) Azure
3 269 (24.23%) GCP
4 187 (16.85%) GitHub
5 127 (11.44%) GitHub Actions
6 105 (9.46%) Serverless
7 90 (8.11%) Amazon S3
8 86 (7.75%) AWS Lambda
9 82 (7.39%) Amazon EKS
10 77 (6.94%) Snowflake
11 67 (6.04%) Azure DevOps
12 63 (5.68%) OpenShift
13 53 (4.77%) dbt
14 51 (4.59%) Amazon SQS
15 48 (4.32%) Amazon ECS
16 43 (3.87%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 36 (3.24%) Azure Data Factory
18 35 (3.15%) Power Platform
19 31 (2.79%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 29 (2.61%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (2.70%) HTTP
2 24 (2.16%) DNS
3 14 (1.26%) Network Security
4 9 (0.81%) Firewall
4 9 (0.81%) TCP/IP
5 7 (0.63%) MQTT
5 7 (0.63%) SSH
5 7 (0.63%) SSL
6 6 (0.54%) SAN
7 5 (0.45%) 4G
7 5 (0.45%) 5G
8 4 (0.36%) NAS
9 3 (0.27%) Internet
9 3 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
9 3 (0.27%) VPN
10 2 (0.18%) Broadband
10 2 (0.18%) Kerberos
11 1 (0.090%) MIMO
11 1 (0.090%) RTP
11 1 (0.090%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 186 (16.76%) PostgreSQL
2 169 (15.23%) MongoDB
3 138 (12.43%) NoSQL
4 94 (8.47%) Relational Database
5 75 (6.76%) Data Warehouse
6 62 (5.59%) Redis
6 62 (5.59%) SQL Server
7 52 (4.68%) MySQL
8 47 (4.23%) Big Data
8 47 (4.23%) Data Lake
9 43 (3.87%) Elasticsearch
10 39 (3.51%) BigQuery
11 38 (3.42%) Flink
12 33 (2.97%) Power BI
13 30 (2.70%) Metadata
14 28 (2.52%) Delta Lake
15 27 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
16 22 (1.98%) RDBMS
17 21 (1.89%) Apache Iceberg
17 21 (1.89%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 223 (20.09%) Jenkins
2 198 (17.84%) Git
3 173 (15.59%) GitLab
4 71 (6.40%) JUnit
5 69 (6.22%) Gradle
6 59 (5.32%) Mockito
7 57 (5.14%) Selenium
8 48 (4.32%) JIRA
9 46 (4.14%) Maven
10 39 (3.51%) Cucumber
11 35 (3.15%) SonarQube
12 26 (2.34%) Postman
13 25 (2.25%) REST Assured
14 22 (1.98%) Bitbucket
15 21 (1.89%) JMeter
16 17 (1.53%) Gatling
17 16 (1.44%) LoadRunner
17 16 (1.44%) SoapUI
18 15 (1.35%) Cypress.io
18 15 (1.35%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 284 (25.59%) Finance
2 213 (19.19%) Social Skills
3 192 (17.30%) Banking
4 111 (10.00%) Analytical Skills
5 102 (9.19%) Public Sector
6 43 (3.87%) Retail
7 36 (3.24%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (2.07%) Front Office
10 20 (1.80%) Financial Institution
11 18 (1.62%) Telecoms
12 12 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 11 (0.99%) Law
14 10 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
15 9 (0.81%) Military
16 8 (0.72%) Billing
16 8 (0.72%) Retail Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Corporate Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Games
17 7 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 329 (29.64%) Developer
2 235 (21.17%) Senior
3 184 (16.58%) Java Developer
4 176 (15.86%) Architect
5 131 (11.80%) Data Engineer
6 101 (9.10%) Lead
7 79 (7.12%) Java Engineer
8 71 (6.40%) Solutions Architect
9 67 (6.04%) Senior Developer
10 65 (5.86%) Software Engineer
11 63 (5.68%) DevOps Engineer
12 50 (4.50%) Full-Stack Developer
13 44 (3.96%) Senior Data Engineer
14 39 (3.51%) Senior Java Developer
15 38 (3.42%) AWS Engineer
15 38 (3.42%) Python Engineer
16 37 (3.33%) Senior Java Engineer
17 36 (3.24%) Kafka Engineer
17 36 (3.24%) Test Engineer
18 35 (3.15%) Python Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 306 (27.57%) Spring
2 305 (27.48%) Spring Boot
3 261 (23.51%) REST
4 237 (21.35%) Terraform
5 156 (14.05%) RESTful
6 134 (12.07%) React
7 117 (10.54%) RabbitMQ
8 73 (6.58%) OAuth
9 69 (6.22%) JSON
10 60 (5.41%) HTML
11 56 (5.05%) Node.js
12 53 (4.77%) PySpark
13 49 (4.41%) GraphQL
14 47 (4.23%) CSS
14 47 (4.23%) SOAP
15 46 (4.14%) .NET
16 45 (4.05%) Elastic Stack
16 45 (4.05%) Middleware
16 45 (4.05%) XML
17 43 (3.87%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 267 (24.05%) Cloud Native
2 237 (21.35%) Distributed Systems
3 79 (7.12%) Product Ownership
4 49 (4.41%) Enterprise Software
5 44 (3.96%) Data Structures
6 37 (3.33%) AI Agents
7 36 (3.24%) Onboarding
8 34 (3.06%) Self-Motivation
9 28 (2.52%) Greenfield Project
9 28 (2.52%) Replication
10 27 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
11 26 (2.34%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 25 (2.25%) Algorithms
13 21 (1.89%) Distributed Architecture
13 21 (1.89%) Public Cloud
14 20 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
15 19 (1.71%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 17 (1.53%) Private Cloud
17 16 (1.44%) PKI
18 14 (1.26%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 144 (12.97%) Linux
2 70 (6.31%) Unix
3 27 (2.43%) Windows
4 12 (1.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (0.45%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.45%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.36%) CentOS
7 2 (0.18%) Android
7 2 (0.18%) VMS
8 1 (0.090%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.090%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.090%) Windows Server
8 1 (0.090%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 629 (56.67%) CI/CD
2 471 (42.43%) Event-Driven
3 463 (41.71%) Microservices
4 403 (36.31%) Agile
5 402 (36.22%) DevOps
6 328 (29.55%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 286 (25.77%) Observability
8 267 (24.05%) Test Automation
9 246 (22.16%) Infrastructure as Code
10 227 (20.45%) Containerisation
11 213 (19.19%) Software Engineering
12 187 (16.85%) AI
13 166 (14.95%) Data Pipeline
14 156 (14.05%) Problem-Solving
15 146 (13.15%) Data Modelling
16 144 (12.97%) Technical Leadership
17 142 (12.79%) Continuous Improvement
18 128 (11.53%) ETL
19 125 (11.26%) TDD
20 124 (11.17%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 500 (45.05%) Java
2 380 (34.23%) Python
3 366 (32.97%) SQL
4 113 (10.18%) JavaScript
5 96 (8.65%) TypeScript
6 88 (7.93%) Bash
7 68 (6.13%) C#
8 54 (4.86%) Go
9 40 (3.60%) Scala
10 32 (2.88%) PowerShell
11 31 (2.79%) PL/SQL
12 28 (2.52%) Shell Script
13 25 (2.25%) Kotlin
14 11 (0.99%) C++
14 11 (0.99%) Groovy
15 8 (0.72%) Perl
15 8 (0.72%) PHP
16 7 (0.63%) Kusto Query Language
17 6 (0.54%) Bicep
17 6 (0.54%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 272 (24.50%) Security Cleared
2 224 (20.18%) SC Cleared
3 67 (6.04%) Degree
4 45 (4.05%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (3.96%) BPSS Clearance
6 29 (2.61%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.35%) Azure Certification
8 12 (1.08%) AWS Certification
8 12 (1.08%) Master's Degree
9 11 (0.99%) ISTQB
10 7 (0.63%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.63%) ISEB
10 7 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 5 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 5 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
12 3 (0.27%) PhD
12 3 (0.27%) SnowPro
13 2 (0.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 1 (0.090%) FFIEC
14 1 (0.090%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 91 (8.20%) Data Quality
2 87 (7.84%) QA
3 44 (3.96%) Accessibility
4 33 (2.97%) ISO 20022
5 20 (1.80%) GDPR
6 14 (1.26%) SEPA
7 6 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 5 (0.45%) ISO 15022
8 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) NIST
8 5 (0.45%) PSD2
9 4 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.36%) SLA
9 4 (0.36%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) Basel III
10 2 (0.18%) GRC
10 2 (0.18%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
System Software
1 389 (35.05%) Docker
2 16 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (0.72%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 4 (0.36%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.18%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.18%) HDFS
6 1 (0.090%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 513 (46.22%) Kubernetes
2 144 (12.97%) Grafana
3 123 (11.08%) Prometheus
4 68 (6.13%) Ansible
5 28 (2.52%) Argo
6 27 (2.43%) Control-M
7 17 (1.53%) Istio
8 16 (1.44%) Kustomize
9 14 (1.26%) Kibana
9 14 (1.26%) Puppet
10 9 (0.81%) Podman
11 8 (0.72%) logstash
12 7 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 6 (0.54%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.45%) Check_MK
14 5 (0.45%) Progress Chef
14 5 (0.45%) Rancher
15 4 (0.36%) Bosun
15 4 (0.36%) HAProxy
16 3 (0.27%) Consul
Vendors
1 123 (11.08%) Oracle
2 105 (9.46%) Databricks
3 62 (5.59%) IBM
4 61 (5.50%) Google
4 61 (5.50%) Splunk
5 55 (4.95%) Microsoft
6 39 (3.51%) Dynatrace
7 32 (2.88%) Confluent
8 28 (2.52%) Informatica
9 20 (1.80%) MuleSoft
9 20 (1.80%) SAP
9 20 (1.80%) VMware
10 19 (1.71%) OpenAI
11 15 (1.35%) TIBCO
12 13 (1.17%) New Relic
12 13 (1.17%) Salesforce
13 12 (1.08%) Solace
14 10 (0.90%) Sybase
14 10 (0.90%) Veracode
14 10 (0.90%) WSO2