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

6 months to
28 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 130 107 170
Rank change year-on-year -23 +63 -34
Contract jobs citing Kafka 944 736 625
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.01% 2.51% 1.44%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.01% 11.06% 7.04%
Number of daily rates quoted 582 481 456
10th Percentile £363 £400 £383
25th Percentile £413 £463 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £565 £534
Median % change year-on-year -7.08% +5.81% -17.85%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £747
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £475 £485
% change year-on-year -2.11% -2.06% -9.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 18 4 6
10th Percentile £40.00 £51.09 £22.24
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £23.81
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +171.75% -58.82%
75th Percentile £87.25 £93.75 £38.94
90th Percentile £91.50 - £54.50
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 9,433 6,653 8,878
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 20.08% 22.66% 20.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,259 4,565 6,164
10th Percentile £358 £363 £338
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £515 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -1.90% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £780 £766
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £492 £500
% change year-on-year +1.63% -1.60% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 267 111 224
10th Percentile £35.00 £27.11 £20.91
25th Percentile £52.50 £46.50 £39.98
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £46.18
Median % change year-on-year - +40.75% -28.95%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £82.96 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -26.92%

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 28 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 28 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 28 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 -24 817 £530 -11.30% 178
London -18 517 £600 -7.69% 120
Work from Home -6 324 £600 -4.00% 89
UK excluding London -39 287 £465 -2.11% 116
North of England -52 123 £455 -13.33% 27
Yorkshire -29 60 £455 -32.59% 1
South East -34 54 £441 -13.27% 57
North West -43 53 £455 -9.00% 22
Midlands -32 50 £500 +39.66% 7
South West -15 30 £550 +7.32% 11
Scotland -16 30 £463 -1.60% 7
West Midlands -38 28 £523 -12.92% 6
East Midlands -24 22 £425 +19.38% 1
North East -14 16 £450 -3.23% 4
East of England -28 13 £525 +65.00% 5
Wales -11 1 £250 -

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
1 129 (13.67%) Apache Spark
2 66 (6.99%) Apache
3 48 (5.08%) Apache Airflow
4 24 (2.54%) Confluence
5 6 (0.64%) Camunda
5 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.53%) MQSeries
6 5 (0.53%) OpenStack
6 5 (0.53%) WebSphere
7 3 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
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 3 (0.32%) Chatbot
1 3 (0.32%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
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 (0.42%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.42%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.32%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 567 (60.06%) AWS
2 278 (29.45%) Azure
3 164 (17.37%) GCP
4 148 (15.68%) GitHub
5 122 (12.92%) Serverless
6 111 (11.76%) Amazon S3
7 106 (11.23%) GitHub Actions
8 91 (9.64%) AWS Lambda
9 78 (8.26%) Amazon EKS
10 65 (6.89%) OpenShift
11 64 (6.78%) AWS CloudFormation
12 62 (6.57%) Azure DevOps
13 61 (6.46%) Power Platform
14 51 (5.40%) Amazon ECS
15 47 (4.98%) Snowflake
16 43 (4.56%) Amazon Kinesis
17 42 (4.45%) Amazon SQS
18 41 (4.34%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 39 (4.13%) Azure Data Factory
20 37 (3.92%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.12%) Firewall
2 17 (1.80%) HTTP
3 13 (1.38%) SSL
4 9 (0.95%) DNS
5 6 (0.64%) SMS
5 6 (0.64%) SSH
6 5 (0.53%) FTP
6 5 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.32%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) Kerberos
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.11%) 4G
9 1 (0.11%) 5G
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) MIMO
9 1 (0.11%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) NAS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 194 (20.55%) PostgreSQL
2 133 (14.09%) MongoDB
3 123 (13.03%) NoSQL
4 72 (7.63%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.57%) Apache Cassandra
6 60 (6.36%) Data Lake
7 59 (6.25%) Big Data
7 59 (6.25%) Data Warehouse
8 50 (5.30%) SQL Server
9 49 (5.19%) Elasticsearch
9 49 (5.19%) Power BI
10 46 (4.87%) Redis
11 43 (4.56%) DynamoDB
12 42 (4.45%) Flink
13 36 (3.81%) Amazon Athena
13 36 (3.81%) Hadoop
14 34 (3.60%) Amazon Redshift
14 34 (3.60%) Metadata
15 33 (3.50%) Amazon RDS
15 33 (3.50%) MySQL
Development Applications
1 141 (14.94%) Jenkins
2 127 (13.45%) GitLab
3 114 (12.08%) Git
4 63 (6.67%) JUnit
5 57 (6.04%) JIRA
6 38 (4.03%) Mockito
7 23 (2.44%) Cucumber
8 20 (2.12%) Gradle
9 13 (1.38%) Gatling
9 13 (1.38%) Selenium
10 12 (1.27%) JMeter
10 12 (1.27%) REST Assured
11 11 (1.17%) Maven
11 11 (1.17%) Postman
12 10 (1.06%) Jaeger
12 10 (1.06%) Liquibase
13 9 (0.95%) Sonatype Nexus
14 8 (0.85%) Artifactory
14 8 (0.85%) CircleCI
15 6 (0.64%) SoapUI
General
1 269 (28.50%) Finance
2 183 (19.39%) Social Skills
3 116 (12.29%) Banking
4 74 (7.84%) Analytical Skills
5 73 (7.73%) Public Sector
6 51 (5.40%) Front Office
7 32 (3.39%) Investment Banking
8 28 (2.97%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.91%) Financial Institution
10 12 (1.27%) Telecoms
11 10 (1.06%) Marketing
12 9 (0.95%) Influencing Skills
13 8 (0.85%) Retail
14 7 (0.74%) Law
14 7 (0.74%) Publishing
15 6 (0.64%) Automotive
16 5 (0.53%) Corporate Banking
17 4 (0.42%) Billing
17 4 (0.42%) Inclusion and Diversity
18 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 331 (35.06%) Developer
2 218 (23.09%) Senior
3 161 (17.06%) Java Developer
4 155 (16.42%) Data Engineer
5 116 (12.29%) Lead
6 111 (11.76%) Architect
7 99 (10.49%) Senior Developer
8 90 (9.53%) Software Engineer
9 55 (5.83%) Java Engineer
10 54 (5.72%) AWS Architect
11 51 (5.40%) Senior Java Developer
12 49 (5.19%) Full-Stack Developer
13 48 (5.08%) DevOps Engineer
14 43 (4.56%) Solutions Architect
15 40 (4.24%) AWS Engineer
16 36 (3.81%) Kafka Developer
17 35 (3.71%) Senior Data Engineer
18 34 (3.60%) Kafka Engineer
19 33 (3.50%) Developer/Software Engineer
20 32 (3.39%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (22.25%) Spring
2 189 (20.02%) Spring Boot
3 119 (12.61%) REST
4 114 (12.08%) Node.js
5 106 (11.23%) React
6 104 (11.02%) RESTful
7 74 (7.84%) gRPC
8 70 (7.42%) RabbitMQ
9 53 (5.61%) OpenTelemetry
10 48 (5.08%) GraphQL
10 48 (5.08%) JSON
11 42 (4.45%) AngularJS
11 42 (4.45%) Middleware
11 42 (4.45%) PySpark
12 39 (4.13%) Apache Avro
13 36 (3.81%) Redux
14 35 (3.71%) OAuth
15 30 (3.18%) OAuth2
16 28 (2.97%) Swagger
16 28 (2.97%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 155 (16.42%) Distributed Systems
2 135 (14.30%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.30%) Management Information System
4 49 (5.19%) Fixed Income
5 35 (3.71%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.44%) Data Structures
7 20 (2.12%) Equities
7 20 (2.12%) Hybrid Cloud
7 20 (2.12%) Onboarding
8 17 (1.80%) Derivative
8 17 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
9 15 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
10 14 (1.48%) Algorithms
11 12 (1.27%) Clustering
11 12 (1.27%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (1.17%) Market Risk
12 11 (1.17%) Replication
13 10 (1.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 9 (0.95%) Hedge funds
14 9 (0.95%) SWIFT Messaging Network
Operating Systems
1 111 (11.76%) Linux
2 57 (6.04%) Unix
3 35 (3.71%) Windows
4 9 (0.95%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) AIX
6 4 (0.42%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 4 (0.42%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.32%) VMS
7 3 (0.32%) 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 (0.11%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 424 (44.92%) CI/CD
2 321 (34.00%) Microservices
3 311 (32.94%) Agile
4 277 (29.34%) DevOps
5 223 (23.62%) Event-Driven
6 204 (21.61%) Software Engineering
7 199 (21.08%) Observability
8 197 (20.87%) Containerisation
9 173 (18.33%) Data Pipeline
10 165 (17.48%) Analytics
11 163 (17.27%) Problem-Solving
12 160 (16.95%) Infrastructure as Code
13 154 (16.31%) Data Modelling
14 153 (16.21%) Data Engineering
15 145 (15.36%) ETL
16 144 (15.25%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 131 (13.88%) Test Automation
18 116 (12.29%) Full-Stack Development
19 102 (10.81%) Data Governance
20 95 (10.06%) AI
Programming Languages
1 437 (46.29%) Java
2 333 (35.28%) Python
3 275 (29.13%) SQL
4 116 (12.29%) Go
5 99 (10.49%) TypeScript
6 96 (10.17%) JavaScript
7 59 (6.25%) C#
8 41 (4.34%) Bash
9 31 (3.28%) Scala
10 18 (1.91%) C++
10 18 (1.91%) PowerShell
10 18 (1.91%) Rust
11 17 (1.80%) Shell Script
12 12 (1.27%) Bicep
13 9 (0.95%) PL/SQL
14 8 (0.85%) Search Processing Language
15 7 (0.74%) Perl
16 6 (0.64%) Groovy
17 5 (0.53%) Korn
18 4 (0.42%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 213 (22.56%) Security Cleared
2 173 (18.33%) SC Cleared
3 44 (4.66%) Degree
4 32 (3.39%) BPSS Clearance
5 20 (2.12%) AWS Certification
6 19 (2.01%) Azure Certification
7 16 (1.69%) Computer Science Degree
7 16 (1.69%) DV Cleared
8 13 (1.38%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 7 (0.74%) SnowPro
10 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
10 3 (0.32%) OCP
10 3 (0.32%) Oracle Certification
10 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
11 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
11 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
12 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.11%) PMP
12 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 111 (11.76%) Data Quality
2 47 (4.98%) GDPR
2 47 (4.98%) QA
3 22 (2.33%) Accessibility
4 13 (1.38%) ISO 20022
5 9 (0.95%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (0.95%) NIST
6 8 (0.85%) NCSC
7 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
8 5 (0.53%) SEPA
9 4 (0.42%) HL7
9 4 (0.42%) MiFID
9 4 (0.42%) SLA
9 4 (0.42%) WCAG
10 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.21%) EMIR
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 321 (34.00%) Docker
2 6 (0.64%) etcd
2 6 (0.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 3 (0.32%) HDFS
4 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 377 (39.94%) Kubernetes
2 203 (21.50%) Terraform
3 118 (12.50%) Grafana
4 114 (12.08%) Prometheus
5 58 (6.14%) Ansible
6 32 (3.39%) Argo
7 10 (1.06%) Fluentd
7 10 (1.06%) Istio
7 10 (1.06%) Kibana
8 9 (0.95%) Kiali
9 8 (0.85%) linkerd
9 8 (0.85%) logstash
10 7 (0.74%) Puppet
10 7 (0.74%) Rancher
11 5 (0.53%) Podman
11 5 (0.53%) Progress Chef
12 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
12 2 (0.21%) Packer
12 2 (0.21%) QRadar
12 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 91 (9.64%) Databricks
2 72 (7.63%) Splunk
3 71 (7.52%) Oracle
4 50 (5.30%) Microsoft
5 41 (4.34%) Google
6 36 (3.81%) Confluent
7 25 (2.65%) Informatica
8 23 (2.44%) IBM
9 14 (1.48%) Dynatrace
9 14 (1.48%) Red Hat
9 14 (1.48%) VMware
10 12 (1.27%) Talend
11 11 (1.17%) ServiceNow
12 10 (1.06%) Salesforce
12 10 (1.06%) Solace
13 9 (0.95%) AppDynamics
14 8 (0.85%) Pega
14 8 (0.85%) SAP
15 7 (0.74%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.74%) Cloudera