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 4 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 121 113 183
Rank change year-on-year -8 +70 -66
Contract jobs citing Kafka 849 711 598
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.31% 2.19% 1.39%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.28% 10.02% 6.43%
Number of daily rates quoted 564 427 469
10th Percentile £360 £380 £425
25th Percentile £413 £475 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £532 £585 £600
Median % change year-on-year -9.10% -2.50% -5.51%
75th Percentile £650 £725 £738
90th Percentile £738 £825 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -5.26% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 3 4
10th Percentile £37.63 £36.82 £47.39
25th Percentile £40.00 £53.95 £58.71
Median hourly rate £54.00 £85.00 £71.50
Median % change year-on-year -36.47% +18.88% -2.39%
75th Percentile £76.75 £90.63 £81.00
90th Percentile £94.50 £92.50 £86.40
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £85.00 £71.50
% change year-on-year -52.94% +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 8,255 7,095 9,305
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.43% 21.89% 21.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,478 4,500 6,613
10th Percentile £356 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.58% -2.27% -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £768 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £492 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -1.60% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 199 82 168
10th Percentile £32.72 £21.33 £30.79
25th Percentile £45.00 £33.69 £46.18
Median hourly rate £61.00 £62.50 £53.50
Median % change year-on-year -2.40% +16.82% -17.69%
75th Percentile £67.50 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £75.00 £77.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £63.00 £62.50 £52.50
% change year-on-year +0.80% +19.05% -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 4 January 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 4 January 2026.

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 4 January 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 -10 735 £550 -10.20% 447
London -1 486 £584 -6.60% 132
Work from Home +20 303 £575 - 257
UK excluding London -21 234 £450 -5.26% 358
North of England -25 93 £488 -11.36% 75
South East +2 55 £433 -16.02% 110
North West -18 45 £435 -11.22% 38
Midlands -13 44 £450 +12.50% 57
Yorkshire -26 42 £575 -19.30% 32
Scotland +8 38 £463 +22.03% 14
West Midlands -29 23 £550 -21.43% 28
East Midlands -7 21 £402 +12.92% 25
South West +3 20 £550 -15.38% 40
North East -7 10 £506 -18.91% 5
East of England -27 1 £450 +42.86% 52

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 75 (8.83%) Apache Spark
2 45 (5.30%) Apache
3 41 (4.83%) Confluence
4 36 (4.24%) Apache Airflow
5 7 (0.82%) Mule
6 5 (0.59%) Anypoint
6 5 (0.59%) CMS
7 4 (0.47%) Microsoft Exchange
7 4 (0.47%) MQSeries
8 3 (0.35%) Camunda
8 3 (0.35%) OpenStack
9 2 (0.24%) JBoss
9 2 (0.24%) Luigi
9 2 (0.24%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.24%) Tomcat
10 1 (0.12%) Apache Pig
10 1 (0.12%) CICS
10 1 (0.12%) IIS
10 1 (0.12%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 1 (0.12%) SAS
Applications
1 4 (0.47%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.24%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.12%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (0.47%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.35%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.24%) Actimize
3 2 (0.24%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.24%) Shopify
4 1 (0.12%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.12%) Bloomberg AIM
4 1 (0.12%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.12%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.12%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 458 (53.95%) AWS
2 229 (26.97%) Azure
3 150 (17.67%) GitHub
4 118 (13.90%) GCP
5 109 (12.84%) Serverless
6 107 (12.60%) GitHub Actions
7 78 (9.19%) Amazon S3
7 78 (9.19%) AWS Lambda
8 58 (6.83%) Amazon EKS
8 58 (6.83%) AWS CloudFormation
9 47 (5.54%) Azure DevOps
10 44 (5.18%) OpenShift
11 43 (5.06%) Amazon SQS
12 42 (4.95%) Amazon Kinesis
13 41 (4.83%) Amazon ECS
14 40 (4.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 35 (4.12%) Azure Data Factory
16 32 (3.77%) Power Platform
17 27 (3.18%) Amazon EC2
18 22 (2.59%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 13 (1.53%) DNS
2 11 (1.30%) Firewall
2 11 (1.30%) SSL
3 7 (0.82%) Kerberos
3 7 (0.82%) SSH
4 6 (0.71%) FTP
4 6 (0.71%) HTTP
5 5 (0.59%) TCP/IP
6 4 (0.47%) AMQP
6 4 (0.47%) DSL
6 4 (0.47%) MQTT
6 4 (0.47%) SMS
7 3 (0.35%) VPN
8 1 (0.12%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 166 (19.55%) PostgreSQL
2 160 (18.85%) MongoDB
3 129 (15.19%) NoSQL
4 76 (8.95%) Apache Cassandra
5 53 (6.24%) Redis
6 52 (6.12%) Relational Database
7 50 (5.89%) Big Data
8 44 (5.18%) Amazon RDS
9 41 (4.83%) DynamoDB
9 41 (4.83%) SQL Server
10 39 (4.59%) Elasticsearch
11 36 (4.24%) Data Lake
11 36 (4.24%) Data Warehouse
12 32 (3.77%) Hadoop
13 28 (3.30%) DB2
14 27 (3.18%) Amazon Redshift
14 27 (3.18%) Power BI
15 26 (3.06%) Amazon Athena
16 25 (2.94%) Metadata
17 23 (2.71%) Amazon Aurora
Development Applications
1 168 (19.79%) Jenkins
2 134 (15.78%) GitLab
3 117 (13.78%) Git
4 85 (10.01%) JUnit
5 60 (7.07%) JIRA
6 46 (5.42%) Mockito
7 25 (2.94%) JMeter
8 24 (2.83%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.83%) Gradle
8 24 (2.83%) Sonatype Nexus
9 21 (2.47%) SonarQube
10 19 (2.24%) Maven
11 14 (1.65%) Gatling
12 12 (1.41%) SoapUI
13 11 (1.30%) Artifactory
14 10 (1.18%) CircleCI
15 9 (1.06%) Subversion
16 8 (0.94%) Atlassian Bamboo
16 8 (0.94%) TeamCity
17 7 (0.82%) Postman
General
1 234 (27.56%) Finance
2 212 (24.97%) Social Skills
3 135 (15.90%) Banking
4 81 (9.54%) Analytical Skills
5 70 (8.24%) Public Sector
6 56 (6.60%) Investment Banking
7 28 (3.30%) Front Office
8 12 (1.41%) Documentation Skills
9 11 (1.30%) Financial Institution
10 8 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.82%) Marketing
12 6 (0.71%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (0.71%) Retail
13 5 (0.59%) Aerospace
13 5 (0.59%) Law
14 3 (0.35%) Manufacturing
14 3 (0.35%) Military
14 3 (0.35%) Telecoms
15 2 (0.24%) Corporate Banking
15 2 (0.24%) Games
Job Titles
1 325 (38.28%) Developer
2 253 (29.80%) Senior
3 195 (22.97%) Java Developer
4 127 (14.96%) Senior Developer
5 100 (11.78%) Data Engineer
6 75 (8.83%) Lead
6 75 (8.83%) Senior Java Developer
7 73 (8.60%) Software Engineer
8 64 (7.54%) DevOps Engineer
9 59 (6.95%) Architect
10 42 (4.95%) Kafka Developer
11 41 (4.83%) AWS Engineer
12 39 (4.59%) Kafka Engineer
13 37 (4.36%) AWS Developer
13 37 (4.36%) Full-Stack Developer
14 34 (4.00%) Platform Engineer
15 33 (3.89%) Python Engineer
16 31 (3.65%) Java Engineer
17 28 (3.30%) Senior Data Engineer
18 22 (2.59%) AWS Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 193 (22.73%) Spring
2 153 (18.02%) Spring Boot
3 101 (11.90%) REST
4 97 (11.43%) gRPC
5 80 (9.42%) React
6 78 (9.19%) RabbitMQ
7 74 (8.72%) RESTful
8 60 (7.07%) Node.js
9 40 (4.71%) AngularJS
10 37 (4.36%) Hibernate
10 37 (4.36%) JMS
11 36 (4.24%) .NET
11 36 (4.24%) ActiveMQ
12 35 (4.12%) Keycloak
12 35 (4.12%) Middleware
13 34 (4.00%) OAuth
14 33 (3.89%) JSON
14 33 (3.89%) PySpark
15 32 (3.77%) OAuth2
16 28 (3.30%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 116 (13.66%) Distributed Systems
2 92 (10.84%) Cloud Native
3 36 (4.24%) Equities
3 36 (4.24%) Management Information System
4 32 (3.77%) Data Structures
5 25 (2.94%) Product Ownership
6 24 (2.83%) Derivative
7 23 (2.71%) Replication
8 19 (2.24%) Market Risk
9 16 (1.88%) Fixed Income
10 15 (1.77%) Legacy Applications
11 14 (1.65%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (1.41%) Hybrid Cloud
13 10 (1.18%) Greenfield Project
13 10 (1.18%) Legacy Systems
14 9 (1.06%) Data Protection Act
14 9 (1.06%) Onboarding
14 9 (1.06%) Public Cloud
15 8 (0.94%) Algorithms
15 8 (0.94%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 162 (19.08%) Linux
2 86 (10.13%) Unix
3 26 (3.06%) Windows
4 13 (1.53%) Mac OS X
5 9 (1.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (0.82%) CentOS
7 5 (0.59%) AIX
8 3 (0.35%) VMS
9 1 (0.12%) Ubuntu
9 1 (0.12%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.12%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 356 (41.93%) CI/CD
2 354 (41.70%) Microservices
3 312 (36.75%) Agile
4 255 (30.04%) DevOps
5 234 (27.56%) Software Engineering
6 181 (21.32%) Problem-Solving
7 174 (20.49%) Containerisation
8 156 (18.37%) Event-Driven
9 150 (17.67%) Infrastructure as Code
10 143 (16.84%) Observability
11 125 (14.72%) Test Automation
12 114 (13.43%) Data Pipeline
13 113 (13.31%) Open Source
14 105 (12.37%) Analytics
15 103 (12.13%) TDD
16 91 (10.72%) Data Engineering
17 88 (10.37%) ETL
17 88 (10.37%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 87 (10.25%) Mentoring
19 80 (9.42%) SDLC
Programming Languages
1 409 (48.17%) Java
2 298 (35.10%) Python
3 243 (28.62%) SQL
4 121 (14.25%) Go
5 72 (8.48%) C#
6 64 (7.54%) JavaScript
7 55 (6.48%) Shell Script
8 48 (5.65%) Bash
9 46 (5.42%) C++
10 30 (3.53%) TypeScript
11 29 (3.42%) Scala
12 14 (1.65%) PL/SQL
12 14 (1.65%) Rust
13 11 (1.30%) Perl
14 9 (1.06%) Groovy
14 9 (1.06%) PowerShell
15 7 (0.82%) Korn
16 6 (0.71%) T-SQL
17 5 (0.59%) RPG
17 5 (0.59%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 178 (20.97%) Security Cleared
2 158 (18.61%) SC Cleared
3 45 (5.30%) Degree
4 30 (3.53%) BPSS Clearance
5 29 (3.42%) Computer Science Degree
6 27 (3.18%) Azure Certification
7 22 (2.59%) DV Cleared
8 15 (1.77%) AWS Certification
9 14 (1.65%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.94%) OCP
10 8 (0.94%) Oracle Certification
11 3 (0.35%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 2 (0.24%) CBAP
12 2 (0.24%) CSPO
12 2 (0.24%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.24%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.12%) ITIL Certification
13 1 (0.12%) MySQL Certification
13 1 (0.12%) PMI Certification
13 1 (0.12%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 65 (7.66%) Data Quality
2 41 (4.83%) QA
3 29 (3.42%) GDPR
4 12 (1.41%) NCSC
5 8 (0.94%) ISO 20022
6 6 (0.71%) Accessibility
6 6 (0.71%) SEPA
6 6 (0.71%) SLA
6 6 (0.71%) WCAG
7 5 (0.59%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.59%) PCI DSS
8 4 (0.47%) NIST
9 3 (0.35%) Def Stans
9 3 (0.35%) HL7
9 3 (0.35%) MiFID
10 2 (0.24%) Actionable Recommendations
10 2 (0.24%) HIPAA
10 2 (0.24%) ISO 8583
10 2 (0.24%) PSD2
11 1 (0.12%) EMIR
System Software
1 313 (36.87%) Docker
2 8 (0.94%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (0.71%) HDFS
4 3 (0.35%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.24%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.24%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 346 (40.75%) Kubernetes
2 203 (23.91%) Terraform
3 103 (12.13%) Grafana
4 86 (10.13%) Prometheus
5 72 (8.48%) Ansible
6 29 (3.42%) Argo
7 16 (1.88%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.18%) Packer
9 8 (0.94%) Istio
10 7 (0.82%) linkerd
10 7 (0.82%) logstash
11 6 (0.71%) Jamf Pro
11 6 (0.71%) Kiali
12 5 (0.59%) Hadoop YARN
12 5 (0.59%) Puppet
12 5 (0.59%) Rancher
12 5 (0.59%) Single Sign-On
13 4 (0.47%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.47%) Kibana
14 3 (0.35%) Oozie
Vendors
1 81 (9.54%) Oracle
2 57 (6.71%) Splunk
3 54 (6.36%) Databricks
4 34 (4.00%) Confluent
4 34 (4.00%) Microsoft
5 31 (3.65%) Google
6 27 (3.18%) IBM
7 25 (2.94%) Dynatrace
8 24 (2.83%) Sybase
8 24 (2.83%) VMware
9 17 (2.00%) Cloudera
10 12 (1.41%) Foundry
10 12 (1.41%) Palantir
10 12 (1.41%) Red Hat
11 10 (1.18%) CA Agile Central
11 10 (1.18%) SAP
12 9 (1.06%) ServiceNow
12 9 (1.06%) TIBCO
13 8 (0.94%) Informatica
14 7 (0.82%) MuleSoft