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

6 months to
1 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 146 103 138
Rank change year-on-year -43 +35 +18
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,029 846 687
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.92% 2.58% 1.78%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 8.80% 10.15% 7.24%
Number of daily rates quoted 636 544 473
10th Percentile £372 £385 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £531 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -3.41% -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £625 £675 £723
90th Percentile £736 £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 9
10th Percentile £45.70 £42.35 £24.87
25th Percentile £56.50 £53.00 £27.00
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 £38.75
90th Percentile £93.00 £97.48 £45.95
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 11,695 8,332 9,493
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.80% 25.44% 24.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,693 5,628 6,415
10th Percentile £375 £355 £356
25th Percentile £433 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £630 £625 £650
90th Percentile £738 £738 £780
UK excluding London median daily rate £501 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.37% -5.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 283 185 196
10th Percentile £29.26 £30.45 £26.30
25th Percentile £45.63 £41.25 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.00 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +20.37% -12.34% -1.44%
75th Percentile £75.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £89.75 £79.48 £74.68
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £55.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year +22.73% -15.38% +8.33%

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 1 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 1 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 1 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 -48 867 £550 - 849
London -44 510 £563 -6.25% 621
UK excluding London -21 390 £500 +6.61% 357
Work from Home -53 256 £530 -7.83% 378
North of England -15 188 £500 +5.82% 104
Yorkshire +10 98 £500 -14.89% 34
North West -47 71 £544 +16.38% 54
South East -33 61 £513 +17.82% 75
Scotland -35 53 £425 -9.57% 59
Midlands -47 42 £500 +17.51% 26
East of England +1 28 £500 -2.44% 12
West Midlands -42 27 £517 +3.40% 18
South West -24 26 £500 -9.09% 46
North East -26 26 £425 -8.55% 16
East Midlands -13 15 £447 +9.02% 8
Northern Ireland +3 4 - - 34
Wales - 1 £375 - 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
1 130 (12.63%) Apache Spark
2 69 (6.71%) Apache
3 68 (6.61%) Apache Airflow
4 22 (2.14%) Confluence
5 15 (1.46%) Camunda
6 8 (0.78%) OpenStack
7 7 (0.68%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 6 (0.58%) CMS
9 5 (0.49%) SharePoint
10 4 (0.39%) Apache Pulsar
10 4 (0.39%) PowerExchange
10 4 (0.39%) WebSphere
11 3 (0.29%) Anypoint
11 3 (0.29%) Mule
12 2 (0.19%) Apache Pig
12 2 (0.19%) IBM HTTP Server
12 2 (0.19%) MQSeries
12 2 (0.19%) nginx
12 2 (0.19%) Oracle HTTP Server
12 2 (0.19%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 7 (0.68%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.097%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.097%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.097%) Mingle
Business Applications
1 4 (0.39%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 2 (0.19%) Endur
2 2 (0.19%) Finacle
2 2 (0.19%) FLEXCUBE
2 2 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.19%) Temenos T24
3 1 (0.097%) Actimize
3 1 (0.097%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.097%) FIS Private Capital Suite
3 1 (0.097%) Oracle ERP
3 1 (0.097%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.097%) SAP IS-U
3 1 (0.097%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 596 (57.92%) AWS
2 369 (35.86%) Azure
3 233 (22.64%) GCP
4 172 (16.72%) GitHub
5 121 (11.76%) GitHub Actions
6 101 (9.82%) Serverless
7 80 (7.77%) AWS Lambda
8 76 (7.39%) Amazon S3
9 75 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
10 71 (6.90%) Amazon EKS
10 71 (6.90%) OpenShift
11 70 (6.80%) Snowflake
12 52 (5.05%) Amazon SQS
12 52 (5.05%) dbt
13 46 (4.47%) Power Platform
14 41 (3.98%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 38 (3.69%) Amazon ECS
16 34 (3.30%) Azure Data Factory
17 32 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
18 29 (2.82%) Google Kubernetes Engine
Communications & Networking
1 29 (2.82%) HTTP
2 18 (1.75%) DNS
3 11 (1.07%) Firewall
3 11 (1.07%) Network Security
4 8 (0.78%) TCP/IP
5 7 (0.68%) MQTT
5 7 (0.68%) SSL
6 6 (0.58%) SSH
7 5 (0.49%) SAN
8 4 (0.39%) 4G
8 4 (0.39%) 5G
8 4 (0.39%) NAS
9 3 (0.29%) Internet
10 2 (0.19%) OpenVPN
11 1 (0.097%) FIX Connectivity
11 1 (0.097%) NaaS
11 1 (0.097%) Reverse Proxy
11 1 (0.097%) RTP
11 1 (0.097%) VPN
11 1 (0.097%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 180 (17.49%) PostgreSQL
2 157 (15.26%) MongoDB
3 136 (13.22%) NoSQL
4 97 (9.43%) Relational Database
5 73 (7.09%) Data Warehouse
6 63 (6.12%) SQL Server
7 59 (5.73%) Big Data
8 54 (5.25%) Redis
9 51 (4.96%) Data Lake
10 45 (4.37%) Power BI
11 44 (4.28%) MySQL
12 40 (3.89%) BigQuery
13 36 (3.50%) Elasticsearch
13 36 (3.50%) Flink
14 34 (3.30%) Metadata
15 28 (2.72%) Amazon Redshift
15 28 (2.72%) Delta Lake
15 28 (2.72%) DynamoDB
16 26 (2.53%) Apache Cassandra
16 26 (2.53%) Hadoop
Development Applications
1 214 (20.80%) Jenkins
2 175 (17.01%) Git
3 154 (14.97%) GitLab
4 73 (7.09%) JUnit
5 64 (6.22%) Gradle
6 60 (5.83%) Mockito
7 49 (4.76%) Selenium
8 47 (4.57%) JIRA
9 40 (3.89%) Maven
10 33 (3.21%) SonarQube
11 27 (2.62%) Cucumber
12 24 (2.33%) REST Assured
13 23 (2.24%) Postman
14 18 (1.75%) JMeter
14 18 (1.75%) Liquibase
15 16 (1.55%) Bitbucket
16 15 (1.46%) Gatling
17 13 (1.26%) Cypress.io
18 12 (1.17%) LoadRunner
18 12 (1.17%) SoapUI
General
1 240 (23.32%) Finance
2 195 (18.95%) Social Skills
3 146 (14.19%) Banking
4 107 (10.40%) Analytical Skills
5 101 (9.82%) Public Sector
6 34 (3.30%) Retail
7 23 (2.24%) Investment Banking
8 19 (1.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 18 (1.75%) Telecoms
10 17 (1.65%) Financial Institution
11 16 (1.55%) Front Office
12 15 (1.46%) Law
13 12 (1.17%) Documentation Skills
14 10 (0.97%) Billing
14 10 (0.97%) Organisational Skills
15 9 (0.87%) Publishing
16 8 (0.78%) Games
17 7 (0.68%) Influencing Skills
17 7 (0.68%) Military
17 7 (0.68%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 310 (30.13%) Developer
2 207 (20.12%) Senior
3 171 (16.62%) Java Developer
4 144 (13.99%) Architect
5 138 (13.41%) Data Engineer
6 100 (9.72%) Lead
7 70 (6.80%) Java Engineer
8 65 (6.32%) Senior Developer
8 65 (6.32%) Software Engineer
9 63 (6.12%) Solutions Architect
10 58 (5.64%) DevOps Engineer
11 39 (3.79%) Full-Stack Developer
11 39 (3.79%) Senior Data Engineer
12 38 (3.69%) Senior Java Developer
13 37 (3.60%) Python Engineer
14 36 (3.50%) AWS Architect
14 36 (3.50%) AWS Engineer
14 36 (3.50%) Kafka Engineer
15 35 (3.40%) Python Developer
16 33 (3.21%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 270 (26.24%) Spring
1 270 (26.24%) Spring Boot
2 223 (21.67%) Terraform
3 222 (21.57%) REST
4 146 (14.19%) RESTful
5 134 (13.02%) React
6 124 (12.05%) RabbitMQ
7 73 (7.09%) JSON
8 57 (5.54%) OAuth
9 52 (5.05%) OpenTelemetry
10 51 (4.96%) PySpark
11 50 (4.86%) Node.js
12 47 (4.57%) HTML
13 45 (4.37%) .NET
14 44 (4.28%) GraphQL
15 43 (4.18%) Swagger
16 41 (3.98%) OAuth2
16 41 (3.98%) OpenAPI
17 40 (3.89%) Elastic Stack
17 40 (3.89%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 223 (21.67%) Cloud Native
2 208 (20.21%) Distributed Systems
3 55 (5.34%) Product Ownership
4 45 (4.37%) Data Structures
5 40 (3.89%) Enterprise Software
6 35 (3.40%) Onboarding
7 30 (2.92%) Self-Motivation
8 29 (2.82%) Algorithms
9 27 (2.62%) Legacy Systems
10 26 (2.53%) AI Agents
11 23 (2.24%) SWIFT Messaging Network
12 21 (2.04%) Management Information System
13 20 (1.94%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 20 (1.94%) Replication
14 18 (1.75%) Greenfield Project
15 16 (1.55%) Data Protection Act
15 16 (1.55%) Public Cloud
16 15 (1.46%) Equities
17 13 (1.26%) Distributed Architecture
18 12 (1.17%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 128 (12.44%) Linux
2 67 (6.51%) Unix
3 28 (2.72%) Windows
4 10 (0.97%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.58%) Ubuntu
6 4 (0.39%) 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 (0.097%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.097%) CentOS
9 1 (0.097%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.097%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 562 (54.62%) CI/CD
2 408 (39.65%) Microservices
3 406 (39.46%) Event-Driven
4 372 (36.15%) DevOps
5 366 (35.57%) Agile
6 282 (27.41%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 272 (26.43%) Observability
8 222 (21.57%) Test Automation
9 221 (21.48%) Containerisation
10 216 (20.99%) Infrastructure as Code
11 186 (18.08%) Software Engineering
12 183 (17.78%) Data Pipeline
13 171 (16.62%) AI
14 153 (14.87%) Data Modelling
15 141 (13.70%) Problem-Solving
16 137 (13.31%) ETL
17 132 (12.83%) Analytics
18 123 (11.95%) Continuous Improvement
19 122 (11.86%) Data Engineering
20 121 (11.76%) Technical Leadership
Programming Languages
1 453 (44.02%) Java
2 356 (34.60%) Python
3 342 (33.24%) SQL
4 100 (9.72%) TypeScript
5 97 (9.43%) JavaScript
6 80 (7.77%) Bash
7 61 (5.93%) C#
8 45 (4.37%) Go
9 42 (4.08%) Scala
10 35 (3.40%) PowerShell
11 29 (2.82%) PL/SQL
12 23 (2.24%) Shell Script
13 20 (1.94%) Kotlin
14 12 (1.17%) Search Processing Language
15 10 (0.97%) Bicep
15 10 (0.97%) Groovy
16 9 (0.87%) C++
16 9 (0.87%) Rust
17 8 (0.78%) Perl
18 7 (0.68%) PHP
Qualifications
1 246 (23.91%) Security Cleared
2 196 (19.05%) SC Cleared
3 58 (5.64%) Degree
4 35 (3.40%) BPSS Clearance
5 34 (3.30%) Computer Science Degree
6 18 (1.75%) DV Cleared
7 11 (1.07%) AWS Certification
8 10 (0.97%) ISTQB
8 10 (0.97%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.78%) Azure Certification
10 7 (0.68%) SnowPro
11 6 (0.58%) ISEB
12 5 (0.49%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
13 4 (0.39%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
13 4 (0.39%) DBS Check
14 3 (0.29%) PhD
14 3 (0.29%) TOGAF Certification
15 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certification
16 1 (0.097%) ITIL Certification
16 1 (0.097%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 95 (9.23%) Data Quality
2 66 (6.41%) QA
3 43 (4.18%) Accessibility
4 31 (3.01%) ISO 20022
5 26 (2.53%) GDPR
6 13 (1.26%) SEPA
7 8 (0.78%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.58%) Actionable Recommendations
8 6 (0.58%) WCAG
9 5 (0.49%) ISO 15022
10 4 (0.39%) SLA
11 3 (0.29%) NIST
11 3 (0.29%) PSD2
12 2 (0.19%) Basel III
12 2 (0.19%) EMIR
12 2 (0.19%) IFRS
12 2 (0.19%) IFRS 17
12 2 (0.19%) MiFID
12 2 (0.19%) Solvency II
13 1 (0.097%) HL7
System Software
1 368 (35.76%) Docker
2 9 (0.87%) VMware Infrastructure
3 7 (0.68%) 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 (0.097%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 459 (44.61%) Kubernetes
2 133 (12.93%) Grafana
3 121 (11.76%) Prometheus
4 69 (6.71%) Ansible
5 31 (3.01%) Argo
6 25 (2.43%) Control-M
7 13 (1.26%) Kustomize
8 12 (1.17%) Istio
8 12 (1.17%) Kibana
9 11 (1.07%) Puppet
10 10 (0.97%) Podman
11 8 (0.78%) logstash
12 7 (0.68%) Fluentd
13 5 (0.49%) Check_MK
13 5 (0.49%) HP Fortify
13 5 (0.49%) Rancher
14 3 (0.29%) Bosun
14 3 (0.29%) Consul
14 3 (0.29%) NetBackup
14 3 (0.29%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 115 (11.18%) Oracle
2 100 (9.72%) Databricks
3 62 (6.03%) Splunk
4 55 (5.34%) Microsoft
5 54 (5.25%) Google
6 51 (4.96%) IBM
7 34 (3.30%) Dynatrace
8 33 (3.21%) Informatica
9 32 (3.11%) Confluent
10 18 (1.75%) MuleSoft
11 17 (1.65%) Salesforce
12 16 (1.55%) SAP
13 15 (1.46%) OpenAI
13 15 (1.46%) Solace
14 13 (1.26%) VMware
15 11 (1.07%) TIBCO
16 10 (0.97%) Red Hat
17 9 (0.87%) New Relic
18 8 (0.78%) Veracode
19 7 (0.68%) Talend