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

6 months to
2 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 141 104 132
Rank change year-on-year -37 +28 +29
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,105 844 717
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.01% 2.55% 1.88%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.28% 9.77% 7.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 707 541 466
10th Percentile £375 £375 £385
25th Percentile £425 £450 £483
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £720
90th Percentile £758 £750 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £470 £493
% change year-on-year +6.38% -4.67% -17.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 10 4 5
10th Percentile £50.33 £40.58 £26.04
25th Percentile £60.00 £48.56 £27.00
Median hourly rate £77.00 £59.25 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +29.96% +111.61% -64.10%
75th Percentile £86.50 £75.31 £38.75
90th Percentile £95.00 £96.13 £68.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 - £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 11,905 8,636 9,456
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.69% 26.08% 24.83%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,825 5,740 6,160
10th Percentile £375 £355 £356
25th Percentile £440 £413 £431
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% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 286 188 188
10th Percentile £29.07 £31.25 £25.60
25th Percentile £50.19 £41.25 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.00 £62.93
Median % change year-on-year +20.37% -14.19% +4.88%
75th Percentile £77.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £70.60 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.47 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +17.34% -11.54% +11.03%

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 2 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 2 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 2 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 -38 918 £550 - 1,047
London -29 564 £575 -4.17% 737
UK excluding London -23 393 £500 +6.38% 442
Work from Home -56 278 £550 -5.42% 446
North of England -15 195 £501 +0.20% 155
Yorkshire +6 97 £500 -16.32% 35
North West -29 78 £550 +17.77% 103
Scotland -35 60 £406 -14.53% 71
South East -51 55 £460 +5.75% 73
Midlands -55 40 £500 +11.11% 33
South West -16 29 £575 +4.55% 43
West Midlands -37 28 £700 +40.00% 23
North East -23 25 £426 -33.25% 17
East of England -5 24 £488 -4.88% 22
East Midlands -18 12 £449 +8.07% 10
Northern Ireland +9 4 - - 34
Wales - 1 £375 - 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
1 130 (11.76%) Apache Spark
2 79 (7.15%) Apache Airflow
3 78 (7.06%) Apache
4 26 (2.35%) Confluence
5 15 (1.36%) Camunda
6 7 (0.63%) OpenStack
6 7 (0.63%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 6 (0.54%) CMS
8 5 (0.45%) Apache Pulsar
8 5 (0.45%) nginx
8 5 (0.45%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.36%) MQSeries
9 4 (0.36%) PowerExchange
10 3 (0.27%) Anypoint
10 3 (0.27%) Mule
11 2 (0.18%) Apache Pig
11 2 (0.18%) JBoss
11 2 (0.18%) Traefik
11 2 (0.18%) WebSphere
12 1 (0.090%) CICS
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%) Endur
4 2 (0.18%) Payment Gateway
5 1 (0.090%) Actimize
5 1 (0.090%) Distributed Ledger
5 1 (0.090%) Dynamics CRM
5 1 (0.090%) FIS Private Capital Suite
5 1 (0.090%) Oracle ERP
5 1 (0.090%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 1 (0.090%) SAP IS-U
5 1 (0.090%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 635 (57.47%) AWS
2 402 (36.38%) Azure
3 264 (23.89%) GCP
4 182 (16.47%) GitHub
5 122 (11.04%) GitHub Actions
6 107 (9.68%) Serverless
7 90 (8.14%) Amazon S3
8 89 (8.05%) AWS Lambda
9 85 (7.69%) Amazon EKS
10 77 (6.97%) Snowflake
11 69 (6.24%) Azure DevOps
12 65 (5.88%) OpenShift
13 52 (4.71%) dbt
14 51 (4.62%) Amazon SQS
15 48 (4.34%) Amazon ECS
16 45 (4.07%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 35 (3.17%) Azure Data Factory
17 35 (3.17%) Power Platform
18 31 (2.81%) Google Kubernetes Engine
19 28 (2.53%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (2.71%) HTTP
2 21 (1.90%) DNS
3 13 (1.18%) Network Security
4 9 (0.81%) TCP/IP
5 8 (0.72%) Firewall
6 7 (0.63%) MQTT
6 7 (0.63%) SSH
6 7 (0.63%) SSL
7 6 (0.54%) SAN
8 5 (0.45%) 4G
8 5 (0.45%) 5G
9 4 (0.36%) NAS
10 3 (0.27%) Internet
10 3 (0.27%) VPN
11 2 (0.18%) Broadband
11 2 (0.18%) Kerberos
12 1 (0.090%) MIMO
12 1 (0.090%) Reverse Proxy
12 1 (0.090%) RTP
12 1 (0.090%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 191 (17.29%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (15.66%) MongoDB
3 139 (12.58%) NoSQL
4 94 (8.51%) Relational Database
5 76 (6.88%) Data Warehouse
6 64 (5.79%) SQL Server
7 62 (5.61%) Redis
8 51 (4.62%) MySQL
9 50 (4.52%) Big Data
10 47 (4.25%) Data Lake
11 43 (3.89%) Elasticsearch
12 38 (3.44%) BigQuery
12 38 (3.44%) Flink
13 33 (2.99%) Power BI
14 30 (2.71%) Metadata
15 29 (2.62%) Delta Lake
16 26 (2.35%) Amazon Redshift
17 24 (2.17%) Hadoop
18 23 (2.08%) Amazon RDS
18 23 (2.08%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 222 (20.09%) Jenkins
2 195 (17.65%) Git
3 171 (15.48%) GitLab
4 72 (6.52%) Gradle
5 71 (6.43%) JUnit
6 60 (5.43%) Mockito
7 57 (5.16%) Selenium
8 48 (4.34%) Maven
9 47 (4.25%) JIRA
10 39 (3.53%) Cucumber
11 34 (3.08%) SonarQube
12 26 (2.35%) Postman
12 26 (2.35%) REST Assured
13 22 (1.99%) Bitbucket
13 22 (1.99%) JMeter
14 18 (1.63%) Gatling
15 17 (1.54%) SoapUI
16 16 (1.45%) LoadRunner
17 15 (1.36%) Sonatype Nexus
18 14 (1.27%) Liquibase
General
1 278 (25.16%) Finance
2 209 (18.91%) Social Skills
3 185 (16.74%) Banking
4 111 (10.05%) Analytical Skills
5 103 (9.32%) Public Sector
6 43 (3.89%) Retail
7 33 (2.99%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 22 (1.99%) Front Office
10 18 (1.63%) Financial Institution
10 18 (1.63%) Telecoms
11 12 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
12 11 (1.00%) Law
13 10 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
14 9 (0.81%) Documentation Skills
14 9 (0.81%) Military
15 8 (0.72%) Billing
15 8 (0.72%) Retail Banking
16 7 (0.63%) Corporate Banking
16 7 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 334 (30.23%) Developer
2 237 (21.45%) Senior
3 186 (16.83%) Java Developer
4 175 (15.84%) Architect
5 132 (11.95%) Data Engineer
6 100 (9.05%) Lead
7 75 (6.79%) Java Engineer
8 70 (6.33%) Solutions Architect
9 69 (6.24%) Senior Developer
10 64 (5.79%) Software Engineer
11 63 (5.70%) DevOps Engineer
12 47 (4.25%) Full-Stack Developer
13 45 (4.07%) Senior Data Engineer
14 41 (3.71%) Senior Java Developer
15 40 (3.62%) Kafka Engineer
16 39 (3.53%) Python Engineer
17 38 (3.44%) AWS Engineer
17 38 (3.44%) Python Developer
18 37 (3.35%) Test Engineer
19 36 (3.26%) Senior Java Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 303 (27.42%) Spring Boot
2 302 (27.33%) Spring
3 254 (22.99%) REST
4 236 (21.36%) Terraform
5 157 (14.21%) RESTful
6 132 (11.95%) React
7 117 (10.59%) RabbitMQ
8 70 (6.33%) OAuth
9 69 (6.24%) JSON
10 57 (5.16%) HTML
11 56 (5.07%) Node.js
12 53 (4.80%) PySpark
13 48 (4.34%) GraphQL
14 47 (4.25%) SOAP
15 46 (4.16%) .NET
15 46 (4.16%) Middleware
16 45 (4.07%) Elastic Stack
16 45 (4.07%) OpenTelemetry
17 43 (3.89%) CSS
17 43 (3.89%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 262 (23.71%) Cloud Native
2 230 (20.81%) Distributed Systems
3 80 (7.24%) Product Ownership
4 47 (4.25%) Enterprise Software
5 42 (3.80%) Data Structures
6 37 (3.35%) AI Agents
7 36 (3.26%) Onboarding
8 34 (3.08%) Self-Motivation
9 28 (2.53%) Replication
10 27 (2.44%) Greenfield Project
10 27 (2.44%) SWIFT Messaging Network
11 26 (2.35%) Legacy Systems
12 25 (2.26%) Algorithms
13 21 (1.90%) Public Cloud
14 20 (1.81%) Distributed Architecture
15 19 (1.72%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 18 (1.63%) Data Protection Act
17 17 (1.54%) PKI
17 17 (1.54%) Private Cloud
18 15 (1.36%) Management Information System
Operating Systems
1 147 (13.30%) Linux
2 73 (6.61%) Unix
3 25 (2.26%) Windows
4 13 (1.18%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.54%) Mac OS X
5 6 (0.54%) 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
1 627 (56.74%) CI/CD
2 465 (42.08%) Event-Driven
3 460 (41.63%) Microservices
4 401 (36.29%) DevOps
5 394 (35.66%) Agile
6 324 (29.32%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 287 (25.97%) Observability
8 264 (23.89%) Test Automation
9 243 (21.99%) Infrastructure as Code
10 233 (21.09%) Containerisation
11 203 (18.37%) Software Engineering
12 184 (16.65%) AI
13 165 (14.93%) Data Pipeline
14 152 (13.76%) Problem-Solving
15 146 (13.21%) Continuous Improvement
16 141 (12.76%) Data Modelling
16 141 (12.76%) Technical Leadership
17 132 (11.95%) ETL
18 125 (11.31%) Analytics
18 125 (11.31%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 493 (44.62%) Java
2 378 (34.21%) Python
3 361 (32.67%) SQL
4 109 (9.86%) JavaScript
5 95 (8.60%) TypeScript
6 86 (7.78%) Bash
7 67 (6.06%) C#
8 53 (4.80%) Go
9 42 (3.80%) Scala
10 30 (2.71%) PowerShell
11 29 (2.62%) PL/SQL
12 28 (2.53%) Shell Script
13 25 (2.26%) Kotlin
14 11 (1.00%) Groovy
15 10 (0.90%) C++
16 8 (0.72%) Perl
16 8 (0.72%) PHP
17 7 (0.63%) Rust
18 6 (0.54%) Bicep
18 6 (0.54%) Search Processing Language
Qualifications
1 271 (24.52%) Security Cleared
2 225 (20.36%) SC Cleared
3 64 (5.79%) Degree
4 43 (3.89%) Computer Science Degree
5 42 (3.80%) BPSS Clearance
6 28 (2.53%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.36%) Azure Certification
8 13 (1.18%) AWS Certification
9 12 (1.09%) Master's Degree
10 11 (1.00%) ISTQB
11 7 (0.63%) DBS Check
11 7 (0.63%) ISEB
11 7 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
12 5 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 5 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
13 3 (0.27%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.27%) PhD
13 3 (0.27%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.090%) CISSP
14 1 (0.090%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 88 (7.96%) QA
2 86 (7.78%) Data Quality
3 44 (3.98%) Accessibility
4 35 (3.17%) ISO 20022
5 20 (1.81%) GDPR
6 15 (1.36%) SEPA
7 6 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 5 (0.45%) ISO 15022
8 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) PSD2
8 5 (0.45%) SLA
9 4 (0.36%) NIST
9 4 (0.36%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) Basel III
10 2 (0.18%) EMIR
10 2 (0.18%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.18%) IFRS
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) Sarbanes-Oxley
10 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
System Software
1 397 (35.93%) Docker
2 17 (1.54%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (0.72%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 3 (0.27%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.18%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.18%) HDFS
6 1 (0.090%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 514 (46.52%) Kubernetes
2 149 (13.48%) Grafana
3 127 (11.49%) Prometheus
4 69 (6.24%) Ansible
5 30 (2.71%) Argo
6 26 (2.35%) Control-M
7 15 (1.36%) Istio
7 15 (1.36%) Kibana
7 15 (1.36%) Puppet
8 14 (1.27%) Kustomize
9 9 (0.81%) Podman
10 7 (0.63%) logstash
10 7 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
11 6 (0.54%) HP Fortify
11 6 (0.54%) Rancher
12 5 (0.45%) Check_MK
13 4 (0.36%) Bosun
13 4 (0.36%) Progress Chef
14 3 (0.27%) Consul
14 3 (0.27%) HAProxy
Vendors
1 120 (10.86%) Oracle
2 105 (9.50%) Databricks
3 64 (5.79%) Splunk
4 61 (5.52%) IBM
5 55 (4.98%) Google
6 54 (4.89%) Microsoft
7 39 (3.53%) Dynatrace
8 32 (2.90%) Confluent
9 26 (2.35%) Informatica
10 21 (1.90%) VMware
11 19 (1.72%) MuleSoft
11 19 (1.72%) OpenAI
11 19 (1.72%) SAP
12 14 (1.27%) TIBCO
13 13 (1.18%) New Relic
13 13 (1.18%) Salesforce
13 13 (1.18%) Solace
14 10 (0.90%) Veracode
15 9 (0.81%) Sybase
15 9 (0.81%) WSO2