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

6 months to
8 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 140 109 128
Rank change year-on-year -31 +19 +38
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,109 827 726
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.03% 2.50% 1.92%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.38% 9.63% 7.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 711 532 463
10th Percentile £375 £375 £366
25th Percentile £425 £450 £478
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £638 £675 £725
90th Percentile £761 £750 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £465 £490
% change year-on-year +7.53% -5.10% -18.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 12 4 5
10th Percentile £51.75 £40.58 £26.04
25th Percentile £67.50 £48.56 £27.00
Median hourly rate £81.00 £59.25 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +36.71% +111.61% -64.10%
75th Percentile £89.06 £75.31 £38.75
90th Percentile £94.50 £96.13 £68.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £82.25 - £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 11,824 8,584 9,375
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.68% 25.97% 24.77%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,762 5,692 6,068
10th Percentile £377 £354 £356
25th Percentile £440 £413 £430
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% -4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 289 188 183
10th Percentile £29.07 £31.10 £25.78
25th Percentile £51.25 £41.13 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year +20.37% -16.92% +8.33%
75th Percentile £77.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £70.60 £74.97
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.47 £56.25 £65.00
% change year-on-year +19.95% -13.46% +10.11%

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 8 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 8 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 8 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 -41 920 £550 - 920
London -31 567 £575 -4.17% 682
UK excluding London -17 393 £500 +7.53% 343
Work from Home -59 281 £550 -4.43% 385
North of England +3 198 £503 +6.35% 112
Yorkshire +9 92 £501 -12.96% 26
North West -13 86 £550 +21.01% 73
Scotland -20 61 £410 -13.68% 64
South East -56 52 £460 +5.75% 45
Midlands -55 37 £500 +5.26% 20
South West -20 29 £575 +4.55% 32
West Midlands -43 27 £700 +40.00% 16
East of England -12 26 £488 -4.88% 20
North East -21 25 £426 -26.00% 13
East Midlands -18 10 £401 -3.37% 4
Northern Ireland +12 4 - - 43
Wales - 1 £375 - 7

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
1 128 (11.54%) Apache Spark
2 79 (7.12%) Apache Airflow
3 77 (6.94%) Apache
4 27 (2.43%) Confluence
5 15 (1.35%) Camunda
6 7 (0.63%) nginx
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%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.36%) MQSeries
9 4 (0.36%) PowerExchange
10 3 (0.27%) Anypoint
10 3 (0.27%) Mule
10 3 (0.27%) Traefik
11 2 (0.18%) Apache Pig
11 2 (0.18%) JBoss
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%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
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%) Payment Gateway
5 1 (0.090%) SAP IS-U
5 1 (0.090%) SAP MM
Cloud Services
1 638 (57.53%) AWS
2 406 (36.61%) Azure
3 271 (24.44%) GCP
4 187 (16.86%) GitHub
5 127 (11.45%) GitHub Actions
6 105 (9.47%) Serverless
7 90 (8.12%) Amazon S3
8 86 (7.75%) AWS Lambda
9 83 (7.48%) Amazon EKS
10 76 (6.85%) Snowflake
11 67 (6.04%) Azure DevOps
12 63 (5.68%) OpenShift
13 52 (4.69%) dbt
14 51 (4.60%) Amazon SQS
15 48 (4.33%) Amazon ECS
16 43 (3.88%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 36 (3.25%) Azure Data Factory
18 35 (3.16%) Power Platform
19 32 (2.89%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 29 (2.61%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 30 (2.71%) HTTP
2 24 (2.16%) DNS
3 14 (1.26%) Network Security
4 9 (0.81%) Firewall
4 9 (0.81%) TCP/IP
5 7 (0.63%) MQTT
5 7 (0.63%) SSH
5 7 (0.63%) SSL
6 6 (0.54%) SAN
7 5 (0.45%) 4G
7 5 (0.45%) 5G
8 4 (0.36%) NAS
9 3 (0.27%) Internet
9 3 (0.27%) Reverse Proxy
9 3 (0.27%) VPN
10 2 (0.18%) Broadband
10 2 (0.18%) Kerberos
11 1 (0.090%) MIMO
11 1 (0.090%) RTP
11 1 (0.090%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 187 (16.86%) PostgreSQL
2 169 (15.24%) MongoDB
3 138 (12.44%) NoSQL
4 96 (8.66%) Relational Database
5 74 (6.67%) Data Warehouse
6 63 (5.68%) SQL Server
7 62 (5.59%) Redis
8 52 (4.69%) MySQL
9 47 (4.24%) Big Data
9 47 (4.24%) Data Lake
10 44 (3.97%) Elasticsearch
11 39 (3.52%) BigQuery
11 39 (3.52%) Flink
12 33 (2.98%) Power BI
13 30 (2.71%) Metadata
14 28 (2.52%) Delta Lake
15 27 (2.43%) Amazon Redshift
16 22 (1.98%) RDBMS
17 21 (1.89%) Apache Iceberg
17 21 (1.89%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 224 (20.20%) Jenkins
2 199 (17.94%) Git
3 173 (15.60%) GitLab
4 71 (6.40%) JUnit
5 69 (6.22%) Gradle
6 59 (5.32%) Mockito
7 57 (5.14%) Selenium
8 48 (4.33%) JIRA
9 46 (4.15%) Maven
10 39 (3.52%) Cucumber
11 35 (3.16%) SonarQube
12 25 (2.25%) Postman
12 25 (2.25%) REST Assured
13 22 (1.98%) Bitbucket
14 21 (1.89%) JMeter
15 17 (1.53%) Gatling
16 16 (1.44%) LoadRunner
16 16 (1.44%) SoapUI
17 15 (1.35%) Cypress.io
17 15 (1.35%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 284 (25.61%) Finance
2 212 (19.12%) Social Skills
3 191 (17.22%) Banking
4 112 (10.10%) Analytical Skills
5 101 (9.11%) Public Sector
6 43 (3.88%) Retail
7 36 (3.25%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 23 (2.07%) Front Office
10 20 (1.80%) Financial Institution
11 18 (1.62%) Telecoms
12 12 (1.08%) Influencing Skills
13 11 (0.99%) Law
14 10 (0.90%) Organisational Skills
15 9 (0.81%) Military
16 8 (0.72%) Billing
16 8 (0.72%) Retail Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Corporate Banking
17 7 (0.63%) Games
17 7 (0.63%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 332 (29.94%) Developer
2 234 (21.10%) Senior
3 185 (16.68%) Java Developer
4 174 (15.69%) Architect
5 130 (11.72%) Data Engineer
6 101 (9.11%) Lead
7 79 (7.12%) Java Engineer
8 70 (6.31%) Solutions Architect
9 67 (6.04%) Senior Developer
10 64 (5.77%) Software Engineer
11 63 (5.68%) DevOps Engineer
12 50 (4.51%) Full-Stack Developer
13 44 (3.97%) Senior Data Engineer
14 39 (3.52%) Senior Java Developer
15 38 (3.43%) Python Engineer
16 37 (3.34%) AWS Engineer
16 37 (3.34%) Kafka Engineer
16 37 (3.34%) Senior Java Engineer
17 36 (3.25%) Python Developer
17 36 (3.25%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 307 (27.68%) Spring
2 305 (27.50%) Spring Boot
3 261 (23.53%) REST
4 238 (21.46%) Terraform
5 155 (13.98%) RESTful
6 134 (12.08%) React
7 117 (10.55%) RabbitMQ
8 73 (6.58%) OAuth
9 68 (6.13%) JSON
10 60 (5.41%) HTML
11 56 (5.05%) Node.js
12 53 (4.78%) PySpark
13 49 (4.42%) GraphQL
14 47 (4.24%) CSS
14 47 (4.24%) SOAP
15 46 (4.15%) .NET
15 46 (4.15%) Elastic Stack
16 44 (3.97%) Middleware
16 44 (3.97%) XML
17 43 (3.88%) AngularJS
Miscellaneous
1 266 (23.99%) Cloud Native
2 237 (21.37%) Distributed Systems
3 79 (7.12%) Product Ownership
4 49 (4.42%) Enterprise Software
5 43 (3.88%) Data Structures
6 37 (3.34%) AI Agents
7 36 (3.25%) Onboarding
8 34 (3.07%) Self-Motivation
9 29 (2.61%) Replication
10 27 (2.43%) Greenfield Project
10 27 (2.43%) Legacy Systems
11 26 (2.34%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 25 (2.25%) Algorithms
13 21 (1.89%) Distributed Architecture
13 21 (1.89%) Public Cloud
14 20 (1.80%) Data Protection Act
15 19 (1.71%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
16 17 (1.53%) Private Cloud
17 16 (1.44%) PKI
18 15 (1.35%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 146 (13.17%) Linux
2 71 (6.40%) Unix
3 27 (2.43%) Windows
4 12 (1.08%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (0.45%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.45%) 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
1 631 (56.90%) CI/CD
2 470 (42.38%) Event-Driven
3 463 (41.75%) Microservices
4 402 (36.25%) Agile
5 401 (36.16%) DevOps
6 327 (29.49%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 288 (25.97%) Observability
8 268 (24.17%) Test Automation
9 246 (22.18%) Infrastructure as Code
10 228 (20.56%) Containerisation
11 212 (19.12%) Software Engineering
12 187 (16.86%) AI
13 166 (14.97%) Data Pipeline
14 154 (13.89%) Problem-Solving
15 145 (13.07%) Data Modelling
16 143 (12.89%) Continuous Improvement
16 143 (12.89%) Technical Leadership
17 127 (11.45%) ETL
18 125 (11.27%) TDD
19 124 (11.18%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 499 (45.00%) Java
2 381 (34.36%) Python
3 365 (32.91%) SQL
4 113 (10.19%) JavaScript
5 96 (8.66%) TypeScript
6 89 (8.03%) Bash
7 68 (6.13%) C#
8 54 (4.87%) Go
9 40 (3.61%) Scala
10 32 (2.89%) PowerShell
11 30 (2.71%) PL/SQL
12 29 (2.61%) Shell Script
13 25 (2.25%) Kotlin
14 11 (0.99%) C++
14 11 (0.99%) Groovy
15 8 (0.72%) Perl
15 8 (0.72%) PHP
16 7 (0.63%) Kusto Query Language
17 6 (0.54%) Rust
17 6 (0.54%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 271 (24.44%) Security Cleared
2 223 (20.11%) SC Cleared
3 67 (6.04%) Degree
4 45 (4.06%) Computer Science Degree
5 44 (3.97%) BPSS Clearance
6 29 (2.61%) DV Cleared
7 15 (1.35%) Azure Certification
8 12 (1.08%) AWS Certification
8 12 (1.08%) Master's Degree
9 11 (0.99%) ISTQB
10 7 (0.63%) DBS Check
10 7 (0.63%) ISEB
10 7 (0.63%) Microsoft Certified Professional
11 5 (0.45%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
11 5 (0.45%) TOGAF Certification
12 3 (0.27%) PhD
13 2 (0.18%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 2 (0.18%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.090%) CISSP
14 1 (0.090%) FFIEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 89 (8.03%) Data Quality
2 86 (7.75%) QA
3 44 (3.97%) Accessibility
4 33 (2.98%) ISO 20022
5 20 (1.80%) GDPR
6 14 (1.26%) SEPA
7 6 (0.54%) Actionable Recommendations
8 5 (0.45%) ISO 15022
8 5 (0.45%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.45%) NIST
8 5 (0.45%) PSD2
9 4 (0.36%) Sarbanes-Oxley
9 4 (0.36%) SLA
9 4 (0.36%) WCAG
10 2 (0.18%) Basel III
10 2 (0.18%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.18%) IFRS
10 2 (0.18%) MiFID
10 2 (0.18%) PCI DSS
10 2 (0.18%) Solvency II
System Software
1 393 (35.44%) Docker
2 16 (1.44%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (0.72%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 4 (0.36%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.18%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.18%) HDFS
6 1 (0.090%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 517 (46.62%) Kubernetes
2 146 (13.17%) Grafana
3 125 (11.27%) Prometheus
4 69 (6.22%) Ansible
5 28 (2.52%) Argo
6 27 (2.43%) Control-M
7 17 (1.53%) Istio
8 16 (1.44%) Kibana
8 16 (1.44%) Kustomize
9 14 (1.26%) Puppet
10 9 (0.81%) Podman
11 8 (0.72%) logstash
12 7 (0.63%) Single Sign-On
13 6 (0.54%) HP Fortify
14 5 (0.45%) Check_MK
14 5 (0.45%) Progress Chef
14 5 (0.45%) Rancher
15 4 (0.36%) Bosun
15 4 (0.36%) HAProxy
16 3 (0.27%) Consul
Vendors
1 122 (11.00%) Oracle
2 105 (9.47%) Databricks
3 61 (5.50%) Google
3 61 (5.50%) IBM
3 61 (5.50%) Splunk
4 54 (4.87%) Microsoft
5 39 (3.52%) Dynatrace
6 32 (2.89%) Confluent
7 27 (2.43%) Informatica
8 20 (1.80%) SAP
8 20 (1.80%) VMware
9 19 (1.71%) MuleSoft
9 19 (1.71%) OpenAI
10 14 (1.26%) TIBCO
11 13 (1.17%) New Relic
12 12 (1.08%) Salesforce
12 12 (1.08%) Solace
13 10 (0.90%) Sybase
13 10 (0.90%) Veracode
14 9 (0.81%) WSO2