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 23 May 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
23 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 132 110 155
Rank change year-on-year -22 +45 -20
Contract jobs citing Kafka 945 704 660
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.95% 2.46% 1.56%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.91% 10.80% 7.41%
Number of daily rates quoted 575 460 493
10th Percentile £363 £400 £400
25th Percentile £421 £458 £458
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £545
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +0.92% -16.15%
75th Percentile £650 £713 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £763
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £495
% change year-on-year -1.06% -4.95% -10.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 16 4 7
10th Percentile £48.38 £51.09 £22.34
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £24.88
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +205.71% -64.10%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £37.63
90th Percentile £92.50 - £51.65
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -11.05% +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 9,534 6,517 8,902
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.62% 22.78% 20.98%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,271 4,467 6,194
10th Percentile £363 £363 £350
25th Percentile £420 £415 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £535
Median % change year-on-year - -1.78% -2.82%
75th Percentile £624 £638 £650
90th Percentile £730 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 275 104 249
10th Percentile £30.71 £27.43 £21.25
25th Percentile £51.25 £38.89 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +31.58% -26.92%
75th Percentile £71.75 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.60 £81.35 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -26.92%

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 23 May 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 23 May 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 23 May 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 -22 817 £550 -4.35% 188
London -17 518 £600 -7.69% 117
UK excluding London -41 302 £465 -1.06% 96
Work from Home -13 291 £600 - 82
North of England -38 136 £453 -9.50% 31
Yorkshire -19 71 £463 -15.91% 7
North West -42 54 £441 -11.90% 19
South East -45 50 £488 +18.18% 33
Midlands -56 43 £491 +33.86% 3
Scotland -9 41 £450 -4.76% 3
South West -12 30 £525 -7.69% 11
West Midlands -51 25 £507 -7.82% 2
North East -14 20 £450 -2.70% 5
East Midlands -26 18 £407 +14.40% 1
East of England -24 15 £550 +71.14% 4
Wales -11 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
1 134 (14.18%) Apache Spark
2 69 (7.30%) Apache
3 50 (5.29%) Apache Airflow
4 20 (2.12%) Confluence
5 6 (0.63%) Camunda
5 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.53%) WebSphere
7 3 (0.32%) Apache Pulsar
7 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
8 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.21%) Palantir Foundry
8 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
9 1 (0.11%) JBoss
Applications
1 4 (0.42%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
Business Applications
1 3 (0.32%) Bloomberg AIM
1 3 (0.32%) Fidessa
1 3 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
2 2 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 2 (0.21%) Shopify
2 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
3 1 (0.11%) Actimize
3 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
3 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
3 1 (0.11%) Endur
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle 11i
3 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
3 1 (0.11%) SAP BRIM
Cloud Services
1 554 (58.62%) AWS
2 271 (28.68%) Azure
3 160 (16.93%) GCP
4 145 (15.34%) GitHub
5 127 (13.44%) Serverless
6 102 (10.79%) Amazon S3
7 98 (10.37%) GitHub Actions
8 94 (9.95%) AWS Lambda
9 70 (7.41%) Amazon EKS
10 66 (6.98%) Power Platform
11 63 (6.67%) Azure DevOps
11 63 (6.67%) OpenShift
12 55 (5.82%) AWS CloudFormation
13 49 (5.19%) Snowflake
14 47 (4.97%) Amazon ECS
15 44 (4.66%) Amazon SQS
16 42 (4.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 39 (4.13%) dbt
18 38 (4.02%) Amazon Kinesis
19 36 (3.81%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 18 (1.90%) Firewall
2 14 (1.48%) HTTP
3 13 (1.38%) SSL
4 9 (0.95%) DNS
5 6 (0.63%) Network Security
5 6 (0.63%) SMS
6 5 (0.53%) TCP/IP
7 4 (0.42%) NAS
7 4 (0.42%) SAN
8 3 (0.32%) MQTT
8 3 (0.32%) VPN
9 2 (0.21%) FTP
9 2 (0.21%) NaaS
9 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
9 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
9 2 (0.21%) SSH
9 2 (0.21%) WAN
10 1 (0.11%) 4G
10 1 (0.11%) 5G
10 1 (0.11%) Kerberos
Database & Business Intelligence
1 193 (20.42%) PostgreSQL
2 156 (16.51%) MongoDB
3 131 (13.86%) NoSQL
4 88 (9.31%) Relational Database
5 63 (6.67%) Big Data
6 57 (6.03%) Data Lake
7 56 (5.93%) Data Warehouse
8 53 (5.61%) Power BI
8 53 (5.61%) SQL Server
9 52 (5.50%) Apache Cassandra
10 50 (5.29%) Redis
11 45 (4.76%) Elasticsearch
12 38 (4.02%) Amazon Athena
12 38 (4.02%) DynamoDB
12 38 (4.02%) Flink
13 36 (3.81%) Hadoop
14 35 (3.70%) MySQL
15 31 (3.28%) Amazon Redshift
16 30 (3.17%) Amazon RDS
16 30 (3.17%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 141 (14.92%) Jenkins
2 130 (13.76%) Git
2 130 (13.76%) GitLab
3 62 (6.56%) JUnit
4 58 (6.14%) JIRA
5 42 (4.44%) Mockito
6 28 (2.96%) Selenium
7 26 (2.75%) Gradle
8 22 (2.33%) REST Assured
9 21 (2.22%) Cucumber
10 20 (2.12%) Gatling
11 15 (1.59%) Liquibase
11 15 (1.59%) Serenity BDD
12 14 (1.48%) Postman
13 13 (1.38%) Maven
14 10 (1.06%) Jaeger
15 9 (0.95%) SonarQube
16 7 (0.74%) JMeter
16 7 (0.74%) Snyk
17 6 (0.63%) Artifactory
General
1 254 (26.88%) Finance
2 170 (17.99%) Social Skills
3 122 (12.91%) Banking
4 79 (8.36%) Public Sector
5 76 (8.04%) Analytical Skills
6 45 (4.76%) Front Office
7 36 (3.81%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.86%) Documentation Skills
9 25 (2.65%) Financial Institution
10 13 (1.38%) Retail
11 12 (1.27%) Influencing Skills
11 12 (1.27%) Marketing
12 11 (1.16%) Law
13 10 (1.06%) Telecoms
14 9 (0.95%) Publishing
15 7 (0.74%) Corporate Banking
15 7 (0.74%) Military
16 6 (0.63%) Automotive
16 6 (0.63%) Inclusion and Diversity
17 5 (0.53%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 317 (33.54%) Developer
2 204 (21.59%) Senior
3 159 (16.83%) Data Engineer
4 152 (16.08%) Java Developer
5 118 (12.49%) Lead
6 108 (11.43%) Architect
7 93 (9.84%) Senior Developer
8 90 (9.52%) Software Engineer
9 65 (6.88%) Java Engineer
10 52 (5.50%) AWS Architect
11 50 (5.29%) Senior Java Developer
12 44 (4.66%) Full-Stack Developer
13 43 (4.55%) DevOps Engineer
14 38 (4.02%) Solutions Architect
15 35 (3.70%) Principal Engineer
16 34 (3.60%) Senior Data Engineer
17 33 (3.49%) Developer/Software Engineer
18 32 (3.39%) Full-Stack Engineer
19 31 (3.28%) Data Architect
20 30 (3.17%) Lead Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 229 (24.23%) Spring
2 211 (22.33%) Spring Boot
3 132 (13.97%) REST
4 120 (12.70%) RESTful
5 113 (11.96%) React
6 105 (11.11%) Node.js
7 84 (8.89%) RabbitMQ
8 58 (6.14%) GraphQL
8 58 (6.14%) gRPC
8 58 (6.14%) OpenTelemetry
9 52 (5.50%) JSON
10 45 (4.76%) Middleware
11 43 (4.55%) PySpark
12 42 (4.44%) Apache Avro
13 39 (4.13%) Redux
14 37 (3.92%) AngularJS
14 37 (3.92%) OAuth
15 35 (3.70%) Swagger
16 34 (3.60%) OpenAPI
17 32 (3.39%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 166 (17.57%) Distributed Systems
2 151 (15.98%) Cloud Native
3 44 (4.66%) Management Information System
4 41 (4.34%) Fixed Income
5 32 (3.39%) Product Ownership
6 27 (2.86%) Data Structures
7 20 (2.12%) Onboarding
8 17 (1.80%) Equities
8 17 (1.80%) Legacy Systems
9 16 (1.69%) Hybrid Cloud
10 15 (1.59%) Enterprise Software
11 14 (1.48%) Algorithms
11 14 (1.48%) Derivative
12 13 (1.38%) Clustering
13 12 (1.27%) SWIFT Messaging Network
14 11 (1.16%) Data Protection Act
14 11 (1.16%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
14 11 (1.16%) Hedge funds
15 10 (1.06%) CMDB
16 9 (0.95%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 96 (10.16%) Linux
2 55 (5.82%) Unix
3 32 (3.39%) Windows
4 8 (0.85%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (0.53%) Ubuntu
6 3 (0.32%) VMS
6 3 (0.32%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) AIX
7 2 (0.21%) Debian
7 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
7 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
7 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 1 (0.11%) Android
8 1 (0.11%) Apple iOS
8 1 (0.11%) CentOS
8 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 427 (45.19%) CI/CD
2 346 (36.61%) Microservices
3 295 (31.22%) Agile
4 287 (30.37%) DevOps
5 253 (26.77%) Event-Driven
6 220 (23.28%) Observability
7 199 (21.06%) Containerisation
8 191 (20.21%) Software Engineering
9 174 (18.41%) Data Pipeline
10 167 (17.67%) Data Modelling
11 164 (17.35%) Infrastructure as Code
12 163 (17.25%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 158 (16.72%) Analytics
14 150 (15.87%) Data Engineering
15 149 (15.77%) Problem-Solving
16 144 (15.24%) Test Automation
17 142 (15.03%) ETL
18 111 (11.75%) Full-Stack Development
19 103 (10.90%) AI
20 98 (10.37%) Data Governance
Programming Languages
1 424 (44.87%) Java
2 324 (34.29%) Python
3 293 (31.01%) SQL
4 110 (11.64%) TypeScript
5 101 (10.69%) Go
6 94 (9.95%) JavaScript
7 58 (6.14%) C#
8 43 (4.55%) Bash
9 28 (2.96%) Scala
10 19 (2.01%) PowerShell
10 19 (2.01%) Rust
11 16 (1.69%) C++
12 15 (1.59%) Shell Script
13 13 (1.38%) Bicep
14 10 (1.06%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.06%) Search Processing Language
15 7 (0.74%) Perl
16 6 (0.63%) PHP
17 5 (0.53%) C
17 5 (0.53%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 210 (22.22%) Security Cleared
2 164 (17.35%) SC Cleared
3 48 (5.08%) Degree
4 26 (2.75%) BPSS Clearance
5 17 (1.80%) AWS Certification
6 16 (1.69%) DV Cleared
7 14 (1.48%) Azure Certification
8 13 (1.38%) Computer Science Degree
8 13 (1.38%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.74%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 7 (0.74%) SnowPro
10 4 (0.42%) ITIL Certification
11 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) DBS Check
12 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
13 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.11%) CISSP
13 1 (0.11%) PhD
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 108 (11.43%) Data Quality
2 50 (5.29%) QA
3 43 (4.55%) GDPR
4 30 (3.17%) Accessibility
5 19 (2.01%) ISO 20022
6 11 (1.16%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.95%) NIST
8 8 (0.85%) SEPA
9 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
10 6 (0.63%) NCSC
11 4 (0.42%) SLA
11 4 (0.42%) WCAG
12 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
12 3 (0.32%) MiFID
13 2 (0.21%) EMIR
13 2 (0.21%) HL7
13 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
13 2 (0.21%) PSD2
14 1 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 328 (34.71%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 3 (0.32%) Apache ZooKeeper
3 3 (0.32%) HDFS
3 3 (0.32%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
4 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 371 (39.26%) Kubernetes
2 197 (20.85%) Terraform
3 127 (13.44%) Grafana
3 127 (13.44%) Prometheus
4 59 (6.24%) Ansible
5 26 (2.75%) Argo
6 11 (1.16%) Istio
6 11 (1.16%) Kibana
7 9 (0.95%) Kiali
8 7 (0.74%) Fluentd
8 7 (0.74%) linkerd
8 7 (0.74%) Puppet
9 6 (0.63%) logstash
9 6 (0.63%) Podman
9 6 (0.63%) Rancher
10 5 (0.53%) Kustomize
11 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
11 2 (0.21%) NetBackup
11 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
11 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 93 (9.84%) Databricks
2 76 (8.04%) Splunk
3 70 (7.41%) Oracle
4 45 (4.76%) Microsoft
5 36 (3.81%) Google
6 29 (3.07%) Confluent
7 22 (2.33%) Informatica
8 18 (1.90%) IBM
9 13 (1.38%) Dynatrace
9 13 (1.38%) Red Hat
10 12 (1.27%) Salesforce
11 11 (1.16%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.95%) Solace
12 9 (0.95%) Talend
13 8 (0.85%) MuleSoft
13 8 (0.85%) VMware
14 7 (0.74%) AppDynamics
14 7 (0.74%) Sybase
15 6 (0.63%) Pega
16 5 (0.53%) Teradata