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 27 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
27 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 117 107 164
Rank change year-on-year -10 +57 -30
Contract jobs citing Kafka 953 735 654
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.16% 2.53% 1.48%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.18% 11.15% 7.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 606 459 505
10th Percentile £363 £383 £400
25th Percentile £416 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £540
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +1.85% -16.92%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £675
90th Percentile £784 £838 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £490
% change year-on-year -1.06% -4.08% -14.78%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 4 5
10th Percentile £52.00 £51.09 £27.04
25th Percentile £64.75 £68.84 £35.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £38.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +122.34% -48.67%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £44.54
90th Percentile £92.50 - £59.06
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £78.70 £36.75
% change year-on-year -11.41% +114.15% -52.88%

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 9,361 6,592 8,986
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.23% 22.71% 20.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,230 4,502 6,265
10th Percentile £358 £363 £331
25th Percentile £415 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% - -4.55%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £496 £498
% change year-on-year +0.78% -0.28% -1.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 257 98 189
10th Percentile £35.15 £26.25 £20.72
25th Percentile £52.50 £43.13 £37.08
Median hourly rate £65.00 £63.25 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +2.77% +29.82% -25.05%
75th Percentile £70.00 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £85.05 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £48.72
% change year-on-year - +33.42% -25.05%

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 27 March 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 27 March 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 27 March 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 -16 842 £540 -7.69% 194
London -13 535 £600 -4.76% 123
Work from Home -2 348 £600 - 90
UK excluding London -52 274 £465 -1.06% 101
North of England -42 118 £465 -7.00% 33
South East -14 64 £450 -11.55% 31
North West -30 58 £475 - 22
Yorkshire -22 52 £460 -35.44% 6
Midlands -41 47 £500 +40.45% 5
South West -6 32 £550 -12.00% 16
West Midlands -38 30 £550 -8.33% 4
Scotland -21 20 £475 +7.95% 7
East Midlands -26 17 £407 +14.40% 1
North East -9 14 £450 -3.23% 5
East of England -35 11 £475 +48.44% 9
Wales -12 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
1 119 (12.49%) Apache Spark
2 64 (6.72%) Apache
3 47 (4.93%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (3.15%) Confluence
5 6 (0.63%) Camunda
5 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
5 6 (0.63%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.52%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.52%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.42%) WebSphere
8 3 (0.31%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 5 (0.52%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.21%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.10%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.42%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.42%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.31%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.10%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 596 (62.54%) AWS
2 276 (28.96%) Azure
3 170 (17.84%) GCP
4 167 (17.52%) GitHub
5 129 (13.54%) Serverless
6 120 (12.59%) Amazon S3
7 118 (12.38%) GitHub Actions
8 94 (9.86%) AWS Lambda
9 77 (8.08%) Amazon EKS
10 72 (7.56%) AWS CloudFormation
11 63 (6.61%) OpenShift
12 58 (6.09%) Power Platform
13 55 (5.77%) Amazon ECS
14 53 (5.56%) Azure DevOps
15 52 (5.46%) Amazon SQS
16 44 (4.62%) Amazon Kinesis
17 43 (4.51%) Azure Data Factory
18 41 (4.30%) Amazon CloudWatch
19 39 (4.09%) Snowflake
20 37 (3.88%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.10%) Firewall
2 16 (1.68%) HTTP
3 12 (1.26%) SSL
4 10 (1.05%) DNS
5 6 (0.63%) FTP
5 6 (0.63%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.63%) SMS
5 6 (0.63%) SSH
6 5 (0.52%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.31%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.10%) 4G
9 1 (0.10%) 5G
9 1 (0.10%) Broadband
9 1 (0.10%) MQTT
9 1 (0.10%) NAS
9 1 (0.10%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 193 (20.25%) PostgreSQL
2 139 (14.59%) MongoDB
3 137 (14.38%) NoSQL
4 77 (8.08%) Apache Cassandra
5 69 (7.24%) Relational Database
6 64 (6.72%) Data Warehouse
7 60 (6.30%) Data Lake
8 49 (5.14%) Big Data
8 49 (5.14%) Elasticsearch
9 47 (4.93%) DynamoDB
10 46 (4.83%) Power BI
11 43 (4.51%) SQL Server
12 40 (4.20%) Amazon RDS
12 40 (4.20%) Redis
13 38 (3.99%) Flink
14 36 (3.78%) Amazon Athena
14 36 (3.78%) MySQL
15 35 (3.67%) Hadoop
15 35 (3.67%) Metadata
16 33 (3.46%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 156 (16.37%) Jenkins
2 134 (14.06%) GitLab
3 107 (11.23%) Git
4 77 (8.08%) JUnit
5 63 (6.61%) JIRA
6 31 (3.25%) Mockito
7 30 (3.15%) Cucumber
8 21 (2.20%) JMeter
9 20 (2.10%) Gradle
10 19 (1.99%) Gatling
10 19 (1.99%) Sonatype Nexus
11 11 (1.15%) Artifactory
11 11 (1.15%) Maven
12 10 (1.05%) CircleCI
12 10 (1.05%) REST Assured
12 10 (1.05%) Selenium
13 9 (0.94%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.94%) Postman
14 7 (0.73%) SonarQube
15 6 (0.63%) Liquibase
General
1 263 (27.60%) Finance
2 191 (20.04%) Social Skills
3 125 (13.12%) Banking
4 72 (7.56%) Analytical Skills
5 70 (7.35%) Public Sector
6 57 (5.98%) Front Office
7 35 (3.67%) Investment Banking
8 23 (2.41%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.89%) Financial Institution
10 9 (0.94%) Influencing Skills
10 9 (0.94%) Marketing
10 9 (0.94%) Telecoms
11 8 (0.84%) Law
12 6 (0.63%) Retail
13 4 (0.42%) Aerospace
13 4 (0.42%) Automotive
13 4 (0.42%) Billing
14 3 (0.31%) Corporate Banking
14 3 (0.31%) Military
14 3 (0.31%) Publishing
Job Titles
1 342 (35.89%) Developer
2 248 (26.02%) Senior
3 168 (17.63%) Java Developer
4 151 (15.84%) Data Engineer
5 121 (12.70%) Lead
6 116 (12.17%) Senior Developer
7 102 (10.70%) Software Engineer
8 99 (10.39%) Architect
9 60 (6.30%) Senior Java Developer
10 52 (5.46%) Java Engineer
11 48 (5.04%) DevOps Engineer
12 46 (4.83%) Full-Stack Developer
13 45 (4.72%) AWS Architect
14 39 (4.09%) Solutions Architect
15 38 (3.99%) AWS Engineer
15 38 (3.99%) Kafka Developer
16 37 (3.88%) Senior Data Engineer
17 33 (3.46%) Developer/Software Engineer
18 32 (3.36%) AWS Developer
18 32 (3.36%) Data Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 208 (21.83%) Spring
2 187 (19.62%) Spring Boot
3 122 (12.80%) REST
4 111 (11.65%) Node.js
5 104 (10.91%) React
6 95 (9.97%) gRPC
7 93 (9.76%) RESTful
8 84 (8.81%) RabbitMQ
9 48 (5.04%) GraphQL
10 47 (4.93%) AngularJS
11 44 (4.62%) OpenTelemetry
12 43 (4.51%) JSON
12 43 (4.51%) Middleware
13 41 (4.30%) PySpark
14 34 (3.57%) Redux
15 31 (3.25%) OAuth
16 30 (3.15%) Keycloak
17 29 (3.04%) Apache Avro
18 27 (2.83%) OAuth2
19 26 (2.73%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 159 (16.68%) Distributed Systems
2 141 (14.80%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.25%) Fixed Income
4 47 (4.93%) Management Information System
5 35 (3.67%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.41%) Hybrid Cloud
7 21 (2.20%) Data Structures
8 20 (2.10%) Derivative
8 20 (2.10%) Equities
9 19 (1.99%) Onboarding
10 15 (1.57%) Legacy Systems
11 14 (1.47%) Market Risk
12 13 (1.36%) Algorithms
12 13 (1.36%) Data Protection Act
13 12 (1.26%) Clustering
13 12 (1.26%) Enterprise Software
14 11 (1.15%) Replication
15 10 (1.05%) Greenfield Project
15 10 (1.05%) Legacy Applications
16 9 (0.94%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 117 (12.28%) Linux
2 56 (5.88%) Unix
3 33 (3.46%) Windows
4 7 (0.73%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.52%) AIX
6 3 (0.31%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 3 (0.31%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) CentOS
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
7 2 (0.21%) VMS
8 1 (0.10%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.10%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 423 (44.39%) CI/CD
2 336 (35.26%) Microservices
3 327 (34.31%) Agile
4 286 (30.01%) DevOps
5 226 (23.71%) Software Engineering
6 210 (22.04%) Event-Driven
7 200 (20.99%) Observability
8 188 (19.73%) Containerisation
9 178 (18.68%) Problem-Solving
10 171 (17.94%) Analytics
11 167 (17.52%) Infrastructure as Code
12 164 (17.21%) Data Pipeline
13 153 (16.05%) Data Modelling
14 151 (15.84%) Data Engineering
15 146 (15.32%) ETL
16 132 (13.85%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 129 (13.54%) Test Automation
18 112 (11.75%) Full-Stack Development
19 110 (11.54%) Open Source
20 102 (10.70%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 449 (47.11%) Java
2 333 (34.94%) Python
3 277 (29.07%) SQL
4 141 (14.80%) Go
5 95 (9.97%) JavaScript
6 89 (9.34%) TypeScript
7 65 (6.82%) C#
8 41 (4.30%) Bash
9 31 (3.25%) Scala
10 24 (2.52%) C++
11 22 (2.31%) Shell Script
12 18 (1.89%) Rust
13 17 (1.78%) PowerShell
14 12 (1.26%) Bicep
15 9 (0.94%) PL/SQL
16 8 (0.84%) Perl
17 6 (0.63%) Korn
17 6 (0.63%) Search Processing Language
18 5 (0.52%) Groovy
18 5 (0.52%) R
Qualifications
1 215 (22.56%) Security Cleared
2 177 (18.57%) SC Cleared
3 46 (4.83%) Degree
4 31 (3.25%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (2.73%) Azure Certification
6 22 (2.31%) AWS Certification
7 19 (1.99%) Computer Science Degree
8 18 (1.89%) DV Cleared
9 13 (1.36%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.84%) OCP
10 8 (0.84%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.63%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 4 (0.42%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.31%) AWS Certified Developer
13 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
13 3 (0.31%) TOGAF Certification
14 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
15 1 (0.10%) PMI Certification
15 1 (0.10%) PMP
15 1 (0.10%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 119 (12.49%) Data Quality
2 51 (5.35%) QA
3 47 (4.93%) GDPR
4 20 (2.10%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.94%) ISO 20022
5 9 (0.94%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (0.94%) NCSC
6 8 (0.84%) NIST
7 7 (0.73%) PCI DSS
8 5 (0.52%) SEPA
9 4 (0.42%) HL7
9 4 (0.42%) SLA
9 4 (0.42%) WCAG
10 3 (0.31%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.31%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 1 (0.10%) JSP 440
System Software
1 331 (34.73%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
2 6 (0.63%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (0.21%) HDFS
3 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.10%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 388 (40.71%) Kubernetes
2 216 (22.67%) Terraform
3 118 (12.38%) Grafana
4 117 (12.28%) Prometheus
5 56 (5.88%) Ansible
6 28 (2.94%) Argo
7 10 (1.05%) Fluentd
7 10 (1.05%) Istio
8 9 (0.94%) Kiali
8 9 (0.94%) Progress Chef
9 8 (0.84%) linkerd
10 7 (0.73%) Rancher
11 5 (0.52%) Puppet
12 4 (0.42%) Kibana
12 4 (0.42%) logstash
12 4 (0.42%) Packer
12 4 (0.42%) Podman
13 2 (0.21%) QRadar
13 2 (0.21%) rkt
13 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 84 (8.81%) Databricks
2 77 (8.08%) Oracle
3 69 (7.24%) Splunk
4 47 (4.93%) Microsoft
5 43 (4.51%) Google
6 34 (3.57%) Confluent
7 27 (2.83%) IBM
7 27 (2.83%) Informatica
8 20 (2.10%) VMware
9 16 (1.68%) Dynatrace
10 15 (1.57%) Red Hat
11 13 (1.36%) ServiceNow
12 12 (1.26%) Sybase
12 12 (1.26%) Talend
13 11 (1.15%) Cloudera
14 9 (0.94%) AppDynamics
15 8 (0.84%) SAP
16 7 (0.73%) Bloomberg
16 7 (0.73%) PagerDuty
16 7 (0.73%) Salesforce