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 12 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
12 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 118 109 176
Rank change year-on-year -9 +67 -63
Contract jobs citing Kafka 852 770 680
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.42% 2.12% 1.46%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.56% 9.79% 6.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 557 465 524
10th Percentile £369 £380 £450
25th Percentile £430 £490 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £650
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -7.69% +4.00%
75th Percentile £675 £725 £788
90th Percentile £750 £810 £842
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £490 £529
% change year-on-year -8.16% -7.37% -11.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 5 10
10th Percentile £42.35 £26.04 £62.48
25th Percentile £53.00 £27.00 £75.31
Median hourly rate £62.50 £28.00 £77.75
Median % change year-on-year +123.21% -63.99% +6.14%
75th Percentile £70.00 £38.75 £84.61
90th Percentile £94.00 £68.00 £90.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £28.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year - -64.10% +6.85%

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 8,066 7,866 10,401
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.92% 21.71% 22.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,364 4,965 7,443
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £503 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -8.64% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £657
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 192 110 189
10th Percentile £29.10 £21.93 £36.13
25th Percentile £42.19 £36.38 £46.18
Median hourly rate £54.35 £62.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year -13.04% +13.64% -12.47%
75th Percentile £65.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.38 £74.00 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £65.00 £54.78
% change year-on-year -3.85% +18.66% -15.72%

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 12 November 2025.

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 12 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 15 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 12 November 2025. 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 -3 745 £550 -10.20% 438
London +1 489 £600 -7.69% 308
Work from Home +25 302 £575 +6.88% 263
UK excluding London -8 258 £450 -8.16% 163
North of England -32 91 £470 -14.53% 39
Scotland +32 59 £458 +19.76% 11
South East +17 58 £435 -9.75% 67
North West -9 45 £433 -11.73% 31
Yorkshire -32 41 £575 -7.56% 6
Midlands -4 40 £500 +17.65% 13
West Midlands -16 24 £500 +17.65% 8
South West +4 15 £550 -12.70% 9
East Midlands 0 15 £420 +17.98% 5
North East -5 7 £575 -7.89% 2
East of England -26 4 £513 +62.70% 11

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 70 (8.22%) Apache Spark
2 49 (5.75%) Apache
3 44 (5.16%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (4.11%) Confluence
5 12 (1.41%) Mule
6 10 (1.17%) Anypoint
7 7 (0.82%) Camunda
7 7 (0.82%) CMS
7 7 (0.82%) JBoss
8 6 (0.70%) WebSphere
9 5 (0.59%) MQSeries
10 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
11 3 (0.35%) Luigi
11 3 (0.35%) WebSphere Application Server
12 2 (0.23%) Alfresco
12 2 (0.23%) Apache Solr
12 2 (0.23%) Oracle Workflow
12 2 (0.23%) SAS
12 2 (0.23%) Tomcat
12 2 (0.23%) WebLogic
Applications
1 4 (0.47%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.23%) Sketch
3 1 (0.12%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 3 (0.35%) Fidessa
1 3 (0.35%) Payment Gateway
2 1 (0.12%) Endur
2 1 (0.12%) Exchequer
2 1 (0.12%) Oracle 11i
2 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
2 1 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
2 1 (0.12%) Temenos T24
Cloud Services
1 422 (49.53%) AWS
2 195 (22.89%) Azure
3 124 (14.55%) GCP
4 100 (11.74%) GitHub
5 90 (10.56%) Serverless
6 68 (7.98%) Amazon S3
7 66 (7.75%) AWS Lambda
8 63 (7.39%) GitHub Actions
9 50 (5.87%) OpenShift
10 41 (4.81%) AWS CloudFormation
11 40 (4.69%) Azure DevOps
12 34 (3.99%) Amazon SQS
13 32 (3.76%) Amazon Kinesis
14 31 (3.64%) Amazon ECS
15 30 (3.52%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 30 (3.52%) Snowflake
16 29 (3.40%) Azure Data Factory
17 28 (3.29%) Amazon EKS
18 25 (2.93%) Amazon EC2
19 20 (2.35%) dbt
Communications & Networking
1 8 (0.94%) DNS
2 7 (0.82%) AMQP
2 7 (0.82%) DSL
2 7 (0.82%) SSL
3 5 (0.59%) HTTP
3 5 (0.59%) Kerberos
4 4 (0.47%) Firewall
4 4 (0.47%) SSH
5 3 (0.35%) MQTT
6 2 (0.23%) SMS
6 2 (0.23%) TCP/IP
7 1 (0.12%) FTP
7 1 (0.12%) HTTPS
7 1 (0.12%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 173 (20.31%) MongoDB
1 173 (20.31%) PostgreSQL
2 121 (14.20%) NoSQL
3 76 (8.92%) Relational Database
4 75 (8.80%) Apache Cassandra
5 60 (7.04%) Big Data
6 50 (5.87%) Redis
7 44 (5.16%) Data Warehouse
8 42 (4.93%) DB2
9 40 (4.69%) SQL Server
10 37 (4.34%) Amazon RDS
11 36 (4.23%) Hadoop
12 35 (4.11%) Elasticsearch
13 34 (3.99%) DynamoDB
14 28 (3.29%) Data Lake
15 24 (2.82%) Amazon Redshift
16 23 (2.70%) BigQuery
17 22 (2.58%) Metadata
18 20 (2.35%) MySQL
19 17 (2.00%) Flink
Development Applications
1 164 (19.25%) Jenkins
2 107 (12.56%) JUnit
3 101 (11.85%) Git
4 97 (11.38%) GitLab
5 59 (6.92%) JIRA
6 48 (5.63%) Mockito
7 28 (3.29%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.82%) Gradle
8 24 (2.82%) JMeter
9 23 (2.70%) Maven
10 22 (2.58%) SonarQube
11 21 (2.46%) Sonatype Nexus
12 16 (1.88%) Artifactory
12 16 (1.88%) Liquibase
13 13 (1.53%) Subversion
14 11 (1.29%) Gatling
15 9 (1.06%) Bitbucket
15 9 (1.06%) ER Studio
15 9 (1.06%) SoapUI
16 7 (0.82%) Cypress.io
General
1 235 (27.58%) Social Skills
2 232 (27.23%) Finance
3 142 (16.67%) Banking
4 109 (12.79%) Analytical Skills
5 75 (8.80%) Investment Banking
6 65 (7.63%) Public Sector
7 50 (5.87%) Front Office
8 9 (1.06%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 9 (1.06%) Retail
9 8 (0.94%) Financial Institution
10 7 (0.82%) Documentation Skills
10 7 (0.82%) Influencing Skills
10 7 (0.82%) Military
10 7 (0.82%) Presentation Skills
11 4 (0.47%) Aerospace
11 4 (0.47%) Retail Banking
11 4 (0.47%) Telecoms
12 3 (0.35%) Back Office
12 3 (0.35%) Law
12 3 (0.35%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 346 (40.61%) Developer
2 234 (27.46%) Senior
3 224 (26.29%) Java Developer
4 119 (13.97%) Senior Developer
5 86 (10.09%) Data Engineer
6 84 (9.86%) Senior Java Developer
7 82 (9.62%) Lead
8 80 (9.39%) Software Engineer
9 79 (9.27%) Architect
10 58 (6.81%) DevOps Engineer
11 39 (4.58%) Platform Engineer
12 38 (4.46%) Kafka Developer
13 37 (4.34%) AWS Developer
13 37 (4.34%) Python Engineer
14 33 (3.87%) SQL Developer
15 32 (3.76%) Investment Banking Java Developer
15 32 (3.76%) Kafka Engineer
16 31 (3.64%) AWS Engineer
16 31 (3.64%) Full-Stack Developer
17 30 (3.52%) Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 201 (23.59%) Spring
2 129 (15.14%) Spring Boot
3 102 (11.97%) React
4 99 (11.62%) REST
5 98 (11.50%) gRPC
6 82 (9.62%) RabbitMQ
7 67 (7.86%) RESTful
8 50 (5.87%) JMS
9 49 (5.75%) ActiveMQ
10 42 (4.93%) Node.js
11 41 (4.81%) GraphQL
12 39 (4.58%) .NET
12 39 (4.58%) AngularJS
13 36 (4.23%) Hibernate
14 32 (3.76%) OAuth
15 29 (3.40%) Apache NiFi
15 29 (3.40%) Keycloak
16 28 (3.29%) JSON
16 28 (3.29%) SOAP
17 27 (3.17%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 110 (12.91%) Distributed Systems
2 82 (9.62%) Cloud Native
3 45 (5.28%) Equities
4 43 (5.05%) Data Structures
5 28 (3.29%) Management Information System
6 25 (2.93%) Product Ownership
7 24 (2.82%) Fixed Income
7 24 (2.82%) Replication
8 23 (2.70%) Derivative
9 22 (2.58%) Market Risk
10 13 (1.53%) Greenfield Project
10 13 (1.53%) PKI
11 12 (1.41%) Distributed Computing
12 10 (1.17%) Algorithms
12 10 (1.17%) Data Protection Act
13 9 (1.06%) Legacy Applications
14 8 (0.94%) Hybrid Cloud
14 8 (0.94%) IoT
14 8 (0.94%) Legacy Systems
14 8 (0.94%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 156 (18.31%) Linux
2 75 (8.80%) Unix
3 14 (1.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
4 13 (1.53%) Windows
5 12 (1.41%) Mac OS X
6 7 (0.82%) CentOS
7 1 (0.12%) Android
7 1 (0.12%) Apple iOS
7 1 (0.12%) Debian
7 1 (0.12%) Ubuntu
7 1 (0.12%) VMS
7 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 355 (41.67%) Agile
2 353 (41.43%) Microservices
3 324 (38.03%) CI/CD
4 245 (28.76%) Software Engineering
5 222 (26.06%) DevOps
6 202 (23.71%) Problem-Solving
7 142 (16.67%) Containerisation
8 137 (16.08%) TDD
9 133 (15.61%) Open Source
10 112 (13.15%) Event-Driven
11 111 (13.03%) Observability
12 109 (12.79%) Infrastructure as Code
13 104 (12.21%) Test Automation
14 103 (12.09%) SDLC
15 101 (11.85%) Data Pipeline
16 93 (10.92%) Scrum
17 89 (10.45%) Analytics
18 84 (9.86%) Mentoring
19 81 (9.51%) ETL
20 78 (9.15%) Data Engineering
Programming Languages
1 429 (50.35%) Java
2 313 (36.74%) Python
3 249 (29.23%) SQL
4 128 (15.02%) Go
5 71 (8.33%) Shell Script
6 58 (6.81%) C#
7 53 (6.22%) JavaScript
8 49 (5.75%) C++
9 47 (5.52%) Bash
10 39 (4.58%) Scala
11 38 (4.46%) TypeScript
12 14 (1.64%) Perl
13 10 (1.17%) Groovy
14 9 (1.06%) DataWeave
15 8 (0.94%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.94%) T-SQL
16 5 (0.59%) RPG
16 5 (0.59%) RPG IV
16 5 (0.59%) Rust
17 4 (0.47%) R
Qualifications
1 152 (17.84%) Security Cleared
2 134 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 59 (6.92%) Degree
4 38 (4.46%) Computer Science Degree
5 24 (2.82%) DV Cleared
6 20 (2.35%) AWS Certification
7 18 (2.11%) BPSS Clearance
8 17 (2.00%) Master's Degree
9 16 (1.88%) Azure Certification
10 8 (0.94%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 8 (0.94%) Numerate Degree
11 5 (0.59%) OCP
11 5 (0.59%) Oracle Certification
12 2 (0.23%) CBAP
12 2 (0.23%) CSPO
12 2 (0.23%) IBM Certification
13 1 (0.12%) AWS Certified Developer
13 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
13 1 (0.12%) PMP
13 1 (0.12%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 50 (5.87%) Data Quality
2 35 (4.11%) QA
3 18 (2.11%) GDPR
4 8 (0.94%) NCSC
5 6 (0.70%) WCAG
6 5 (0.59%) Accessibility
6 5 (0.59%) HIPAA
6 5 (0.59%) ISO 20022
7 3 (0.35%) Def Stans
7 3 (0.35%) EMIR
7 3 (0.35%) MiFID
7 3 (0.35%) PCI DSS
7 3 (0.35%) SLA
8 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.23%) HL7
8 2 (0.23%) ISO 15022
8 2 (0.23%) Section 508
8 2 (0.23%) SEPA
9 1 (0.12%) Disclosure Scotland
9 1 (0.12%) NIST 800
System Software
1 275 (32.28%) Docker
2 6 (0.70%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.47%) HDFS
3 4 (0.47%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.12%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 313 (36.74%) Kubernetes
2 155 (18.19%) Terraform
3 78 (9.15%) Grafana
4 74 (8.69%) Prometheus
5 68 (7.98%) Ansible
6 16 (1.88%) Progress Chef
7 15 (1.76%) Packer
8 11 (1.29%) Argo
9 8 (0.94%) Single Sign-On
10 7 (0.82%) Jamf Pro
10 7 (0.82%) logstash
11 6 (0.70%) Kibana
12 5 (0.59%) Kustomize
13 4 (0.47%) Hadoop YARN
14 3 (0.35%) Control-M
14 3 (0.35%) Oozie
14 3 (0.35%) Puppet
14 3 (0.35%) Rancher
15 2 (0.23%) Fluentd
15 2 (0.23%) rkt
Vendors
1 73 (8.57%) Oracle
2 49 (5.75%) Splunk
3 38 (4.46%) Sybase
4 34 (3.99%) Google
5 33 (3.87%) Databricks
6 32 (3.76%) Microsoft
7 28 (3.29%) IBM
8 27 (3.17%) Dynatrace
9 24 (2.82%) Confluent
10 18 (2.11%) Cloudera
11 17 (2.00%) CA Agile Central
11 17 (2.00%) MuleSoft
11 17 (2.00%) VMware
12 16 (1.88%) Red Hat
13 15 (1.76%) Palantir
14 14 (1.64%) Foundry
15 12 (1.41%) TIBCO
16 11 (1.29%) ServiceNow
17 9 (1.06%) Informatica
17 9 (1.06%) Salesforce