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 31 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 148 101 141
Rank change year-on-year -47 +40 +14
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,018 840 683
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.92% 2.56% 1.72%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.97% 11.35% 7.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 624 544 475
10th Percentile £377 £385 £400
25th Percentile £425 £452 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £578
Median % change year-on-year - -4.76% -11.15%
75th Percentile £650 £678 £712
90th Percentile £798 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £490
% change year-on-year +6.61% -4.29% -18.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 3 9
10th Percentile £56.50 £54.65 £22.55
25th Percentile £64.75 £57.13 £27.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £62.50 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +12.00% +123.21% -64.10%
75th Percentile £86.25 £71.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £75.71 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £72.50 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -7.88% +181.07% -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 10,209 7,401 8,634
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.23% 22.57% 21.73%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,659 5,007 5,884
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £427
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £503 £550
Median % change year-on-year +4.48% -8.64% -
75th Percentile £638 £636 £665
90th Percentile £738 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £500
% change year-on-year +6.38% -6.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 269 163 248
10th Percentile £28.30 £30.05 £23.49
25th Percentile £42.31 £40.75 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £73.75 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.47 £79.74 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £57.50 £58.60
% change year-on-year +13.04% -1.88% +0.10%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 31 July 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 -40 862 £550 - 342
London -32 508 £575 -8.00% 250
UK excluding London -24 385 £500 +6.61% 141
Work from Home -53 278 £550 -4.35% 128
North of England -16 175 £470 +0.97% 39
Yorkshire -8 80 £495 -1.00% 15
North West -39 75 £429 -8.53% 15
South East -37 65 £513 +15.82% 41
Scotland -21 56 £447 -4.89% 21
Midlands -53 41 £500 +17.51% 7
South West -29 28 £500 -9.09% 22
North East -22 27 £463 +0.05% 9
West Midlands -58 25 £500 - 6
East of England -3 24 £550 +10.00% 6
East Midlands -15 16 £459 +26.48% 1
Northern Ireland -3 3 - - 4
Wales -14 2 £313 - 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
1 135 (13.26%) Apache Spark
2 73 (7.17%) Apache
3 60 (5.89%) Apache Airflow
4 19 (1.87%) Confluence
5 7 (0.69%) Camunda
6 6 (0.59%) CMS
6 6 (0.59%) WebSphere
7 5 (0.49%) Apache Pulsar
8 4 (0.39%) OpenStack
9 3 (0.29%) Anypoint
9 3 (0.29%) Mule
10 2 (0.20%) Apache Pig
10 2 (0.20%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.20%) JBoss
10 2 (0.20%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.20%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.20%) WebLogic
10 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 8 (0.79%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.20%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.098%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.098%) Maya
3 1 (0.098%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.098%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.39%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.20%) Bloomberg AIM
2 2 (0.20%) Endur
2 2 (0.20%) Fidessa
2 2 (0.20%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.098%) Actimize
3 1 (0.098%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.098%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.098%) SAP IS-U
3 1 (0.098%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 607 (59.63%) AWS
2 318 (31.24%) Azure
3 203 (19.94%) GCP
4 146 (14.34%) GitHub
5 104 (10.22%) GitHub Actions
6 103 (10.12%) Serverless
7 80 (7.86%) AWS Lambda
8 78 (7.66%) Amazon S3
9 72 (7.07%) OpenShift
10 69 (6.78%) Amazon EKS
11 63 (6.19%) Azure DevOps
12 58 (5.70%) Snowflake
13 51 (5.01%) Amazon SQS
14 48 (4.72%) dbt
15 47 (4.62%) Amazon ECS
16 42 (4.13%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 42 (4.13%) Power Platform
17 35 (3.44%) AWS CloudFormation
18 30 (2.95%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 27 (2.65%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.57%) HTTP
2 10 (0.98%) Firewall
2 10 (0.98%) Network Security
3 8 (0.79%) DNS
4 7 (0.69%) MQTT
4 7 (0.69%) SSL
5 4 (0.39%) NAS
5 4 (0.39%) SAN
6 3 (0.29%) Internet
6 3 (0.29%) TCP/IP
7 2 (0.20%) NaaS
7 2 (0.20%) OpenVPN
7 2 (0.20%) Reverse Proxy
7 2 (0.20%) WAN
8 1 (0.098%) 4G
8 1 (0.098%) 5G
8 1 (0.098%) FIX Connectivity
8 1 (0.098%) MIMO
8 1 (0.098%) SSH
8 1 (0.098%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 188 (18.47%) PostgreSQL
2 162 (15.91%) MongoDB
3 129 (12.67%) NoSQL
4 106 (10.41%) Relational Database
5 66 (6.48%) Big Data
6 62 (6.09%) SQL Server
7 60 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
8 53 (5.21%) Data Lake
9 44 (4.32%) Redis
10 40 (3.93%) MySQL
11 39 (3.83%) Flink
11 39 (3.83%) Power BI
12 37 (3.63%) Apache Cassandra
12 37 (3.63%) Hadoop
13 36 (3.54%) Elasticsearch
14 34 (3.34%) BigQuery
15 33 (3.24%) DynamoDB
16 32 (3.14%) Metadata
17 25 (2.46%) Amazon Redshift
17 25 (2.46%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 180 (17.68%) Jenkins
2 142 (13.95%) Git
3 129 (12.67%) GitLab
4 73 (7.17%) JUnit
5 64 (6.29%) Mockito
6 47 (4.62%) Gradle
7 41 (4.03%) JIRA
8 29 (2.85%) Selenium
9 27 (2.65%) Cucumber
10 24 (2.36%) Maven
11 21 (2.06%) REST Assured
12 18 (1.77%) Liquibase
12 18 (1.77%) SonarQube
13 15 (1.47%) Gatling
14 13 (1.28%) Postman
15 10 (0.98%) Bitbucket
15 10 (0.98%) Cypress.io
15 10 (0.98%) Serenity BDD
16 7 (0.69%) Claude Code
17 6 (0.59%) MLflow
General
1 269 (26.42%) Finance
2 178 (17.49%) Social Skills
3 137 (13.46%) Banking
4 101 (9.92%) Public Sector
5 95 (9.33%) Analytical Skills
6 50 (4.91%) Front Office
7 32 (3.14%) Investment Banking
8 29 (2.85%) Retail
9 20 (1.96%) Documentation Skills
9 20 (1.96%) Financial Institution
10 16 (1.57%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 15 (1.47%) Law
11 15 (1.47%) Telecoms
12 11 (1.08%) Billing
13 10 (0.98%) Organisational Skills
14 9 (0.88%) Publishing
15 8 (0.79%) Influencing Skills
15 8 (0.79%) Military
16 7 (0.69%) Marketing
16 7 (0.69%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 337 (33.10%) Developer
2 189 (18.57%) Senior
3 177 (17.39%) Java Developer
4 144 (14.15%) Data Engineer
5 141 (13.85%) Architect
6 110 (10.81%) Lead
7 96 (9.43%) Software Engineer
8 76 (7.47%) Java Engineer
9 75 (7.37%) Senior Developer
10 59 (5.80%) Solutions Architect
11 47 (4.62%) DevOps Engineer
12 45 (4.42%) Senior Java Developer
13 42 (4.13%) Full-Stack Developer
14 41 (4.03%) AWS Architect
15 37 (3.63%) Lead Developer
16 36 (3.54%) Data Architect
16 36 (3.54%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 36 (3.54%) Java Software Engineer
17 35 (3.44%) Python Engineer
18 32 (3.14%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 245 (24.07%) Spring
2 234 (22.99%) Spring Boot
3 177 (17.39%) REST
4 151 (14.83%) React
5 140 (13.75%) RESTful
6 116 (11.39%) RabbitMQ
7 85 (8.35%) Node.js
8 71 (6.97%) GraphQL
9 67 (6.58%) JSON
10 59 (5.80%) Redux
11 55 (5.40%) OpenTelemetry
12 48 (4.72%) OAuth
13 44 (4.32%) Swagger
14 43 (4.22%) OpenAPI
15 42 (4.13%) PySpark
16 37 (3.63%) OAuth2
17 36 (3.54%) AngularJS
18 35 (3.44%) Middleware
19 34 (3.34%) .NET
20 32 (3.14%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 208 (20.43%) Distributed Systems
2 192 (18.86%) Cloud Native
3 44 (4.32%) Data Structures
4 40 (3.93%) Fixed Income
5 34 (3.34%) Product Ownership
6 33 (3.24%) Algorithms
7 30 (2.95%) Enterprise Software
8 25 (2.46%) Legacy Systems
8 25 (2.46%) Management Information System
8 25 (2.46%) Onboarding
9 24 (2.36%) Self-Motivation
10 21 (2.06%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
11 19 (1.87%) AI Agents
12 17 (1.67%) Data Protection Act
12 17 (1.67%) Public Cloud
13 16 (1.57%) Hybrid Cloud
14 15 (1.47%) Replication
15 14 (1.38%) Distributed Architecture
15 14 (1.38%) Equities
16 12 (1.18%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 106 (10.41%) Linux
2 60 (5.89%) Unix
3 29 (2.85%) Windows
4 10 (0.98%) Mac OS X
5 8 (0.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.49%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.29%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.20%) Android
8 2 (0.20%) Debian
8 2 (0.20%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.20%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.20%) VMS
8 2 (0.20%) zOS
9 1 (0.098%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.098%) CentOS
9 1 (0.098%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 487 (47.84%) CI/CD
2 388 (38.11%) Microservices
3 356 (34.97%) Agile
4 350 (34.38%) Event-Driven
5 324 (31.83%) DevOps
6 248 (24.36%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 237 (23.28%) Observability
8 228 (22.40%) Containerisation
9 198 (19.45%) Software Engineering
10 193 (18.96%) Data Pipeline
11 178 (17.49%) Infrastructure as Code
12 175 (17.19%) Test Automation
13 161 (15.82%) AI
14 157 (15.42%) Problem-Solving
15 156 (15.32%) Data Modelling
16 153 (15.03%) Analytics
17 141 (13.85%) ETL
18 137 (13.46%) Data Engineering
19 123 (12.08%) TDD
20 110 (10.81%) Machine Learning
Programming Languages
1 466 (45.78%) Java
2 357 (35.07%) Python
3 318 (31.24%) SQL
4 129 (12.67%) TypeScript
5 96 (9.43%) JavaScript
6 80 (7.86%) Go
7 59 (5.80%) Bash
8 56 (5.50%) C#
9 36 (3.54%) Scala
10 27 (2.65%) PowerShell
11 23 (2.26%) PL/SQL
12 19 (1.87%) Kotlin
13 17 (1.67%) Shell Script
14 11 (1.08%) C++
14 11 (1.08%) Rust
15 10 (0.98%) Groovy
15 10 (0.98%) Search Processing Language
16 9 (0.88%) Bicep
17 7 (0.69%) PHP
18 6 (0.59%) Perl
Qualifications
1 223 (21.91%) Security Cleared
2 171 (16.80%) SC Cleared
3 49 (4.81%) Degree
4 33 (3.24%) BPSS Clearance
5 23 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
6 22 (2.16%) DV Cleared
7 16 (1.57%) AWS Certification
8 13 (1.28%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.69%) Azure Certification
10 6 (0.59%) SnowPro
11 5 (0.49%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.29%) DBS Check
12 3 (0.29%) PhD
12 3 (0.29%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.20%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.20%) Postgraduate
14 1 (0.098%) ITIL Certification
14 1 (0.098%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.098%) PMP
14 1 (0.098%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 99 (9.72%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.50%) QA
3 45 (4.42%) Accessibility
4 31 (3.05%) GDPR
5 19 (1.87%) ISO 20022
6 10 (0.98%) SEPA
7 6 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.49%) WCAG
9 4 (0.39%) NIST
10 3 (0.29%) ISO 15022
10 3 (0.29%) PCI DSS
10 3 (0.29%) SLA
11 2 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.20%) EMIR
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS 17
11 2 (0.20%) MiFID
11 2 (0.20%) NCSC
11 2 (0.20%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.098%) GRC
System Software
1 350 (34.38%) Docker
2 6 (0.59%) Apache ZooKeeper
2 6 (0.59%) etcd
3 3 (0.29%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.20%) Apache Flume
4 2 (0.20%) HDFS
5 1 (0.098%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.098%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 435 (42.73%) Kubernetes
2 202 (19.84%) Terraform
3 115 (11.30%) Prometheus
4 114 (11.20%) Grafana
5 61 (5.99%) Ansible
6 26 (2.55%) Argo
7 15 (1.47%) Control-M
8 12 (1.18%) Kibana
9 11 (1.08%) Podman
10 10 (0.98%) Istio
11 9 (0.88%) Puppet
12 7 (0.69%) Fluentd
12 7 (0.69%) Kustomize
13 5 (0.49%) logstash
13 5 (0.49%) Rancher
14 4 (0.39%) Check_MK
15 3 (0.29%) Bosun
15 3 (0.29%) NetBackup
16 2 (0.20%) CA Wily
16 2 (0.20%) CloudHub
Vendors
1 85 (8.35%) Oracle
2 79 (7.76%) Databricks
3 56 (5.50%) Splunk
4 48 (4.72%) Google
5 47 (4.62%) Microsoft
6 27 (2.65%) Confluent
7 24 (2.36%) Dynatrace
7 24 (2.36%) Informatica
8 22 (2.16%) IBM
9 17 (1.67%) Salesforce
10 16 (1.57%) Solace
11 15 (1.47%) MuleSoft
12 14 (1.38%) OpenAI
13 10 (0.98%) SAP
14 9 (0.88%) Red Hat
15 8 (0.79%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.79%) Sybase
16 7 (0.69%) Talend
17 6 (0.59%) ForgeRock
17 6 (0.59%) Pega