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 29 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
29 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 114 115 181
Rank change year-on-year +1 +66 -69
Contract jobs citing Kafka 887 759 656
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.46% 2.08% 1.43%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.79% 9.59% 6.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 584 452 503
10th Percentile £363 £384 £450
25th Percentile £425 £489 £503
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% -
75th Percentile £675 £725 £775
90th Percentile £749 £810 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £455 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -4.32% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 9
10th Percentile £37.63 £26.04 £59.97
25th Percentile £43.25 £27.00 £75.00
Median hourly rate £59.25 £37.50 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year +58.00% -51.61% +5.80%
75th Percentile £68.44 £87.50 £78.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £91.25 £87.25
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £56.50 £78.00
% change year-on-year -29.20% -27.56% +6.85%

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 8,218 7,916 10,160
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.80% 21.72% 22.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,453 4,972 7,245
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £440
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £720 £780 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 191 120 187
10th Percentile £30.75 £22.00 £33.80
25th Percentile £43.00 £37.88 £46.18
Median hourly rate £55.00 £65.00 £54.56
Median % change year-on-year -15.38% +19.13% -12.93%
75th Percentile £65.00 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.50 £74.04 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.75 £65.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year -1.92% +23.81% -19.23%

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 29 November 2025.

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 29 November 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 15 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 29 November 2025. 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 +2 776 £550 -11.90% 164
London +7 512 £600 -7.69% 110
Work from Home +31 321 £594 +7.95% 95
UK excluding London +7 260 £455 -4.32% 124
North of England -26 98 £473 -17.47% 15
North West -7 57 £435 -11.33% 8
South East +14 56 £434 -11.03% 67
Scotland +26 52 £450 +20.00% 8
Midlands -4 45 £500 +17.65% 10
Yorkshire -26 36 £586 -9.81% 5
West Midlands -8 28 £533 +25.29% 9
South West +17 20 £550 -15.38% 16
East Midlands 0 17 £420 +17.98% 1
North East -3 7 £575 -7.89% 2
East of England -30 1 £538 +69.83% 4

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 70 (7.89%) Apache Spark
2 51 (5.75%) Apache
3 42 (4.74%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (4.17%) Confluence
5 10 (1.13%) Mule
6 8 (0.90%) Anypoint
7 7 (0.79%) MQSeries
8 6 (0.68%) Camunda
8 6 (0.68%) CMS
8 6 (0.68%) JBoss
8 6 (0.68%) WebSphere
9 5 (0.56%) Microsoft Exchange
10 3 (0.34%) Luigi
10 3 (0.34%) OpenStack
10 3 (0.34%) WebSphere Application Server
11 2 (0.23%) Apache Solr
11 2 (0.23%) SAS
11 2 (0.23%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.23%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.23%) WebLogic
Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.23%) MS Visio
2 2 (0.23%) Sketch
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (0.45%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.45%) Oracle 11i
2 2 (0.23%) Actimize
2 2 (0.23%) SAP BRIM
3 1 (0.11%) Bloomberg AIM
3 1 (0.11%) Endur
3 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 449 (50.62%) AWS
2 222 (25.03%) Azure
3 126 (14.21%) GitHub
4 122 (13.75%) GCP
5 94 (10.60%) Serverless
6 80 (9.02%) GitHub Actions
7 67 (7.55%) Amazon S3
8 66 (7.44%) AWS Lambda
9 48 (5.41%) AWS CloudFormation
9 48 (5.41%) OpenShift
10 46 (5.19%) Azure DevOps
11 44 (4.96%) Amazon EKS
12 37 (4.17%) Amazon ECS
13 36 (4.06%) Amazon SQS
14 34 (3.83%) Amazon Kinesis
14 34 (3.83%) Azure Data Factory
15 32 (3.61%) Amazon CloudWatch
16 28 (3.16%) Snowflake
17 27 (3.04%) Amazon EC2
18 21 (2.37%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 11 (1.24%) SSL
2 10 (1.13%) HTTP
3 8 (0.90%) DNS
4 7 (0.79%) AMQP
4 7 (0.79%) DSL
5 6 (0.68%) Firewall
5 6 (0.68%) Kerberos
6 5 (0.56%) SSH
7 4 (0.45%) FTP
7 4 (0.45%) MQTT
8 2 (0.23%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.23%) VPN
9 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 178 (20.07%) PostgreSQL
2 176 (19.84%) MongoDB
3 129 (14.54%) NoSQL
4 74 (8.34%) Apache Cassandra
5 72 (8.12%) Relational Database
6 61 (6.88%) Big Data
7 52 (5.86%) Redis
8 43 (4.85%) SQL Server
9 41 (4.62%) Amazon RDS
10 38 (4.28%) Data Warehouse
10 38 (4.28%) DB2
10 38 (4.28%) Elasticsearch
11 36 (4.06%) DynamoDB
12 35 (3.95%) Hadoop
13 31 (3.49%) Data Lake
14 25 (2.82%) Metadata
15 22 (2.48%) Amazon Redshift
16 21 (2.37%) MySQL
17 20 (2.25%) Power BI
18 18 (2.03%) Oracle Database
Development Applications
1 175 (19.73%) Jenkins
2 120 (13.53%) GitLab
3 111 (12.51%) Git
4 108 (12.18%) JUnit
5 60 (6.76%) JIRA
6 48 (5.41%) Mockito
7 29 (3.27%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.71%) Gradle
8 24 (2.71%) JMeter
8 24 (2.71%) Sonatype Nexus
9 22 (2.48%) Maven
10 21 (2.37%) SonarQube
11 15 (1.69%) Artifactory
12 12 (1.35%) Liquibase
13 11 (1.24%) Gatling
13 11 (1.24%) SoapUI
13 11 (1.24%) Subversion
14 7 (0.79%) Atlassian Bamboo
14 7 (0.79%) Cypress.io
14 7 (0.79%) TeamCity
General
1 248 (27.96%) Finance
2 245 (27.62%) Social Skills
3 143 (16.12%) Banking
4 102 (11.50%) Analytical Skills
5 73 (8.23%) Public Sector
6 69 (7.78%) Investment Banking
7 50 (5.64%) Front Office
8 12 (1.35%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.01%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 8 (0.90%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.79%) Financial Institution
11 7 (0.79%) Military
12 6 (0.68%) Retail
13 5 (0.56%) Telecoms
14 4 (0.45%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.45%) Retail Banking
15 3 (0.34%) Back Office
15 3 (0.34%) Law
15 3 (0.34%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.34%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 363 (40.92%) Developer
2 242 (27.28%) Senior
3 223 (25.14%) Java Developer
4 122 (13.75%) Senior Developer
5 89 (10.03%) Data Engineer
6 84 (9.47%) Software Engineer
7 83 (9.36%) Lead
8 81 (9.13%) Senior Java Developer
9 68 (7.67%) Architect
10 64 (7.22%) DevOps Engineer
11 40 (4.51%) AWS Engineer
11 40 (4.51%) Platform Engineer
12 39 (4.40%) Kafka Developer
13 38 (4.28%) Python Engineer
14 37 (4.17%) AWS Developer
15 36 (4.06%) Full-Stack Developer
15 36 (4.06%) Kafka Engineer
16 31 (3.49%) Java Engineer
17 30 (3.38%) SQL Developer
18 28 (3.16%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 206 (23.22%) Spring
2 146 (16.46%) Spring Boot
3 106 (11.95%) REST
4 103 (11.61%) React
5 100 (11.27%) gRPC
6 90 (10.15%) RabbitMQ
7 79 (8.91%) RESTful
8 52 (5.86%) Node.js
9 48 (5.41%) ActiveMQ
9 48 (5.41%) JMS
10 42 (4.74%) AngularJS
11 39 (4.40%) .NET
12 36 (4.06%) GraphQL
13 35 (3.95%) Hibernate
13 35 (3.95%) Keycloak
14 34 (3.83%) JSON
15 33 (3.72%) OAuth
16 32 (3.61%) Middleware
17 30 (3.38%) Apache NiFi
17 30 (3.38%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 117 (13.19%) Distributed Systems
2 87 (9.81%) Cloud Native
3 44 (4.96%) Equities
4 39 (4.40%) Data Structures
5 31 (3.49%) Management Information System
6 29 (3.27%) Fixed Income
7 28 (3.16%) Product Ownership
8 26 (2.93%) Replication
9 22 (2.48%) Derivative
10 21 (2.37%) Market Risk
11 14 (1.58%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (1.35%) Hybrid Cloud
12 12 (1.35%) PKI
13 11 (1.24%) Data Protection Act
13 11 (1.24%) Greenfield Project
14 10 (1.13%) Algorithms
15 9 (1.01%) Legacy Applications
15 9 (1.01%) Legacy Systems
15 9 (1.01%) Onboarding
16 8 (0.90%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 167 (18.83%) Linux
2 78 (8.79%) Unix
3 22 (2.48%) Windows
4 13 (1.47%) Mac OS X
4 13 (1.47%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 7 (0.79%) CentOS
6 5 (0.56%) AIX
7 1 (0.11%) Debian
7 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
7 1 (0.11%) VMS
7 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
7 1 (0.11%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 365 (41.15%) Microservices
2 361 (40.70%) Agile
3 352 (39.68%) CI/CD
4 252 (28.41%) Software Engineering
5 245 (27.62%) DevOps
6 210 (23.68%) Problem-Solving
7 167 (18.83%) Containerisation
8 135 (15.22%) Event-Driven
9 132 (14.88%) Infrastructure as Code
10 129 (14.54%) TDD
11 127 (14.32%) Open Source
12 122 (13.75%) Observability
13 119 (13.42%) Test Automation
14 106 (11.95%) Data Pipeline
15 103 (11.61%) SDLC
16 95 (10.71%) Analytics
17 92 (10.37%) Scrum
18 87 (9.81%) Mentoring
19 86 (9.70%) Data Engineering
20 85 (9.58%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 441 (49.72%) Java
2 327 (36.87%) Python
3 244 (27.51%) SQL
4 131 (14.77%) Go
5 65 (7.33%) JavaScript
6 64 (7.22%) C#
7 58 (6.54%) Shell Script
8 51 (5.75%) C++
9 48 (5.41%) Bash
10 40 (4.51%) TypeScript
11 35 (3.95%) Scala
12 14 (1.58%) Perl
13 12 (1.35%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.13%) Groovy
15 8 (0.90%) Korn
15 8 (0.90%) T-SQL
16 7 (0.79%) DataWeave
17 6 (0.68%) R
17 6 (0.68%) Rust
18 5 (0.56%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 174 (19.62%) Security Cleared
2 151 (17.02%) SC Cleared
3 51 (5.75%) Degree
4 33 (3.72%) Computer Science Degree
5 26 (2.93%) DV Cleared
6 23 (2.59%) Azure Certification
6 23 (2.59%) BPSS Clearance
7 18 (2.03%) AWS Certification
8 17 (1.92%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.79%) OCP
9 7 (0.79%) Oracle Certification
10 6 (0.68%) Numerate Degree
11 5 (0.56%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 2 (0.23%) CBAP
12 2 (0.23%) CSPO
12 2 (0.23%) IBM Certification
12 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.11%) PMP
13 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 55 (6.20%) Data Quality
2 40 (4.51%) QA
3 22 (2.48%) GDPR
4 10 (1.13%) NCSC
5 6 (0.68%) WCAG
6 5 (0.56%) HIPAA
6 5 (0.56%) HL7
6 5 (0.56%) MiFID
7 4 (0.45%) Accessibility
7 4 (0.45%) SEPA
8 3 (0.34%) Def Stans
8 3 (0.34%) EMIR
8 3 (0.34%) SLA
9 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
9 2 (0.23%) ISO 20022
9 2 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
9 2 (0.23%) Section 508
10 1 (0.11%) Disclosure Scotland
10 1 (0.11%) NIST 800
System Software
1 300 (33.82%) Docker
2 8 (0.90%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (0.56%) HDFS
4 3 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 345 (38.90%) Kubernetes
2 181 (20.41%) Terraform
3 93 (10.48%) Grafana
4 82 (9.24%) Prometheus
5 73 (8.23%) Ansible
6 20 (2.25%) Argo
7 17 (1.92%) Progress Chef
8 15 (1.69%) Packer
9 9 (1.01%) logstash
10 7 (0.79%) Jamf Pro
10 7 (0.79%) Single Sign-On
11 6 (0.68%) Kibana
11 6 (0.68%) Puppet
12 5 (0.56%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.56%) Rancher
13 4 (0.45%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.45%) Hadoop YARN
13 4 (0.45%) Istio
14 3 (0.34%) linkerd
14 3 (0.34%) Oozie
Vendors
1 81 (9.13%) Oracle
2 50 (5.64%) Splunk
3 41 (4.62%) Databricks
4 39 (4.40%) Microsoft
5 34 (3.83%) Sybase
6 31 (3.49%) IBM
7 30 (3.38%) Google
8 29 (3.27%) Confluent
9 24 (2.71%) Dynatrace
10 20 (2.25%) VMware
11 17 (1.92%) Cloudera
12 16 (1.80%) Red Hat
13 15 (1.69%) MuleSoft
14 14 (1.58%) CA Agile Central
15 13 (1.47%) Foundry
15 13 (1.47%) Palantir
16 12 (1.35%) ServiceNow
16 12 (1.35%) TIBCO
17 10 (1.13%) Informatica
17 10 (1.13%) SAP