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 22 June 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
22 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 139 105 148
Rank change year-on-year -34 +43 -3
Contract jobs citing Kafka 959 763 708
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.89% 2.55% 1.61%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.68% 11.15% 7.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 565 494 514
10th Percentile £381 £400 £400
25th Percentile £425 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.91% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £684 £687
90th Percentile £800 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £493
% change year-on-year -1.06% -4.67% -17.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 3 9
10th Percentile £61.10 £47.14 £22.55
25th Percentile £65.00 £58.98 £27.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -64.10%
75th Percentile £90.00 £86.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £95.00 £90.74 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -11.05% +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 9,907 6,842 9,288
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.53% 22.85% 21.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,502 4,663 6,379
10th Percentile £363 £356 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £538
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -4.65% -2.27%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 284 131 280
10th Percentile £30.15 £29.07 £22.45
25th Percentile £51.25 £38.52 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £74.45 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £85.00 £81.01 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £57.13
% change year-on-year +4.00% +9.41% -12.12%

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 22 June 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 22 June 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 22 June 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 -37 829 £550 - 114
London -27 517 £588 -6.00% 70
UK excluding London -53 324 £465 -1.06% 77
Work from Home -42 276 £600 +4.35% 66
North of England -32 151 £447 -4.89% 18
Yorkshire -14 72 £464 -15.68% 3
North West -38 65 £438 -6.71% 12
South East -44 51 £488 +8.33% 22
Scotland -16 46 £450 -4.76% 7
Midlands -51 39 £491 +9.17% 4
South West -19 26 £500 -9.09% 11
North East -23 21 £425 -8.11% 3
West Midlands -55 21 £500 - 3
East Midlands -16 18 £407 +14.08% 1
East of England -17 17 £550 +10.00% 5
Northern Ireland -7 2 - - 10
Wales -14 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
1 129 (13.45%) Apache Spark
2 66 (6.88%) Apache
3 54 (5.63%) Apache Airflow
4 14 (1.46%) Confluence
5 7 (0.73%) Camunda
6 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.52%) Apache Pulsar
7 5 (0.52%) WebSphere
8 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
10 1 (0.10%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.10%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 8 (0.83%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.31%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.31%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 558 (58.19%) AWS
2 280 (29.20%) Azure
3 173 (18.04%) GCP
4 136 (14.18%) GitHub
5 121 (12.62%) Serverless
6 101 (10.53%) GitHub Actions
7 94 (9.80%) Amazon S3
8 92 (9.59%) AWS Lambda
9 69 (7.19%) OpenShift
10 64 (6.67%) Amazon EKS
11 60 (6.26%) Azure DevOps
12 55 (5.74%) Power Platform
13 54 (5.63%) Snowflake
14 45 (4.69%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 45 (4.69%) Amazon ECS
15 42 (4.38%) dbt
16 40 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
17 38 (3.96%) Amazon SQS
18 32 (3.34%) Amazon Kinesis
19 31 (3.23%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.56%) HTTP
2 13 (1.36%) Firewall
3 10 (1.04%) Network Security
4 8 (0.83%) DNS
5 7 (0.73%) MQTT
6 5 (0.52%) NAS
6 5 (0.52%) SAN
6 5 (0.52%) SSL
7 4 (0.42%) Internet
7 4 (0.42%) SMS
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.10%) 4G
9 1 (0.10%) 5G
9 1 (0.10%) FIX Connectivity
9 1 (0.10%) MIMO
9 1 (0.10%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 185 (19.29%) PostgreSQL
2 156 (16.27%) MongoDB
3 129 (13.45%) NoSQL
4 97 (10.11%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.47%) Big Data
6 57 (5.94%) Data Warehouse
7 56 (5.84%) SQL Server
8 54 (5.63%) Data Lake
9 49 (5.11%) Redis
10 45 (4.69%) Power BI
11 43 (4.48%) Elasticsearch
12 42 (4.38%) Apache Cassandra
13 37 (3.86%) DynamoDB
14 36 (3.75%) Flink
14 36 (3.75%) MySQL
15 33 (3.44%) Hadoop
16 30 (3.13%) Amazon Athena
17 29 (3.02%) BigQuery
18 28 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
19 27 (2.82%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 157 (16.37%) Jenkins
2 128 (13.35%) GitLab
3 126 (13.14%) Git
4 70 (7.30%) JUnit
5 48 (5.01%) Mockito
6 45 (4.69%) JIRA
7 35 (3.65%) Gradle
8 31 (3.23%) Selenium
9 25 (2.61%) Cucumber
10 23 (2.40%) REST Assured
11 20 (2.09%) Gatling
12 17 (1.77%) Liquibase
13 16 (1.67%) Postman
14 15 (1.56%) Maven
14 15 (1.56%) Serenity BDD
15 13 (1.36%) SonarQube
16 6 (0.63%) Cypress.io
16 6 (0.63%) Jaeger
16 6 (0.63%) JMeter
16 6 (0.63%) Snyk
General
1 263 (27.42%) Finance
2 177 (18.46%) Social Skills
3 129 (13.45%) Banking
4 84 (8.76%) Public Sector
5 82 (8.55%) Analytical Skills
6 45 (4.69%) Front Office
7 35 (3.65%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.82%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (2.19%) Financial Institution
9 21 (2.19%) Retail
10 14 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 14 (1.46%) Law
11 10 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
11 10 (1.04%) Marketing
11 10 (1.04%) Telecoms
12 9 (0.94%) Publishing
13 8 (0.83%) Corporate Banking
13 8 (0.83%) Military
14 7 (0.73%) Automotive
14 7 (0.73%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 310 (32.33%) Developer
2 199 (20.75%) Senior
3 157 (16.37%) Java Developer
4 154 (16.06%) Data Engineer
5 117 (12.20%) Architect
5 117 (12.20%) Lead
6 101 (10.53%) Software Engineer
7 83 (8.65%) Senior Developer
8 81 (8.45%) Java Engineer
9 55 (5.74%) AWS Architect
10 48 (5.01%) Senior Java Developer
11 43 (4.48%) Solutions Architect
12 40 (4.17%) DevOps Engineer
13 39 (4.07%) Full-Stack Developer
14 36 (3.75%) Developer/Software Engineer
15 33 (3.44%) Java Software Engineer
15 33 (3.44%) Principal Engineer
16 32 (3.34%) Lead Developer
16 32 (3.34%) Senior Java Engineer
17 31 (3.23%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 241 (25.13%) Spring
2 230 (23.98%) Spring Boot
3 139 (14.49%) REST
4 131 (13.66%) RESTful
5 127 (13.24%) React
6 100 (10.43%) RabbitMQ
7 89 (9.28%) Node.js
8 64 (6.67%) GraphQL
9 57 (5.94%) OpenTelemetry
10 51 (5.32%) gRPC
10 51 (5.32%) JSON
11 50 (5.21%) Redux
12 42 (4.38%) Middleware
13 40 (4.17%) AngularJS
13 40 (4.17%) Apache Avro
13 40 (4.17%) OAuth
14 39 (4.07%) Swagger
15 38 (3.96%) OpenAPI
16 36 (3.75%) PySpark
17 35 (3.65%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 192 (20.02%) Distributed Systems
2 176 (18.35%) Cloud Native
3 39 (4.07%) Fixed Income
4 37 (3.86%) Management Information System
4 37 (3.86%) Product Ownership
5 34 (3.55%) Data Structures
6 24 (2.50%) Algorithms
7 23 (2.40%) Enterprise Software
7 23 (2.40%) Onboarding
8 18 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
9 15 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
9 15 (1.56%) Self-Motivation
10 14 (1.46%) Clustering
10 14 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
10 14 (1.46%) Derivative
10 14 (1.46%) Equities
10 14 (1.46%) Public Cloud
11 13 (1.36%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 10 (1.04%) CMDB
12 10 (1.04%) Hedge funds
Operating Systems
1 86 (8.97%) Linux
2 51 (5.32%) Unix
3 26 (2.71%) Windows
4 8 (0.83%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.52%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.31%) Mac OS
7 3 (0.31%) VMS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.21%) zOS
9 1 (0.10%) Android
9 1 (0.10%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.10%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 435 (45.36%) CI/CD
2 362 (37.75%) Microservices
3 313 (32.64%) Agile
4 286 (29.82%) DevOps
5 285 (29.72%) Event-Driven
6 220 (22.94%) Observability
7 202 (21.06%) Containerisation
8 194 (20.23%) Event-Driven Architecture
9 193 (20.13%) Software Engineering
10 175 (18.25%) Data Pipeline
11 158 (16.48%) Data Modelling
12 155 (16.16%) Infrastructure as Code
13 152 (15.85%) Problem-Solving
14 150 (15.64%) Analytics
14 150 (15.64%) Test Automation
15 140 (14.60%) Data Engineering
16 138 (14.39%) ETL
17 122 (12.72%) AI
18 108 (11.26%) TDD
19 104 (10.84%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 444 (46.30%) Java
2 326 (33.99%) Python
3 297 (30.97%) SQL
4 119 (12.41%) TypeScript
5 87 (9.07%) Go
6 84 (8.76%) JavaScript
7 56 (5.84%) C#
8 39 (4.07%) Bash
9 26 (2.71%) Scala
10 20 (2.09%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.88%) Rust
12 17 (1.77%) PL/SQL
13 14 (1.46%) C++
14 12 (1.25%) Bicep
14 12 (1.25%) Kotlin
14 12 (1.25%) Shell Script
15 10 (1.04%) Search Processing Language
16 9 (0.94%) Groovy
17 7 (0.73%) PHP
18 6 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 195 (20.33%) Security Cleared
2 151 (15.75%) SC Cleared
3 50 (5.21%) Degree
4 27 (2.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.88%) AWS Certification
5 18 (1.88%) DV Cleared
6 17 (1.77%) Computer Science Degree
7 12 (1.25%) Master's Degree
8 10 (1.04%) Azure Certification
9 8 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.73%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.31%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.10%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.10%) CISSP
13 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Certification
13 1 (0.10%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 101 (10.53%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.84%) QA
3 37 (3.86%) GDPR
4 34 (3.55%) Accessibility
5 18 (1.88%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.94%) NIST
8 8 (0.83%) PCI DSS
9 7 (0.73%) SEPA
10 3 (0.31%) ISO 8583
10 3 (0.31%) PSD2
10 3 (0.31%) WCAG
11 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.21%) EMIR
11 2 (0.21%) IFRS
11 2 (0.21%) IFRS 17
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) NCSC
11 2 (0.21%) Solvency II
System Software
1 319 (33.26%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 4 (0.42%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 2 (0.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.10%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.10%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.10%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 377 (39.31%) Kubernetes
2 195 (20.33%) Terraform
3 120 (12.51%) Prometheus
4 117 (12.20%) Grafana
5 57 (5.94%) Ansible
6 18 (1.88%) Argo
7 10 (1.04%) Kibana
8 9 (0.94%) Control-M
8 9 (0.94%) Istio
8 9 (0.94%) Puppet
9 8 (0.83%) Podman
10 7 (0.73%) Fluentd
11 6 (0.63%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.52%) Kiali
12 5 (0.52%) logstash
12 5 (0.52%) Rancher
13 3 (0.31%) NetBackup
14 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
14 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
14 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 84 (8.76%) Databricks
2 67 (6.99%) Oracle
3 64 (6.67%) Splunk
4 41 (4.28%) Microsoft
5 37 (3.86%) Google
6 27 (2.82%) Confluent
7 24 (2.50%) Informatica
8 18 (1.88%) IBM
9 15 (1.56%) Dynatrace
10 13 (1.36%) Salesforce
11 11 (1.15%) Solace
12 10 (1.04%) MuleSoft
13 9 (0.94%) OpenAI
13 9 (0.94%) Sybase
13 9 (0.94%) Talend
14 8 (0.83%) Red Hat
14 8 (0.83%) ServiceNow
15 7 (0.73%) SAP
16 6 (0.63%) AppDynamics
16 6 (0.63%) Pega