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

6 months to
13 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 118 108 167
Rank change year-on-year -10 +59 -39
Contract jobs citing Kafka 940 738 631
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.19% 2.50% 1.42%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.11% 11.04% 7.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 597 452 485
10th Percentile £363 £375 £400
25th Percentile £418 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £575 £540
Median % change year-on-year -7.83% +6.48% -16.92%
75th Percentile £675 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.60% -6.00% -9.34%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 5 5
10th Percentile £49.60 £55.03 £27.04
25th Percentile £64.50 £78.70 £35.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.00 £42.19
Median % change year-on-year -17.65% +101.47% -43.75%
75th Percentile £84.50 £93.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £93.00 - £67.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £81.85 £50.00
% change year-on-year -14.82% +63.70% -31.51%

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 9,302 6,686 9,001
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.72% 22.69% 20.20%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,202 4,463 6,264
10th Percentile £358 £363 £334
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -7.08%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £495
% change year-on-year - +1.01% -3.41%
Number of hourly rates quoted 240 95 217
10th Percentile £35.00 £26.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £52.50 £42.13 £39.92
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +28.28% -25.05%
75th Percentile £73.46 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £82.62 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £48.72
% change year-on-year - +33.42% -25.05%

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 13 March 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 13 March 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 13 March 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 -13 821 £550 -8.33% 170
London -10 523 £603 -5.49% 99
Work from Home +6 351 £603 -3.60% 80
UK excluding London -54 267 £463 -1.60% 103
North of England -39 117 £475 -7.32% 33
South East -26 62 £433 -20.46% 40
North West -30 58 £475 +1.88% 16
Yorkshire -25 50 £465 -34.74% 11
Midlands -39 49 £500 +38.31% 9
West Midlands -40 31 £550 -8.33% 4
South West -12 28 £550 -12.00% 11
Scotland -7 25 £475 +16.42% 6
East Midlands -28 18 £402 +12.92% 5
North East -4 16 £475 -12.38% 6
East of England -38 5 £500 +57.23% 4
Wales -10 1 £250 - 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
1 117 (12.45%) Apache Spark
2 60 (6.38%) Apache
3 43 (4.57%) Apache Airflow
4 33 (3.51%) Confluence
5 7 (0.74%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.53%) Camunda
7 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
7 5 (0.53%) OpenStack
8 4 (0.43%) WebSphere
9 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
10 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.21%) CMS
10 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.11%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 5 (0.53%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
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 (0.43%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.43%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.43%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
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
4 1 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 584 (62.13%) AWS
2 251 (26.70%) Azure
3 168 (17.87%) GitHub
4 161 (17.13%) GCP
5 129 (13.72%) Serverless
6 119 (12.66%) GitHub Actions
7 118 (12.55%) Amazon S3
8 93 (9.89%) AWS Lambda
9 79 (8.40%) Amazon EKS
10 70 (7.45%) AWS CloudFormation
11 58 (6.17%) OpenShift
12 56 (5.96%) Amazon ECS
13 52 (5.53%) Power Platform
14 50 (5.32%) Amazon SQS
15 41 (4.36%) Amazon Kinesis
15 41 (4.36%) Azure Data Factory
15 41 (4.36%) Azure DevOps
16 40 (4.26%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 36 (3.83%) Amazon EC2
18 35 (3.72%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.91%) Firewall
2 14 (1.49%) HTTP
3 11 (1.17%) SSL
4 10 (1.06%) DNS
5 6 (0.64%) FTP
5 6 (0.64%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.64%) SMS
5 6 (0.64%) SSH
6 4 (0.43%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.32%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) MQTT
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%) HTTPS
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 191 (20.32%) PostgreSQL
2 146 (15.53%) MongoDB
3 136 (14.47%) NoSQL
4 81 (8.62%) Apache Cassandra
5 68 (7.23%) Relational Database
6 61 (6.49%) Data Warehouse
7 58 (6.17%) Data Lake
8 53 (5.64%) Big Data
9 52 (5.53%) Elasticsearch
10 47 (5.00%) DynamoDB
11 43 (4.57%) SQL Server
12 42 (4.47%) Redis
13 40 (4.26%) Amazon RDS
13 40 (4.26%) Power BI
14 38 (4.04%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.72%) Amazon Athena
16 34 (3.62%) Flink
17 33 (3.51%) MySQL
18 32 (3.40%) Amazon Redshift
19 31 (3.30%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 158 (16.81%) Jenkins
2 140 (14.89%) GitLab
3 103 (10.96%) Git
4 79 (8.40%) JUnit
5 63 (6.70%) JIRA
6 29 (3.09%) Cucumber
6 29 (3.09%) Mockito
7 22 (2.34%) JMeter
8 21 (2.23%) Sonatype Nexus
9 19 (2.02%) Gatling
10 17 (1.81%) Gradle
11 12 (1.28%) Maven
12 11 (1.17%) Artifactory
13 10 (1.06%) CircleCI
13 10 (1.06%) REST Assured
13 10 (1.06%) Selenium
14 9 (0.96%) Jaeger
15 8 (0.85%) Postman
16 6 (0.64%) Serenity BDD
16 6 (0.64%) SonarQube
General
1 265 (28.19%) Finance
2 199 (21.17%) Social Skills
3 133 (14.15%) Banking
4 77 (8.19%) Analytical Skills
5 68 (7.23%) Public Sector
6 59 (6.28%) Front Office
7 42 (4.47%) Investment Banking
8 23 (2.45%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.91%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.06%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (0.96%) Marketing
12 8 (0.85%) Telecoms
13 7 (0.74%) Retail
14 6 (0.64%) Law
15 4 (0.43%) Aerospace
15 4 (0.43%) Billing
15 4 (0.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 4 (0.43%) Military
16 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 346 (36.81%) Developer
2 255 (27.13%) Senior
3 180 (19.15%) Java Developer
4 141 (15.00%) Data Engineer
5 124 (13.19%) Lead
6 121 (12.87%) Senior Developer
7 105 (11.17%) Software Engineer
8 94 (10.00%) Architect
9 66 (7.02%) Senior Java Developer
10 50 (5.32%) Java Engineer
11 45 (4.79%) AWS Architect
11 45 (4.79%) DevOps Engineer
11 45 (4.79%) Full-Stack Developer
12 41 (4.36%) Kafka Developer
13 38 (4.04%) AWS Engineer
14 37 (3.94%) AWS Developer
14 37 (3.94%) Solutions Architect
15 36 (3.83%) Senior Data Engineer
16 33 (3.51%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 33 (3.51%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 212 (22.55%) Spring
2 184 (19.57%) Spring Boot
3 120 (12.77%) REST
4 106 (11.28%) Node.js
5 101 (10.74%) React
6 99 (10.53%) gRPC
7 84 (8.94%) RESTful
8 79 (8.40%) RabbitMQ
9 46 (4.89%) AngularJS
9 46 (4.89%) GraphQL
10 43 (4.57%) Middleware
11 38 (4.04%) OpenTelemetry
11 38 (4.04%) PySpark
12 37 (3.94%) JSON
13 33 (3.51%) Redux
14 30 (3.19%) Keycloak
15 29 (3.09%) OAuth
16 27 (2.87%) OAuth2
17 25 (2.66%) WireMock
18 24 (2.55%) Hibernate
Miscellaneous
1 146 (15.53%) Distributed Systems
2 128 (13.62%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.32%) Fixed Income
4 46 (4.89%) Management Information System
5 35 (3.72%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.45%) Data Structures
7 22 (2.34%) Derivative
7 22 (2.34%) Equities
7 22 (2.34%) Hybrid Cloud
8 17 (1.81%) Onboarding
9 16 (1.70%) Market Risk
10 14 (1.49%) Legacy Applications
11 12 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
11 12 (1.28%) Legacy Systems
12 10 (1.06%) Algorithms
12 10 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
12 10 (1.06%) Replication
13 9 (0.96%) Clustering
14 8 (0.85%) Virtual Team
15 7 (0.74%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 127 (13.51%) Linux
2 62 (6.60%) Unix
3 33 (3.51%) Windows
4 7 (0.74%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) AIX
6 3 (0.32%) CentOS
6 3 (0.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 3 (0.32%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) VMS
8 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.11%) Oracle Linux
8 1 (0.11%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 406 (43.19%) CI/CD
2 339 (36.06%) Microservices
3 326 (34.68%) Agile
4 265 (28.19%) DevOps
5 232 (24.68%) Software Engineering
6 191 (20.32%) Event-Driven
7 188 (20.00%) Problem-Solving
8 185 (19.68%) Observability
9 177 (18.83%) Containerisation
10 162 (17.23%) Analytics
11 157 (16.70%) Infrastructure as Code
12 150 (15.96%) Data Pipeline
13 144 (15.32%) Data Engineering
14 135 (14.36%) Data Modelling
15 132 (14.04%) ETL
16 129 (13.72%) Test Automation
17 118 (12.55%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 113 (12.02%) Open Source
19 107 (11.38%) Full-Stack Development
20 99 (10.53%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 456 (48.51%) Java
2 329 (35.00%) Python
3 277 (29.47%) SQL
4 148 (15.74%) Go
5 96 (10.21%) JavaScript
6 81 (8.62%) TypeScript
7 65 (6.91%) C#
8 38 (4.04%) Bash
9 31 (3.30%) Scala
10 29 (3.09%) C++
11 28 (2.98%) Shell Script
12 19 (2.02%) Rust
13 16 (1.70%) PowerShell
14 10 (1.06%) Bicep
14 10 (1.06%) PL/SQL
15 8 (0.85%) Perl
16 7 (0.74%) Korn
17 5 (0.53%) Groovy
17 5 (0.53%) R
17 5 (0.53%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 209 (22.23%) Security Cleared
2 179 (19.04%) SC Cleared
3 47 (5.00%) Degree
4 34 (3.62%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (2.77%) Azure Certification
6 23 (2.45%) AWS Certification
7 20 (2.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 19 (2.02%) DV Cleared
9 14 (1.49%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.85%) OCP
10 8 (0.85%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.32%) AWS Certified Developer
12 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
13 2 (0.21%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 108 (11.49%) Data Quality
2 46 (4.89%) QA
3 44 (4.68%) GDPR
4 18 (1.91%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.06%) NCSC
6 9 (0.96%) ISO 20022
6 9 (0.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 8 (0.85%) NIST
8 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
9 5 (0.53%) SEPA
10 4 (0.43%) SLA
11 3 (0.32%) Def Stans
11 3 (0.32%) HL7
11 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
12 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
12 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 2 (0.21%) WCAG
13 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
System Software
1 322 (34.26%) Docker
2 7 (0.74%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (0.53%) etcd
4 2 (0.21%) HDFS
4 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 374 (39.79%) Kubernetes
2 214 (22.77%) Terraform
3 114 (12.13%) Grafana
4 110 (11.70%) Prometheus
5 55 (5.85%) Ansible
6 25 (2.66%) Argo
7 11 (1.17%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.06%) Istio
9 9 (0.96%) Kiali
10 8 (0.85%) Fluentd
10 8 (0.85%) linkerd
11 6 (0.64%) Rancher
12 5 (0.53%) Packer
12 5 (0.53%) Puppet
13 4 (0.43%) Kibana
13 4 (0.43%) logstash
13 4 (0.43%) Podman
14 2 (0.21%) Jamf Pro
14 2 (0.21%) rkt
14 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 83 (8.83%) Databricks
2 73 (7.77%) Oracle
3 67 (7.13%) Splunk
4 42 (4.47%) Google
5 39 (4.15%) Microsoft
6 29 (3.09%) Confluent
7 25 (2.66%) IBM
8 22 (2.34%) Informatica
8 22 (2.34%) VMware
9 16 (1.70%) Dynatrace
9 16 (1.70%) Sybase
10 13 (1.38%) ServiceNow
11 12 (1.28%) Red Hat
12 11 (1.17%) Cloudera
13 9 (0.96%) Talend
14 8 (0.85%) AppDynamics
14 8 (0.85%) Atlassian
15 7 (0.74%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.74%) PagerDuty
15 7 (0.74%) SAP