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

6 months to
9 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 111 153
Rank change year-on-year -29 +42 -13
Contract jobs citing Kafka 936 725 691
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.88% 2.48% 1.60%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.61% 10.82% 7.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 556 473 508
10th Percentile £381 £400 £400
25th Percentile £425 £458 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.27% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £700 £675
90th Percentile £800 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £473 £475 £490
% change year-on-year -0.53% -3.06% -14.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 3 8
10th Percentile £61.10 £47.14 £22.44
25th Percentile £65.00 £58.98 £25.94
Median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -64.10%
75th Percentile £90.00 £86.23 £36.31
90th Percentile £92.00 £90.74 £48.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -11.05% +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 9,740 6,702 9,136
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.61% 22.89% 21.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,401 4,576 6,307
10th Percentile £363 £358 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £520 £535
Median % change year-on-year +0.96% -2.80% -2.73%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 282 121 262
10th Percentile £32.50 £29.25 £22.05
25th Percentile £52.50 £41.60 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.97
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +27.64% -24.67%
75th Percentile £73.46 £68.75 £67.75
90th Percentile £81.25 £81.35 £74.49
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year - +18.18% -15.38%

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 June 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 June 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 9 June 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 -24 804 £550 - 159
London -12 507 £600 -7.69% 96
UK excluding London -46 305 £473 -0.53% 95
Work from Home -40 281 £575 -0.43% 163
North of England -33 137 £458 -8.50% 31
Yorkshire -21 70 £464 -15.68% 7
North West -38 54 £461 -7.80% 19
South East -38 51 £488 +10.17% 26
Scotland -19 45 £450 -4.76% 10
Midlands -53 39 £491 +9.17% 2
South West -12 26 £500 -9.09% 11
West Midlands -53 22 £500 - 1
North East -11 20 £425 -8.05% 5
East Midlands -25 17 £402 +12.92% 1
East of England -24 16 £550 +33.92% 4
Wales -11 1 £250 - 5

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
1 131 (14.00%) Apache Spark
2 67 (7.16%) Apache
3 51 (5.45%) Apache Airflow
4 15 (1.60%) Confluence
5 7 (0.75%) Camunda
6 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.53%) WebSphere
8 4 (0.43%) Apache Pulsar
8 4 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.32%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
10 2 (0.21%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 2 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
10 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
10 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
11 1 (0.11%) JBoss
Applications
1 5 (0.53%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
Business Applications
1 4 (0.43%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.32%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.32%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
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%) Endur
4 1 (0.11%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 556 (59.40%) AWS
2 271 (28.95%) Azure
3 166 (17.74%) GCP
4 142 (15.17%) GitHub
5 123 (13.14%) Serverless
6 105 (11.22%) GitHub Actions
7 94 (10.04%) Amazon S3
8 91 (9.72%) AWS Lambda
9 66 (7.05%) OpenShift
10 65 (6.94%) Amazon EKS
11 61 (6.52%) Power Platform
12 59 (6.30%) Azure DevOps
13 50 (5.34%) Snowflake
14 47 (5.02%) AWS CloudFormation
15 45 (4.81%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 45 (4.81%) Amazon ECS
16 41 (4.38%) dbt
17 38 (4.06%) Amazon SQS
18 35 (3.74%) Amazon Kinesis
19 31 (3.31%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.92%) Firewall
2 13 (1.39%) HTTP
3 10 (1.07%) DNS
4 8 (0.85%) Network Security
5 7 (0.75%) SSL
6 6 (0.64%) MQTT
6 6 (0.64%) SMS
7 5 (0.53%) NAS
7 5 (0.53%) SAN
7 5 (0.53%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.21%) Internet
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%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) FTP
9 1 (0.11%) Kerberos
9 1 (0.11%) MIMO
Database & Business Intelligence
1 187 (19.98%) PostgreSQL
2 151 (16.13%) MongoDB
3 123 (13.14%) NoSQL
4 85 (9.08%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.62%) Big Data
6 54 (5.77%) Data Warehouse
7 52 (5.56%) Data Lake
8 51 (5.45%) SQL Server
9 49 (5.24%) Power BI
9 49 (5.24%) Redis
10 47 (5.02%) Elasticsearch
11 46 (4.91%) Apache Cassandra
12 37 (3.95%) DynamoDB
12 37 (3.95%) Flink
13 35 (3.74%) Hadoop
13 35 (3.74%) MySQL
14 34 (3.63%) Amazon Athena
15 29 (3.10%) Amazon RDS
15 29 (3.10%) Amazon Redshift
15 29 (3.10%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 143 (15.28%) Jenkins
2 125 (13.35%) Git
3 124 (13.25%) GitLab
4 62 (6.62%) JUnit
5 52 (5.56%) JIRA
6 44 (4.70%) Mockito
7 31 (3.31%) Gradle
8 29 (3.10%) Selenium
9 23 (2.46%) REST Assured
10 20 (2.14%) Cucumber
10 20 (2.14%) Gatling
11 17 (1.82%) Liquibase
12 15 (1.60%) Serenity BDD
13 14 (1.50%) Maven
13 14 (1.50%) Postman
14 11 (1.18%) SonarQube
15 10 (1.07%) Jaeger
16 7 (0.75%) JMeter
16 7 (0.75%) Snyk
17 5 (0.53%) Artifactory
General
1 255 (27.24%) Finance
2 176 (18.80%) Social Skills
3 126 (13.46%) Banking
4 82 (8.76%) Public Sector
5 77 (8.23%) Analytical Skills
6 44 (4.70%) Front Office
7 34 (3.63%) Investment Banking
8 26 (2.78%) Documentation Skills
9 25 (2.67%) Financial Institution
10 19 (2.03%) Retail
11 14 (1.50%) Law
12 12 (1.28%) Marketing
13 11 (1.18%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (1.07%) Telecoms
15 9 (0.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 9 (0.96%) Publishing
16 7 (0.75%) Automotive
16 7 (0.75%) Corporate Banking
16 7 (0.75%) Military
17 6 (0.64%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 301 (32.16%) Developer
2 199 (21.26%) Senior
3 158 (16.88%) Data Engineer
4 154 (16.45%) Java Developer
5 118 (12.61%) Lead
6 112 (11.97%) Architect
7 93 (9.94%) Software Engineer
8 86 (9.19%) Senior Developer
9 73 (7.80%) Java Engineer
10 56 (5.98%) AWS Architect
11 48 (5.13%) Senior Java Developer
12 44 (4.70%) DevOps Engineer
13 41 (4.38%) Solutions Architect
14 40 (4.27%) Full-Stack Developer
15 34 (3.63%) Principal Engineer
16 33 (3.53%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 33 (3.53%) Senior Data Engineer
17 32 (3.42%) Lead Developer
18 31 (3.31%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 30 (3.21%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 231 (24.68%) Spring
2 220 (23.50%) Spring Boot
3 136 (14.53%) REST
4 124 (13.25%) RESTful
5 117 (12.50%) React
6 93 (9.94%) Node.js
7 90 (9.62%) RabbitMQ
8 60 (6.41%) OpenTelemetry
9 59 (6.30%) GraphQL
10 52 (5.56%) gRPC
11 49 (5.24%) JSON
12 44 (4.70%) Middleware
13 43 (4.59%) Redux
14 42 (4.49%) Apache Avro
15 40 (4.27%) PySpark
16 39 (4.17%) OAuth
17 38 (4.06%) AngularJS
18 37 (3.95%) Swagger
19 36 (3.85%) OpenAPI
20 34 (3.63%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 176 (18.80%) Distributed Systems
2 164 (17.52%) Cloud Native
3 42 (4.49%) Management Information System
4 38 (4.06%) Fixed Income
5 35 (3.74%) Product Ownership
6 25 (2.67%) Data Structures
7 21 (2.24%) Onboarding
8 19 (2.03%) Enterprise Software
9 16 (1.71%) Legacy Systems
10 15 (1.60%) Algorithms
10 15 (1.60%) Derivative
10 15 (1.60%) Hybrid Cloud
11 14 (1.50%) Clustering
11 14 (1.50%) Equities
12 13 (1.39%) Data Protection Act
12 13 (1.39%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 12 (1.28%) Public Cloud
14 11 (1.18%) SWIFT Messaging Network
15 10 (1.07%) CMDB
15 10 (1.07%) Distributed Architecture
Operating Systems
1 91 (9.72%) Linux
2 56 (5.98%) Unix
3 30 (3.21%) Windows
4 8 (0.85%) Mac OS X
5 6 (0.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.64%) Ubuntu
6 3 (0.32%) VMS
7 2 (0.21%) Debian
7 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
7 2 (0.21%) zOS
8 1 (0.11%) Android
8 1 (0.11%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.11%) CentOS
8 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 425 (45.41%) CI/CD
2 356 (38.03%) Microservices
3 298 (31.84%) Agile
4 282 (30.13%) DevOps
5 274 (29.27%) Event-Driven
6 223 (23.82%) Observability
7 204 (21.79%) Containerisation
8 191 (20.41%) Software Engineering
9 184 (19.66%) Event-Driven Architecture
10 170 (18.16%) Data Pipeline
11 161 (17.20%) Data Modelling
11 161 (17.20%) Infrastructure as Code
12 147 (15.71%) Test Automation
13 146 (15.60%) Analytics
13 146 (15.60%) Problem-Solving
14 145 (15.49%) Data Engineering
15 137 (14.64%) ETL
16 107 (11.43%) Full-Stack Development
17 103 (11.00%) AI
18 100 (10.68%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 427 (45.62%) Java
2 322 (34.40%) Python
3 293 (31.30%) SQL
4 115 (12.29%) TypeScript
5 94 (10.04%) Go
6 87 (9.29%) JavaScript
7 54 (5.77%) C#
8 45 (4.81%) Bash
9 26 (2.78%) Scala
10 20 (2.14%) Rust
11 19 (2.03%) PowerShell
12 15 (1.60%) C++
12 15 (1.60%) Shell Script
13 13 (1.39%) Bicep
14 10 (1.07%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.07%) Search Processing Language
15 8 (0.85%) Kotlin
16 7 (0.75%) Groovy
16 7 (0.75%) PHP
17 6 (0.64%) Perl
Qualifications
1 201 (21.47%) Security Cleared
2 159 (16.99%) SC Cleared
3 52 (5.56%) Degree
4 26 (2.78%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.92%) DV Cleared
6 17 (1.82%) AWS Certification
7 15 (1.60%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (1.28%) Master's Degree
9 9 (0.96%) Azure Certification
10 7 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.75%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.32%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.11%) CISSP
13 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.11%) PhD
13 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 102 (10.90%) Data Quality
2 51 (5.45%) QA
3 39 (4.17%) GDPR
4 33 (3.53%) Accessibility
5 20 (2.14%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.07%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 10 (1.07%) NIST
7 8 (0.85%) PCI DSS
8 7 (0.75%) SEPA
9 5 (0.53%) NCSC
10 4 (0.43%) SLA
10 4 (0.43%) WCAG
11 3 (0.32%) ISO 15022
11 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
11 3 (0.32%) PSD2
12 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.21%) EMIR
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
13 1 (0.11%) Basel III
13 1 (0.11%) HL7
System Software
1 320 (34.19%) Docker
2 6 (0.64%) etcd
3 3 (0.32%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 2 (0.21%) HDFS
4 2 (0.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 374 (39.96%) Kubernetes
2 195 (20.83%) Terraform
3 130 (13.89%) Grafana
4 129 (13.78%) Prometheus
5 59 (6.30%) Ansible
6 23 (2.46%) Argo
7 12 (1.28%) Istio
8 11 (1.18%) Kibana
9 9 (0.96%) Kiali
10 8 (0.85%) Puppet
11 7 (0.75%) Fluentd
11 7 (0.75%) Podman
12 6 (0.64%) Kustomize
12 6 (0.64%) linkerd
12 6 (0.64%) logstash
13 5 (0.53%) Rancher
14 3 (0.32%) NetBackup
15 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
15 2 (0.21%) Control-M
15 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 87 (9.29%) Databricks
2 75 (8.01%) Splunk
3 65 (6.94%) Oracle
4 40 (4.27%) Microsoft
5 36 (3.85%) Google
6 29 (3.10%) Confluent
7 23 (2.46%) Informatica
8 18 (1.92%) IBM
9 14 (1.50%) Dynatrace
10 12 (1.28%) Red Hat
10 12 (1.28%) Salesforce
11 11 (1.18%) ServiceNow
12 10 (1.07%) Solace
13 9 (0.96%) MuleSoft
13 9 (0.96%) Talend
14 8 (0.85%) Sybase
15 7 (0.75%) AppDynamics
16 6 (0.64%) Pega
16 6 (0.64%) Tenable
16 6 (0.64%) VMware