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 10 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 122 117 167
Rank change year-on-year -5 +50 -40
Contract jobs citing Kafka 885 715 663
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.25% 2.33% 1.48%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.14% 10.38% 7.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 568 434 518
10th Percentile £362 £379 £409
25th Percentile £416 £464 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £588 £550
Median % change year-on-year -10.64% +6.82% -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £681
90th Percentile £741 £836 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £475 £503
% change year-on-year -2.84% -5.47% -12.61%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 5 3
10th Percentile £40.00 £30.94 £44.88
25th Percentile £52.00 £39.25 £52.42
Median hourly rate £68.00 £85.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year -20.00% +30.77% -13.33%
75th Percentile £87.00 £93.75 £71.50
90th Percentile £95.00 - £75.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £85.00 £71.50
% change year-on-year -24.71% +18.88% -2.05%

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 8,729 6,890 9,320
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.18% 22.45% 20.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,819 4,399 6,564
10th Percentile £358 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £538 £535
Median % change year-on-year -4.65% +0.47% -6.96%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 215 85 191
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.31 £24.00
25th Percentile £50.13 £38.50 £45.44
Median hourly rate £64.00 £62.50 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% +13.64% -15.38%
75th Percentile £70.00 £65.75 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £77.96 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £55.00
% change year-on-year - +18.18% -15.38%

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 10 February 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 10 February 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 10 February 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 -6 781 £539 -12.04% 193
London -8 507 £600 -5.33% 119
Work from Home +16 323 £575 -5.93% 148
UK excluding London -22 245 £462 -2.84% 117
North of England -32 105 £488 -11.36% 38
South East +8 61 £433 -17.62% 48
North West -23 51 £447 -11.92% 26
Yorkshire -30 45 £575 -17.86% 8
Midlands -27 44 £500 +40.45% 4
West Midlands -29 27 £550 - 3
Scotland -2 25 £455 +20.62% 11
South West -4 22 £550 -5.38% 14
East Midlands -21 17 £402 +12.92% 1
North East -3 15 £475 -12.38% 4
East of England -25 5 £500 +56.74% 2
Wales -7 1 £250 - 1

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 91 (10.28%) Apache Spark
2 57 (6.44%) Apache
3 48 (5.42%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (4.18%) Confluence
5 8 (0.90%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.68%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.68%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.56%) Camunda
8 4 (0.45%) CMS
8 4 (0.45%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.34%) MQSeries
9 3 (0.34%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.23%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.23%) JBoss
10 2 (0.23%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.11%) IIS
11 1 (0.11%) nginx
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
11 1 (0.11%) WebSphere
Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.34%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.34%) Fidessa
2 3 (0.34%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.23%) Actimize
3 2 (0.23%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.23%) Shopify
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 519 (58.64%) AWS
2 236 (26.67%) Azure
3 160 (18.08%) GitHub
4 151 (17.06%) GCP
5 125 (14.12%) Serverless
6 112 (12.66%) GitHub Actions
7 104 (11.75%) Amazon S3
8 93 (10.51%) AWS Lambda
9 74 (8.36%) AWS CloudFormation
10 73 (8.25%) Amazon EKS
11 49 (5.54%) Amazon ECS
12 48 (5.42%) Amazon CloudWatch
13 45 (5.08%) Power Platform
14 43 (4.86%) Amazon Kinesis
14 43 (4.86%) Amazon SQS
15 41 (4.63%) OpenShift
16 39 (4.41%) Azure DevOps
17 37 (4.18%) Azure Data Factory
18 32 (3.62%) Amazon EC2
19 28 (3.16%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.81%) Firewall
2 13 (1.47%) HTTP
3 12 (1.36%) DNS
4 11 (1.24%) SSL
5 6 (0.68%) FTP
5 6 (0.68%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.68%) SMS
5 6 (0.68%) SSH
6 4 (0.45%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.34%) VPN
8 2 (0.23%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) NAS
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 175 (19.77%) PostgreSQL
2 152 (17.18%) MongoDB
3 133 (15.03%) NoSQL
4 79 (8.93%) Apache Cassandra
5 59 (6.67%) Relational Database
6 52 (5.88%) Data Warehouse
7 49 (5.54%) Amazon RDS
8 48 (5.42%) Data Lake
8 48 (5.42%) Elasticsearch
9 47 (5.31%) Big Data
10 46 (5.20%) Redis
11 45 (5.08%) DynamoDB
12 41 (4.63%) SQL Server
13 34 (3.84%) Power BI
14 33 (3.73%) Amazon Athena
15 32 (3.62%) Amazon Redshift
16 31 (3.50%) MySQL
17 30 (3.39%) BigQuery
17 30 (3.39%) Hadoop
18 29 (3.28%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 157 (17.74%) Jenkins
2 134 (15.14%) GitLab
3 105 (11.86%) Git
4 80 (9.04%) JUnit
5 58 (6.55%) JIRA
6 40 (4.52%) Mockito
7 24 (2.71%) Cucumber
7 24 (2.71%) JMeter
7 24 (2.71%) Sonatype Nexus
8 21 (2.37%) Gradle
9 15 (1.69%) Gatling
10 14 (1.58%) Maven
11 11 (1.24%) Selenium
12 10 (1.13%) Artifactory
12 10 (1.13%) CircleCI
13 9 (1.02%) Jaeger
13 9 (1.02%) REST Assured
13 9 (1.02%) SoapUI
14 8 (0.90%) Postman
14 8 (0.90%) SonarQube
General
1 238 (26.89%) Finance
2 200 (22.60%) Social Skills
3 123 (13.90%) Banking
4 72 (8.14%) Analytical Skills
5 63 (7.12%) Public Sector
6 45 (5.08%) Investment Banking
7 31 (3.50%) Front Office
8 21 (2.37%) Documentation Skills
9 14 (1.58%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.13%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (1.02%) Marketing
12 7 (0.79%) Retail
13 5 (0.56%) Law
13 5 (0.56%) Telecoms
14 4 (0.45%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.45%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 3 (0.34%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.34%) Legal
15 3 (0.34%) Manufacturing
16 2 (0.23%) Games
Job Titles
1 330 (37.29%) Developer
2 261 (29.49%) Senior
3 185 (20.90%) Java Developer
4 130 (14.69%) Senior Developer
5 119 (13.45%) Data Engineer
6 100 (11.30%) Lead
7 81 (9.15%) Software Engineer
8 78 (8.81%) Senior Java Developer
9 75 (8.47%) Architect
10 56 (6.33%) DevOps Engineer
11 44 (4.97%) Full-Stack Developer
12 43 (4.86%) Kafka Developer
13 41 (4.63%) AWS Engineer
14 37 (4.18%) AWS Developer
15 36 (4.07%) AWS Architect
16 34 (3.84%) Kafka Engineer
17 32 (3.62%) Java Engineer
18 31 (3.50%) Senior Data Engineer
19 28 (3.16%) Platform Engineer
20 25 (2.82%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 212 (23.95%) Spring
2 179 (20.23%) Spring Boot
3 106 (11.98%) REST
4 99 (11.19%) gRPC
5 82 (9.27%) React
5 82 (9.27%) RESTful
6 79 (8.93%) Node.js
7 69 (7.80%) RabbitMQ
8 41 (4.63%) AngularJS
9 36 (4.07%) Middleware
10 33 (3.73%) Hibernate
10 33 (3.73%) Keycloak
11 31 (3.50%) PySpark
12 30 (3.39%) JSON
13 29 (3.28%) ActiveMQ
13 29 (3.28%) OAuth
13 29 (3.28%) OpenTelemetry
14 28 (3.16%) JMS
15 27 (3.05%) OAuth2
16 23 (2.60%) JAX-RS
Miscellaneous
1 137 (15.48%) Distributed Systems
2 118 (13.33%) Cloud Native
3 42 (4.75%) Management Information System
4 37 (4.18%) Product Ownership
5 28 (3.16%) Data Structures
6 25 (2.82%) Equities
7 23 (2.60%) Fixed Income
8 22 (2.49%) Derivative
9 17 (1.92%) Market Risk
9 17 (1.92%) Replication
10 16 (1.81%) Hybrid Cloud
11 14 (1.58%) Legacy Applications
12 13 (1.47%) Distributed Computing
13 12 (1.36%) Algorithms
13 12 (1.36%) Onboarding
14 11 (1.24%) Legacy Systems
15 10 (1.13%) Greenfield Project
16 8 (0.90%) Data Protection Act
16 8 (0.90%) SWIFT Messaging Network
17 7 (0.79%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 153 (17.29%) Linux
2 77 (8.70%) Unix
3 29 (3.28%) Windows
4 13 (1.47%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.79%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.56%) AIX
6 5 (0.56%) CentOS
7 3 (0.34%) zOS
8 2 (0.23%) VMS
9 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 384 (43.39%) CI/CD
2 354 (40.00%) Microservices
3 298 (33.67%) Agile
4 251 (28.36%) DevOps
5 224 (25.31%) Software Engineering
6 181 (20.45%) Containerisation
7 180 (20.34%) Problem-Solving
8 178 (20.11%) Event-Driven
9 163 (18.42%) Observability
10 154 (17.40%) Infrastructure as Code
11 131 (14.80%) Data Pipeline
12 130 (14.69%) Analytics
13 127 (14.35%) Test Automation
14 116 (13.11%) Data Engineering
15 111 (12.54%) ETL
16 108 (12.20%) Open Source
17 106 (11.98%) Data Modelling
18 102 (11.53%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 101 (11.41%) TDD
20 90 (10.17%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 425 (48.02%) Java
2 305 (34.46%) Python
3 258 (29.15%) SQL
4 126 (14.24%) Go
5 67 (7.57%) C#
5 67 (7.57%) JavaScript
6 50 (5.65%) TypeScript
7 43 (4.86%) Shell Script
8 41 (4.63%) C++
9 40 (4.52%) Bash
10 30 (3.39%) Scala
11 17 (1.92%) Rust
12 12 (1.36%) PL/SQL
13 10 (1.13%) PowerShell
14 8 (0.90%) Bicep
15 7 (0.79%) Korn
15 7 (0.79%) Perl
16 6 (0.68%) Groovy
16 6 (0.68%) R
17 5 (0.56%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 195 (22.03%) Security Cleared
2 174 (19.66%) SC Cleared
3 43 (4.86%) Degree
4 31 (3.50%) BPSS Clearance
5 29 (3.28%) Azure Certification
6 23 (2.60%) AWS Certification
7 20 (2.26%) Computer Science Degree
8 19 (2.15%) DV Cleared
9 15 (1.69%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.90%) OCP
10 8 (0.90%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.34%) ITIL Certification
13 2 (0.23%) AWS Certified Developer
13 2 (0.23%) CBAP
13 2 (0.23%) CSPO
13 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
14 1 (0.11%) SnowPro
14 1 (0.11%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 86 (9.72%) Data Quality
2 43 (4.86%) QA
3 36 (4.07%) GDPR
4 14 (1.58%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.13%) ISO 20022
5 10 (1.13%) NCSC
6 9 (1.02%) PCI DSS
7 7 (0.79%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 7 (0.79%) NIST
8 6 (0.68%) SEPA
9 5 (0.56%) SLA
10 3 (0.34%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.34%) HL7
10 3 (0.34%) ISO 8583
10 3 (0.34%) WCAG
11 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.23%) HIPAA
11 2 (0.23%) MiFID
11 2 (0.23%) PSD2
12 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
System Software
1 317 (35.82%) Docker
2 8 (0.90%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.45%) HDFS
4 3 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 359 (40.56%) Kubernetes
2 216 (24.41%) Terraform
3 107 (12.09%) Grafana
4 95 (10.73%) Prometheus
5 62 (7.01%) Ansible
6 26 (2.94%) Argo
7 15 (1.69%) Progress Chef
8 9 (1.02%) Istio
8 9 (1.02%) Kiali
9 8 (0.90%) linkerd
9 8 (0.90%) Packer
10 7 (0.79%) logstash
11 5 (0.56%) Puppet
11 5 (0.56%) Rancher
12 4 (0.45%) Fluentd
12 4 (0.45%) Jamf Pro
12 4 (0.45%) Kibana
12 4 (0.45%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (0.34%) Hadoop YARN
14 2 (0.23%) QRadar
Vendors
1 77 (8.70%) Oracle
2 68 (7.68%) Databricks
3 61 (6.89%) Splunk
4 38 (4.29%) Google
5 37 (4.18%) Confluent
6 36 (4.07%) Microsoft
7 29 (3.28%) IBM
8 24 (2.71%) VMware
9 18 (2.03%) Sybase
10 17 (1.92%) Dynatrace
10 17 (1.92%) Informatica
11 13 (1.47%) Cloudera
12 12 (1.36%) Red Hat
13 9 (1.02%) ServiceNow
13 9 (1.02%) Talend
14 8 (0.90%) Atlassian
14 8 (0.90%) Foundry
14 8 (0.90%) Palantir
14 8 (0.90%) SAP
15 7 (0.79%) PagerDuty