Kafka Contracts

Apache Kafka
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Kafka skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Kafka over the 6 months leading up to 3 July 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Jul 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 99 148 145
Rank change year-on-year +49 -3 -43
Contract jobs citing Kafka 808 707 1,023
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 2.58% 1.63% 1.83%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 11.35% 7.59% 8.06%
Number of daily rates quoted 522 508 723
10th Percentile £400 £400 £463
25th Percentile £458 £463 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £556 £650
Median % change year-on-year -1.12% -14.42% +1.96%
75th Percentile £700 £700 £775
90th Percentile £833 £788 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £493 £600
% change year-on-year -4.67% -17.83% +4.35%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 9 13
10th Percentile £44.75 £22.55 -
25th Percentile £53.00 £27.00 £75.00
Median hourly rate £62.50 £28.00 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year +123.21% -64.10% +26.83%
75th Percentile £78.70 £38.75 £90.00
90th Percentile £87.73 £45.95 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £78.70 £28.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year +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 7,122 9,314 12,687
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.73% 21.42% 22.74%
Number of daily rates quoted 4,822 6,381 9,223
10th Percentile £350 £350 £388
25th Percentile £413 £425 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -4.74% -2.18% -
75th Percentile £638 £650 £675
90th Percentile £763 £788 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -0.99%
Number of hourly rates quoted 146 280 155
10th Percentile £28.29 £22.50 £28.50
25th Percentile £35.00 £43.00 £50.00
Median hourly rate £55.00 £55.00 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year - -15.38% +23.81%
75th Percentile £68.00 £70.00 £75.00
90th Percentile £80.51 £74.44 £80.70
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £58.30 £62.50
% change year-on-year +7.20% -6.72% +13.64%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Kafka as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Kafka.

Daily rate trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Kafka.

Hourly rate trend for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Kafka over the 6 months to 3 July 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 17 Contract 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 3 July 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 +42 681 £550 -4.35% 687
London +24 440 £636 +6.04% 507
Work from Home +72 305 £575 -4.17% 380
UK excluding London +65 265 £470 -4.67% 245
North of England +31 102 £469 -7.50% 75
North West +37 65 £469 -5.16% 52
Scotland +25 61 £473 -0.53% 47
Midlands +43 38 £450 +9.42% 21
South East +15 36 £435 -8.42% 48
Yorkshire -5 31 £550 +7.11% 21
West Midlands +23 21 £500 +17.65% 16
East Midlands +16 16 £357 -10.19% 5
South West +34 14 £550 -8.33% 25
East of England +29 10 £500 +2.56% 7
Northern Ireland - 7 £470 - 18
North East - 6 £463 - 2
Wales +3 1 - - 4

Kafka
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 94 (11.63%) Apache Spark
2 72 (8.91%) Apache
3 44 (5.45%) Apache Airflow
4 27 (3.34%) Confluence
5 14 (1.73%) Camunda
6 7 (0.87%) Alfresco
6 7 (0.87%) Mule
7 6 (0.74%) Anypoint
7 6 (0.74%) JBoss
7 6 (0.74%) WebSphere
8 4 (0.50%) MQSeries
8 4 (0.50%) Oracle Coherence
8 4 (0.50%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 3 (0.37%) SharePoint
9 3 (0.37%) WebSphere Application Server
10 2 (0.25%) CMS
10 2 (0.25%) GemFire
10 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Exchange
10 2 (0.25%) Oracle Workflow
10 2 (0.25%) WebLogic
Applications
1 7 (0.87%) MS Visio
2 3 (0.37%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.37%) Microsoft Project
3 2 (0.25%) Microsoft Office
3 2 (0.25%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 6 (0.74%) SAP PM
2 5 (0.62%) Payment Gateway
3 4 (0.50%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 3 (0.37%) Oracle 11i
5 2 (0.25%) Dynamics CRM
5 2 (0.25%) Fidessa
5 2 (0.25%) Magento
5 2 (0.25%) Oracle Retail
5 2 (0.25%) SAP CX
5 2 (0.25%) SAP S/4HANA
5 2 (0.25%) Shopify
5 2 (0.25%) Temenos T24
6 1 (0.12%) Distributed Ledger
6 1 (0.12%) Endur
6 1 (0.12%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
Cloud Services
1 388 (48.02%) AWS
2 169 (20.92%) Azure
3 95 (11.76%) GCP
4 89 (11.01%) Serverless
5 69 (8.54%) AWS Lambda
6 63 (7.80%) Amazon S3
7 56 (6.93%) GitHub
8 47 (5.82%) OpenShift
9 41 (5.07%) Azure DevOps
10 34 (4.21%) Snowflake
11 33 (4.08%) dbt
12 30 (3.71%) Amazon ECS
13 28 (3.47%) GitHub Actions
14 24 (2.97%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 23 (2.85%) Amazon Kinesis
16 20 (2.48%) Azure AKS
16 20 (2.48%) Power Platform
17 17 (2.10%) Azure Data Factory
18 16 (1.98%) Amazon SQS
19 15 (1.86%) Entra ID
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.24%) SSL
2 9 (1.11%) HTTP
3 6 (0.74%) Firewall
4 5 (0.62%) DNS
5 4 (0.50%) NAS
5 4 (0.50%) SAN
6 3 (0.37%) AMQP
6 3 (0.37%) Cisco ISE
6 3 (0.37%) DSL
6 3 (0.37%) SSH
7 2 (0.25%) MQTT
7 2 (0.25%) SMS
8 1 (0.12%) Internet
8 1 (0.12%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 195 (24.13%) PostgreSQL
2 173 (21.41%) MongoDB
3 127 (15.72%) Relational Database
4 108 (13.37%) NoSQL
5 69 (8.54%) Apache Cassandra
6 60 (7.43%) Big Data
7 52 (6.44%) Redis
8 49 (6.06%) DB2
9 44 (5.45%) Data Warehouse
10 41 (5.07%) MySQL
11 39 (4.83%) Hadoop
12 35 (4.33%) SQL Server
13 29 (3.59%) BigQuery
14 28 (3.47%) Flink
15 23 (2.85%) Amazon Redshift
15 23 (2.85%) Data Lake
15 23 (2.85%) DynamoDB
15 23 (2.85%) RDBMS
16 21 (2.60%) Amazon Athena
17 20 (2.48%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 143 (17.70%) Jenkins
2 130 (16.09%) JUnit
3 66 (8.17%) Git
4 57 (7.05%) JIRA
5 55 (6.81%) GitLab
5 55 (6.81%) Gradle
6 50 (6.19%) Mockito
7 47 (5.82%) Liquibase
8 35 (4.33%) Artifactory
9 27 (3.34%) Maven
10 17 (2.10%) SonarQube
11 15 (1.86%) Bitbucket
11 15 (1.86%) Cucumber
12 13 (1.61%) Selenium
12 13 (1.61%) Subversion
13 10 (1.24%) IntelliJ
13 10 (1.24%) Postman
14 9 (1.11%) ER Studio
14 9 (1.11%) Sonatype Nexus
15 7 (0.87%) REST Assured
General
1 218 (26.98%) Finance
2 202 (25.00%) Social Skills
3 126 (15.59%) Banking
4 124 (15.35%) Analytical Skills
5 97 (12.00%) Public Sector
6 75 (9.28%) Front Office
7 71 (8.79%) Investment Banking
8 27 (3.34%) Telecoms
9 24 (2.97%) Marketing
10 22 (2.72%) Manufacturing
11 21 (2.60%) Electronics
12 19 (2.35%) Retail
13 18 (2.23%) Presentation Skills
14 13 (1.61%) Financial Institution
15 8 (0.99%) Organisational Skills
16 6 (0.74%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 5 (0.62%) Back Office
18 4 (0.50%) Documentation Skills
18 4 (0.50%) Military
18 4 (0.50%) Police
Job Titles
1 334 (41.34%) Developer
2 202 (25.00%) Java Developer
3 138 (17.08%) Senior
4 113 (13.99%) Architect
5 89 (11.01%) Data Engineer
6 84 (10.40%) Lead
7 74 (9.16%) Senior Developer
8 54 (6.68%) Senior Java Developer
9 51 (6.31%) Software Engineer
10 45 (5.57%) DevOps Engineer
11 39 (4.83%) Lead Developer
11 39 (4.83%) Solutions Architect
12 37 (4.58%) Data Architect
13 33 (4.08%) SC Cleared Java Developer
14 30 (3.71%) AWS Engineer
14 30 (3.71%) Full-Stack Developer
14 30 (3.71%) Lead Java Developer
14 30 (3.71%) Python Engineer
15 28 (3.47%) SQL Developer
16 26 (3.22%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 192 (23.76%) Spring
2 138 (17.08%) Spring Boot
3 119 (14.73%) React
4 78 (9.65%) REST
5 74 (9.16%) gRPC
6 58 (7.18%) RabbitMQ
7 54 (6.68%) Swagger
8 53 (6.56%) RESTful
9 47 (5.82%) OpenAPI
10 46 (5.69%) AngularJS
11 42 (5.20%) JMS
11 42 (5.20%) Node.js
12 35 (4.33%) ActiveMQ
12 35 (4.33%) GraphQL
13 34 (4.21%) .NET
14 33 (4.08%) OAuth
14 33 (4.08%) XML
15 32 (3.96%) J2EE
16 31 (3.84%) Web Services
17 29 (3.59%) HTML
Miscellaneous
1 104 (12.87%) Distributed Systems
2 55 (6.81%) Data Structures
3 47 (5.82%) Cloud Native
4 44 (5.45%) Equities
5 28 (3.47%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
6 25 (3.09%) Management Information System
7 18 (2.23%) Product Ownership
8 17 (2.10%) Derivative
9 16 (1.98%) Fixed Income
10 15 (1.86%) PKI
11 14 (1.73%) Market Risk
11 14 (1.73%) Public Cloud
12 13 (1.61%) Legacy Systems
13 12 (1.49%) Greenfield Project
14 11 (1.36%) Legacy Applications
14 11 (1.36%) Onboarding
15 10 (1.24%) Algorithms
16 9 (1.11%) Replication
17 8 (0.99%) Data Centre
17 8 (0.99%) Equity Derivative
Operating Systems
1 107 (13.24%) Linux
2 30 (3.71%) Unix
3 26 (3.22%) Windows
4 8 (0.99%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 4 (0.50%) AIX
6 2 (0.25%) Debian
6 2 (0.25%) Ubuntu
6 2 (0.25%) zOS
7 1 (0.12%) Android
7 1 (0.12%) Apple iOS
7 1 (0.12%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 345 (42.70%) Agile
2 296 (36.63%) Microservices
3 259 (32.05%) DevOps
4 257 (31.81%) CI/CD
5 206 (25.50%) Software Engineering
6 181 (22.40%) Problem-Solving
7 145 (17.95%) Open Source
8 139 (17.20%) TDD
9 132 (16.34%) Containerisation
10 111 (13.74%) Event-Driven
11 94 (11.63%) Analytics
12 85 (10.52%) Scrum
13 83 (10.27%) Data Pipeline
14 81 (10.02%) Migration
14 81 (10.02%) SDLC
15 77 (9.53%) Test Automation
16 73 (9.03%) Mentoring
17 72 (8.91%) Data Engineering
17 72 (8.91%) Full-Stack Development
18 71 (8.79%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 405 (50.12%) Java
2 275 (34.03%) Python
3 272 (33.66%) SQL
4 105 (13.00%) Go
5 81 (10.02%) TypeScript
6 71 (8.79%) JavaScript
7 64 (7.92%) Shell Script
8 47 (5.82%) C#
9 34 (4.21%) Scala
10 33 (4.08%) C++
11 29 (3.59%) Bash
12 17 (2.10%) Perl
13 8 (0.99%) PL/SQL
14 7 (0.87%) Groovy
15 6 (0.74%) DataWeave
15 6 (0.74%) Kusto Query Language
16 5 (0.62%) Bicep
16 5 (0.62%) Clojure
16 5 (0.62%) Korn
16 5 (0.62%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 183 (22.65%) Security Cleared
2 166 (20.54%) SC Cleared
3 56 (6.93%) Degree
4 23 (2.85%) Computer Science Degree
5 19 (2.35%) AWS Certification
6 16 (1.98%) Numerate Degree
7 14 (1.73%) DV Cleared
8 11 (1.36%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 9 (1.11%) AWS Certified Developer
10 8 (0.99%) Master's Degree
11 6 (0.74%) BPSS Clearance
12 4 (0.50%) Azure Certification
13 2 (0.25%) CISSP
13 2 (0.25%) IBM Certification
14 1 (0.12%) DBS Check
14 1 (0.12%) ISTQB
14 1 (0.12%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 38 (4.70%) Data Quality
2 24 (2.97%) QA
3 22 (2.72%) GDPR
4 11 (1.36%) Accessibility
5 9 (1.11%) Def Stans
6 7 (0.87%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 6 (0.74%) PCI DSS
8 5 (0.62%) ISO 20022
8 5 (0.62%) WCAG
9 4 (0.50%) HIPAA
10 3 (0.37%) Disclosure Scotland
10 3 (0.37%) EMIR
10 3 (0.37%) ISO/IEC 27001
10 3 (0.37%) MiFID
10 3 (0.37%) NCSC
10 3 (0.37%) SEPA
11 2 (0.25%) HL7
11 2 (0.25%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.25%) Section 508
12 1 (0.12%) NIST
System Software
1 254 (31.44%) Docker
2 11 (1.36%) Apache ZooKeeper
3 9 (1.11%) VMware Infrastructure
4 4 (0.50%) HDFS
5 1 (0.12%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 283 (35.02%) Kubernetes
2 129 (15.97%) Terraform
3 50 (6.19%) Prometheus
4 45 (5.57%) Grafana
5 41 (5.07%) Ansible
6 11 (1.36%) Istio
7 10 (1.24%) Puppet
8 8 (0.99%) Kibana
8 8 (0.99%) logstash
8 8 (0.99%) Progress Chef
9 7 (0.87%) Control-M
10 6 (0.74%) Packer
11 3 (0.37%) FortiGate
11 3 (0.37%) QRadar
11 3 (0.37%) Rundeck
11 3 (0.37%) Single Sign-On
11 3 (0.37%) Trend Micro Deep Security
12 2 (0.25%) CloudHub
12 2 (0.25%) Hadoop YARN
12 2 (0.25%) Kustomize
Vendors
1 88 (10.89%) Oracle
2 46 (5.69%) Sybase
3 39 (4.83%) Splunk
4 36 (4.46%) SAP
5 35 (4.33%) Google
6 31 (3.84%) Microsoft
7 29 (3.59%) Databricks
8 24 (2.97%) IBM
9 21 (2.60%) MuleSoft
10 19 (2.35%) Confluent
11 17 (2.10%) Dynatrace
12 16 (1.98%) CA Agile Central
13 15 (1.86%) Red Hat
14 14 (1.73%) Informatica
14 14 (1.73%) Salesforce
15 13 (1.61%) ServiceNow
16 12 (1.49%) Cloudera
16 12 (1.49%) VMware
17 10 (1.24%) TIBCO
18 8 (0.99%) Palantir