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

6 months to
4 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 146 103 138
Rank change year-on-year -43 +35 +16
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,039 832 677
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.94% 2.57% 1.78%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 8.88% 10.12% 7.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 648 541 462
10th Percentile £375 £385 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £476
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £534 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -2.95% -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £725
90th Percentile £738 £750 £799
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £492
% change year-on-year +6.61% -4.58% -19.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 5 8
10th Percentile £45.70 £42.35 £24.60
25th Percentile £56.50 £53.00 £26.60
Median hourly rate £72.50 £62.50 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.00% +123.21% -64.10%
75th Percentile £87.50 £78.70 £39.13
90th Percentile £93.00 £97.48 £48.80
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -2.16% +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 11,706 8,223 9,393
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.82% 25.45% 24.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,704 5,544 6,349
10th Percentile £375 £354 £356
25th Percentile £435 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £636 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 286 182 191
10th Percentile £29.07 £30.80 £25.60
25th Percentile £46.39 £40.88 £43.00
Median hourly rate £66.83 £52.50 £62.00
Median % change year-on-year +27.30% -15.32% -0.80%
75th Percentile £75.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £74.75 £74.87
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +22.73% -15.38% +9.22%

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 4 September 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 4 September 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 4 September 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 -48 875 £550 - 877
London -44 518 £563 -6.25% 663
UK excluding London -23 390 £500 +6.61% 332
Work from Home -57 263 £530 -7.83% 369
North of England -24 188 £500 +5.82% 100
Yorkshire +1 96 £500 -14.89% 33
North West -37 72 £537 +14.99% 53
South East -41 61 £463 +6.32% 68
Scotland -33 53 £425 -9.57% 55
Midlands -44 41 £500 +16.01% 23
East of England +5 28 £500 -2.44% 10
South West -29 26 £500 -9.09% 48
West Midlands -43 26 £514 +2.80% 17
North East -19 25 £425 -8.60% 14
East Midlands -19 15 £447 +9.02% 6
Northern Ireland +3 4 - - 26
Wales - 1 £375 - 3

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
1 132 (12.70%) Apache Spark
2 71 (6.83%) Apache Airflow
3 70 (6.74%) Apache
4 24 (2.31%) Confluence
5 16 (1.54%) Camunda
6 7 (0.67%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 6 (0.58%) CMS
7 6 (0.58%) OpenStack
8 5 (0.48%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.38%) Apache Pulsar
9 4 (0.38%) PowerExchange
9 4 (0.38%) WebSphere
10 3 (0.29%) Anypoint
10 3 (0.29%) Mule
11 2 (0.19%) Apache Pig
11 2 (0.19%) JBoss
11 2 (0.19%) MQSeries
11 2 (0.19%) nginx
11 2 (0.19%) Oracle HTTP Server
11 2 (0.19%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 7 (0.67%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.096%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.096%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.096%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 3 (0.29%) Finacle
1 3 (0.29%) FLEXCUBE
1 3 (0.29%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
1 3 (0.29%) Temenos T24
2 2 (0.19%) Endur
2 2 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
3 1 (0.096%) Actimize
3 1 (0.096%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.096%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.096%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.096%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.096%) SAP IS-U
3 1 (0.096%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 596 (57.36%) AWS
2 374 (36.00%) Azure
3 240 (23.10%) GCP
4 172 (16.55%) GitHub
5 120 (11.55%) GitHub Actions
6 103 (9.91%) Serverless
7 84 (8.08%) AWS Lambda
8 76 (7.31%) Azure DevOps
9 74 (7.12%) Amazon S3
10 73 (7.03%) Snowflake
11 71 (6.83%) Amazon EKS
12 69 (6.64%) OpenShift
13 53 (5.10%) dbt
14 49 (4.72%) Amazon SQS
15 46 (4.43%) Power Platform
16 41 (3.95%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 37 (3.56%) Amazon ECS
18 34 (3.27%) Azure Data Factory
19 32 (3.08%) Azure Synapse Analytics
20 30 (2.89%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 29 (2.79%) HTTP
2 18 (1.73%) DNS
3 11 (1.06%) Firewall
3 11 (1.06%) Network Security
4 8 (0.77%) TCP/IP
5 7 (0.67%) MQTT
5 7 (0.67%) SSL
6 6 (0.58%) SSH
7 5 (0.48%) SAN
8 4 (0.38%) 4G
8 4 (0.38%) 5G
8 4 (0.38%) NAS
9 3 (0.29%) Internet
10 1 (0.096%) Broadband
10 1 (0.096%) Kerberos
10 1 (0.096%) MIMO
10 1 (0.096%) RTP
10 1 (0.096%) VPN
10 1 (0.096%) WAN
10 1 (0.096%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 181 (17.42%) PostgreSQL
2 158 (15.21%) MongoDB
3 137 (13.19%) NoSQL
4 95 (9.14%) Relational Database
5 73 (7.03%) Data Warehouse
6 64 (6.16%) SQL Server
7 58 (5.58%) Big Data
8 54 (5.20%) Redis
9 49 (4.72%) Data Lake
10 45 (4.33%) MySQL
10 45 (4.33%) Power BI
11 41 (3.95%) BigQuery
12 38 (3.66%) Elasticsearch
13 37 (3.56%) Flink
14 32 (3.08%) Metadata
15 28 (2.69%) Delta Lake
16 27 (2.60%) Hadoop
17 26 (2.50%) Amazon Redshift
17 26 (2.50%) Apache Cassandra
17 26 (2.50%) DynamoDB
Development Applications
1 209 (20.12%) Jenkins
2 179 (17.23%) Git
3 153 (14.73%) GitLab
4 75 (7.22%) JUnit
5 68 (6.54%) Gradle
6 63 (6.06%) Mockito
7 49 (4.72%) JIRA
7 49 (4.72%) Selenium
8 42 (4.04%) Maven
9 32 (3.08%) SonarQube
10 28 (2.69%) Cucumber
11 25 (2.41%) REST Assured
12 23 (2.21%) Postman
13 19 (1.83%) Liquibase
14 18 (1.73%) JMeter
15 17 (1.64%) Bitbucket
16 15 (1.44%) Gatling
17 13 (1.25%) Cypress.io
18 12 (1.15%) LoadRunner
18 12 (1.15%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 248 (23.87%) Finance
2 197 (18.96%) Social Skills
3 152 (14.63%) Banking
4 108 (10.39%) Analytical Skills
5 100 (9.62%) Public Sector
6 35 (3.37%) Retail
7 24 (2.31%) Investment Banking
8 22 (2.12%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 18 (1.73%) Front Office
9 18 (1.73%) Telecoms
10 17 (1.64%) Financial Institution
11 15 (1.44%) Law
12 11 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
13 10 (0.96%) Publishing
14 9 (0.87%) Billing
14 9 (0.87%) Organisational Skills
15 8 (0.77%) Games
15 8 (0.77%) Influencing Skills
15 8 (0.77%) Marketing
16 7 (0.67%) Military
Job Titles
1 319 (30.70%) Developer
2 214 (20.60%) Senior
3 174 (16.75%) Java Developer
4 145 (13.96%) Architect
5 135 (12.99%) Data Engineer
6 98 (9.43%) Lead
7 72 (6.93%) Java Engineer
8 68 (6.54%) Senior Developer
9 65 (6.26%) Software Engineer
10 63 (6.06%) Solutions Architect
11 59 (5.68%) DevOps Engineer
12 40 (3.85%) Full-Stack Developer
12 40 (3.85%) Senior Data Engineer
13 39 (3.75%) Senior Java Developer
14 36 (3.46%) AWS Engineer
14 36 (3.46%) Kafka Engineer
14 36 (3.46%) Python Developer
14 36 (3.46%) Python Engineer
15 35 (3.37%) AWS Architect
16 33 (3.18%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 276 (26.56%) Spring
1 276 (26.56%) Spring Boot
2 230 (22.14%) REST
3 221 (21.27%) Terraform
4 149 (14.34%) RESTful
5 134 (12.90%) React
6 124 (11.93%) RabbitMQ
7 74 (7.12%) JSON
8 57 (5.49%) OAuth
9 52 (5.00%) OpenTelemetry
10 51 (4.91%) Node.js
11 50 (4.81%) PySpark
12 48 (4.62%) HTML
13 46 (4.43%) .NET
13 46 (4.43%) GraphQL
13 46 (4.43%) Swagger
14 44 (4.23%) OpenAPI
15 40 (3.85%) Middleware
15 40 (3.85%) OAuth2
16 39 (3.75%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 229 (22.04%) Cloud Native
2 210 (20.21%) Distributed Systems
3 57 (5.49%) Product Ownership
4 46 (4.43%) Data Structures
5 43 (4.14%) Enterprise Software
6 36 (3.46%) Onboarding
7 30 (2.89%) Self-Motivation
8 29 (2.79%) Algorithms
9 28 (2.69%) AI Agents
10 27 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
11 24 (2.31%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 22 (2.12%) Replication
13 21 (2.02%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 21 (2.02%) Management Information System
14 20 (1.92%) Greenfield Project
15 16 (1.54%) Public Cloud
16 15 (1.44%) Data Protection Act
16 15 (1.44%) Distributed Architecture
16 15 (1.44%) Equities
17 12 (1.15%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 127 (12.22%) Linux
2 68 (6.54%) Unix
3 28 (2.69%) Windows
4 10 (0.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.58%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.38%) Mac OS X
7 3 (0.29%) VMS
8 2 (0.19%) Android
8 2 (0.19%) Debian
8 2 (0.19%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.19%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.19%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.096%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.096%) CentOS
9 1 (0.096%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.096%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 571 (54.96%) CI/CD
2 414 (39.85%) Microservices
3 413 (39.75%) Event-Driven
4 375 (36.09%) DevOps
5 372 (35.80%) Agile
6 285 (27.43%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 278 (26.76%) Observability
8 233 (22.43%) Test Automation
9 225 (21.66%) Containerisation
10 218 (20.98%) Infrastructure as Code
11 188 (18.09%) Software Engineering
12 184 (17.71%) Data Pipeline
13 177 (17.04%) AI
14 154 (14.82%) Data Modelling
15 144 (13.86%) Problem-Solving
16 138 (13.28%) ETL
17 131 (12.61%) Analytics
18 125 (12.03%) Continuous Improvement
19 122 (11.74%) Technical Leadership
20 121 (11.65%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 460 (44.27%) Java
2 359 (34.55%) Python
3 347 (33.40%) SQL
4 102 (9.82%) TypeScript
5 97 (9.34%) JavaScript
6 80 (7.70%) Bash
7 62 (5.97%) C#
8 47 (4.52%) Go
9 43 (4.14%) Scala
10 32 (3.08%) PowerShell
11 29 (2.79%) PL/SQL
12 22 (2.12%) Kotlin
12 22 (2.12%) Shell Script
13 12 (1.15%) Search Processing Language
14 11 (1.06%) Groovy
15 10 (0.96%) Bicep
16 9 (0.87%) C++
16 9 (0.87%) Perl
16 9 (0.87%) Rust
17 7 (0.67%) PHP
Qualifications
1 246 (23.68%) Security Cleared
2 198 (19.06%) SC Cleared
3 61 (5.87%) Degree
4 37 (3.56%) Computer Science Degree
5 36 (3.46%) BPSS Clearance
6 18 (1.73%) DV Cleared
7 11 (1.06%) Master's Degree
8 10 (0.96%) AWS Certification
8 10 (0.96%) ISTQB
9 9 (0.87%) Azure Certification
10 7 (0.67%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.58%) ISEB
12 5 (0.48%) DBS Check
12 5 (0.48%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 3 (0.29%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 3 (0.29%) PhD
13 3 (0.29%) TOGAF Certification
14 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certification
14 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certified Professional
15 1 (0.096%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 97 (9.34%) Data Quality
2 74 (7.12%) QA
3 42 (4.04%) Accessibility
4 32 (3.08%) ISO 20022
5 25 (2.41%) GDPR
6 14 (1.35%) SEPA
7 8 (0.77%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.58%) WCAG
9 5 (0.48%) Actionable Recommendations
9 5 (0.48%) ISO 15022
10 4 (0.38%) PSD2
10 4 (0.38%) SLA
11 3 (0.29%) NIST
12 2 (0.19%) Basel III
12 2 (0.19%) EMIR
12 2 (0.19%) GRC
12 2 (0.19%) IFRS
12 2 (0.19%) IFRS 17
12 2 (0.19%) MiFID
12 2 (0.19%) Solvency II
System Software
1 371 (35.71%) Docker
2 9 (0.87%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (0.67%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 6 (0.58%) etcd
5 3 (0.29%) Active Directory
6 2 (0.19%) Apache Flume
6 2 (0.19%) HDFS
7 1 (0.096%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 465 (44.75%) Kubernetes
2 133 (12.80%) Grafana
3 120 (11.55%) Prometheus
4 68 (6.54%) Ansible
5 30 (2.89%) Argo
6 25 (2.41%) Control-M
7 14 (1.35%) Kustomize
8 12 (1.15%) Istio
8 12 (1.15%) Kibana
9 11 (1.06%) Puppet
10 10 (0.96%) Podman
11 8 (0.77%) logstash
12 7 (0.67%) Fluentd
13 5 (0.48%) Check_MK
13 5 (0.48%) HP Fortify
13 5 (0.48%) Rancher
14 3 (0.29%) Bosun
14 3 (0.29%) Consul
14 3 (0.29%) NetBackup
14 3 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 117 (11.26%) Oracle
2 101 (9.72%) Databricks
3 61 (5.87%) Splunk
4 57 (5.49%) Microsoft
5 54 (5.20%) Google
6 53 (5.10%) IBM
7 36 (3.46%) Dynatrace
8 33 (3.18%) Confluent
8 33 (3.18%) Informatica
9 18 (1.73%) MuleSoft
10 17 (1.64%) OpenAI
10 17 (1.64%) Salesforce
11 16 (1.54%) SAP
11 16 (1.54%) Solace
12 13 (1.25%) VMware
13 11 (1.06%) TIBCO
14 10 (0.96%) Red Hat
15 9 (0.87%) New Relic
15 9 (0.87%) Veracode
16 8 (0.77%) Sybase