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 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 121 111 160
Rank change year-on-year -10 +49 -29
Contract jobs citing Kafka 917 734 655
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.26% 2.39% 1.48%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.18% 10.62% 7.15%
Number of daily rates quoted 588 450 508
10th Percentile £363 £367 £400
25th Percentile £416 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £530 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.40% +6.36% -15.38%
75th Percentile £675 £738 £675
90th Percentile £750 £838 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £462 £470 £500
% change year-on-year -1.81% -6.00% -13.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 11 4 4
10th Percentile £40.00 £52.23 £27.16
25th Percentile £52.00 £71.69 £35.32
Median hourly rate £68.00 £88.75 £53.60
Median % change year-on-year -23.38% +65.59% -28.54%
75th Percentile £87.00 £93.75 £68.25
90th Percentile £95.00 - £74.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.00 £85.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -24.71% +30.77% -10.96%

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 9,009 6,912 9,167
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.21% 22.53% 20.66%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,030 4,459 6,428
10th Percentile £358 £358 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £526 £534
Median % change year-on-year -2.57% -1.50% -7.13%
75th Percentile £623 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 220 84 199
10th Percentile £35.00 £25.55 £23.75
25th Percentile £51.19 £39.06 £43.81
Median hourly rate £64.00 £62.50 £54.56
Median % change year-on-year +2.40% +14.55% -16.06%
75th Percentile £70.00 £66.19 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £78.08 £76.72
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £54.50
% change year-on-year - +19.27% -16.15%

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 18 February 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 18 February 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 18 February 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 -15 807 £550 -10.20% 197
London -15 517 £600 -5.88% 117
Work from Home +12 333 £581 -6.06% 111
UK excluding London -25 262 £462 -1.81% 117
North of England -20 115 £475 -11.05% 37
South East +3 62 £433 -21.36% 53
North West -19 57 £449 -11.63% 20
Yorkshire -21 48 £520 -28.31% 11
Midlands -33 45 £500 +40.45% 5
West Midlands -31 28 £550 -8.33% 3
Scotland -6 27 £463 +22.03% 8
South West -8 25 £550 -13.73% 11
East Midlands -18 17 £402 +12.92% 2
North East -3 16 £506 -6.62% 6
East of England -35 5 £500 +57.23% 2
Wales -5 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 98 (10.69%) Apache Spark
2 58 (6.32%) Apache
3 47 (5.13%) Apache Airflow
4 36 (3.93%) Confluence
5 8 (0.87%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.65%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.65%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.55%) Camunda
8 4 (0.44%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.33%) CMS
9 3 (0.33%) MQSeries
9 3 (0.33%) OpenStack
10 2 (0.22%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.22%) JBoss
10 2 (0.22%) SharePoint
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.11%) Luigi
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
11 1 (0.11%) Tomcat
Applications
1 5 (0.55%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
2 1 (0.11%) Maya
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
2 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.44%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.44%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.44%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.33%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.22%) Actimize
3 2 (0.22%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.22%) Shopify
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 541 (59.00%) AWS
2 240 (26.17%) Azure
3 160 (17.45%) GitHub
4 156 (17.01%) GCP
5 125 (13.63%) Serverless
6 113 (12.32%) GitHub Actions
7 105 (11.45%) Amazon S3
8 95 (10.36%) AWS Lambda
9 74 (8.07%) AWS CloudFormation
10 73 (7.96%) Amazon EKS
11 54 (5.89%) Amazon ECS
12 50 (5.45%) OpenShift
13 48 (5.23%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 44 (4.80%) Power Platform
15 42 (4.58%) Amazon Kinesis
15 42 (4.58%) Amazon SQS
16 38 (4.14%) Azure DevOps
17 37 (4.03%) Azure Data Factory
18 31 (3.38%) Amazon EC2
19 28 (3.05%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.74%) Firewall
2 14 (1.53%) HTTP
3 12 (1.31%) DNS
4 11 (1.20%) SSL
5 6 (0.65%) FTP
5 6 (0.65%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.65%) SMS
5 6 (0.65%) SSH
6 4 (0.44%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.33%) VPN
8 2 (0.22%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) 4G
9 1 (0.11%) 5G
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) NAS
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 174 (18.97%) PostgreSQL
2 158 (17.23%) MongoDB
3 134 (14.61%) NoSQL
4 79 (8.62%) Apache Cassandra
5 63 (6.87%) Relational Database
6 54 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
7 53 (5.78%) Elasticsearch
8 47 (5.13%) Big Data
8 47 (5.13%) Data Lake
9 44 (4.80%) Amazon RDS
10 43 (4.69%) DynamoDB
10 43 (4.69%) Redis
11 40 (4.36%) SQL Server
12 33 (3.60%) Amazon Athena
12 33 (3.60%) Hadoop
13 32 (3.49%) Power BI
14 31 (3.38%) Amazon Redshift
14 31 (3.38%) MySQL
15 29 (3.16%) BigQuery
15 29 (3.16%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 154 (16.79%) Jenkins
2 137 (14.94%) GitLab
3 102 (11.12%) Git
4 78 (8.51%) JUnit
5 57 (6.22%) JIRA
6 40 (4.36%) Mockito
7 24 (2.62%) Cucumber
7 24 (2.62%) JMeter
7 24 (2.62%) Sonatype Nexus
8 20 (2.18%) Gradle
9 16 (1.74%) Gatling
10 13 (1.42%) Maven
11 11 (1.20%) Selenium
12 10 (1.09%) Artifactory
12 10 (1.09%) CircleCI
13 9 (0.98%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.98%) REST Assured
14 7 (0.76%) Postman
14 7 (0.76%) SoapUI
15 6 (0.65%) SonarQube
General
1 252 (27.48%) Finance
2 205 (22.36%) Social Skills
3 126 (13.74%) Banking
4 76 (8.29%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (7.31%) Public Sector
6 47 (5.13%) Investment Banking
7 41 (4.47%) Front Office
8 25 (2.73%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.85%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.09%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (0.98%) Marketing
12 7 (0.76%) Retail
13 6 (0.65%) Telecoms
14 5 (0.55%) Law
15 4 (0.44%) Aerospace
15 4 (0.44%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 4 (0.44%) Military
16 3 (0.33%) Corporate Banking
16 3 (0.33%) Legal
16 3 (0.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 345 (37.62%) Developer
2 262 (28.57%) Senior
3 193 (21.05%) Java Developer
4 130 (14.18%) Senior Developer
5 124 (13.52%) Data Engineer
6 106 (11.56%) Lead
7 88 (9.60%) Software Engineer
8 80 (8.72%) Architect
9 79 (8.62%) Senior Java Developer
10 59 (6.43%) DevOps Engineer
11 45 (4.91%) Full-Stack Developer
12 44 (4.80%) Kafka Developer
13 39 (4.25%) AWS Engineer
14 38 (4.14%) AWS Developer
15 37 (4.03%) AWS Architect
15 37 (4.03%) Java Engineer
16 35 (3.82%) Kafka Engineer
17 32 (3.49%) Senior Data Engineer
18 27 (2.94%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 27 (2.94%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 219 (23.88%) Spring
2 184 (20.07%) Spring Boot
3 109 (11.89%) REST
4 97 (10.58%) gRPC
5 88 (9.60%) Node.js
6 87 (9.49%) React
7 85 (9.27%) RESTful
8 70 (7.63%) RabbitMQ
9 42 (4.58%) AngularJS
10 41 (4.47%) Middleware
11 35 (3.82%) OpenTelemetry
12 33 (3.60%) JSON
13 32 (3.49%) GraphQL
13 32 (3.49%) Keycloak
14 31 (3.38%) Hibernate
14 31 (3.38%) OAuth
15 30 (3.27%) ActiveMQ
15 30 (3.27%) PySpark
16 29 (3.16%) JMS
16 29 (3.16%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 138 (15.05%) Distributed Systems
2 119 (12.98%) Cloud Native
3 43 (4.69%) Management Information System
4 37 (4.03%) Product Ownership
5 33 (3.60%) Fixed Income
6 28 (3.05%) Data Structures
7 26 (2.84%) Equities
8 23 (2.51%) Derivative
9 21 (2.29%) Hybrid Cloud
10 18 (1.96%) Market Risk
11 16 (1.74%) Replication
12 14 (1.53%) Legacy Applications
13 13 (1.42%) Algorithms
14 12 (1.31%) Distributed Computing
14 12 (1.31%) Legacy Systems
14 12 (1.31%) Onboarding
15 10 (1.09%) Data Protection Act
15 10 (1.09%) Greenfield Project
16 8 (0.87%) SWIFT Messaging Network
17 7 (0.76%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 160 (17.45%) Linux
2 82 (8.94%) Unix
3 29 (3.16%) Windows
4 14 (1.53%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.76%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.55%) AIX
6 5 (0.55%) CentOS
7 3 (0.33%) zOS
8 2 (0.22%) VMS
9 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 388 (42.31%) CI/CD
2 358 (39.04%) Microservices
3 307 (33.48%) Agile
4 253 (27.59%) DevOps
5 232 (25.30%) Software Engineering
6 191 (20.83%) Problem-Solving
7 183 (19.96%) Containerisation
8 182 (19.85%) Event-Driven
9 173 (18.87%) Observability
10 151 (16.47%) Infrastructure as Code
11 141 (15.38%) Analytics
12 138 (15.05%) Data Pipeline
13 128 (13.96%) Test Automation
14 126 (13.74%) Data Engineering
15 118 (12.87%) ETL
16 116 (12.65%) Data Modelling
17 109 (11.89%) Open Source
18 105 (11.45%) Event-Driven Architecture
19 103 (11.23%) TDD
20 97 (10.58%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 447 (48.75%) Java
2 323 (35.22%) Python
3 262 (28.57%) SQL
4 132 (14.39%) Go
5 75 (8.18%) JavaScript
6 67 (7.31%) C#
7 58 (6.32%) TypeScript
8 42 (4.58%) Shell Script
9 41 (4.47%) C++
10 39 (4.25%) Bash
11 29 (3.16%) Scala
12 17 (1.85%) Rust
13 12 (1.31%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.09%) PowerShell
15 9 (0.98%) Bicep
16 7 (0.76%) Korn
16 7 (0.76%) Perl
17 6 (0.65%) R
18 5 (0.55%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.55%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 205 (22.36%) Security Cleared
2 182 (19.85%) SC Cleared
3 44 (4.80%) Degree
4 35 (3.82%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (3.05%) Azure Certification
6 24 (2.62%) AWS Certification
7 22 (2.40%) DV Cleared
8 20 (2.18%) Computer Science Degree
9 15 (1.64%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.87%) OCP
10 8 (0.87%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.65%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.33%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.33%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.22%) AWS Certified Developer
13 2 (0.22%) CBAP
13 2 (0.22%) CSPO
13 2 (0.22%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) SAFe Agilist
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 90 (9.81%) Data Quality
2 43 (4.69%) QA
3 35 (3.82%) GDPR
4 15 (1.64%) Accessibility
5 10 (1.09%) ISO 20022
5 10 (1.09%) NCSC
6 9 (0.98%) PCI DSS
7 7 (0.76%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 7 (0.76%) NIST
8 6 (0.65%) SEPA
9 5 (0.55%) SLA
10 3 (0.33%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.33%) HL7
10 3 (0.33%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.22%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.22%) MiFID
11 2 (0.22%) PSD2
11 2 (0.22%) WCAG
12 1 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 1 (0.11%) SOC 2
System Software
1 317 (34.57%) Docker
2 8 (0.87%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.44%) HDFS
3 4 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
4 2 (0.22%) Active Directory
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 369 (40.24%) Kubernetes
2 217 (23.66%) Terraform
3 109 (11.89%) Grafana
4 103 (11.23%) Prometheus
5 63 (6.87%) Ansible
6 26 (2.84%) Argo
7 15 (1.64%) Progress Chef
8 9 (0.98%) Istio
8 9 (0.98%) Kiali
9 8 (0.87%) linkerd
9 8 (0.87%) Packer
10 7 (0.76%) logstash
11 5 (0.55%) Kibana
11 5 (0.55%) Puppet
12 4 (0.44%) Fluentd
12 4 (0.44%) Jamf Pro
12 4 (0.44%) Rancher
12 4 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
13 3 (0.33%) Hadoop YARN
14 2 (0.22%) QRadar
Vendors
1 75 (8.18%) Oracle
2 72 (7.85%) Databricks
3 67 (7.31%) Splunk
4 38 (4.14%) Google
5 37 (4.03%) Confluent
6 35 (3.82%) Microsoft
7 29 (3.16%) IBM
8 24 (2.62%) VMware
9 18 (1.96%) Sybase
10 17 (1.85%) Informatica
11 16 (1.74%) Dynatrace
12 13 (1.42%) Cloudera
13 12 (1.31%) Red Hat
14 9 (0.98%) Talend
15 8 (0.87%) Atlassian
15 8 (0.87%) Foundry
15 8 (0.87%) Palantir
15 8 (0.87%) SAP
15 8 (0.87%) ServiceNow
16 7 (0.76%) Bloomberg