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

6 months to
24 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 116 105 163
Rank change year-on-year -11 +58 -30
Contract jobs citing Kafka 940 730 653
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.15% 2.51% 1.48%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.11% 11.03% 7.29%
Number of daily rates quoted 602 454 501
10th Percentile £363 £369 £400
25th Percentile £416 £457 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £560 £545
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% +2.75% -16.15%
75th Percentile £673 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £463 £470 £495
% change year-on-year -1.60% -5.00% -13.96%
Number of hourly rates quoted 15 4 4
10th Percentile £49.60 £51.09 £25.71
25th Percentile £64.50 £68.84 £31.68
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £38.60
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +121.79% -48.54%
75th Percentile £84.50 £93.75 £50.59
90th Percentile £93.00 - £61.49
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £78.70 £35.00
% change year-on-year -11.41% +124.86% -55.13%

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 9,295 6,621 8,954
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.21% 22.73% 20.23%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,217 4,492 6,234
10th Percentile £358 £363 £334
25th Percentile £414 £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 £495 £495
% change year-on-year +1.01% - -2.37%
Number of hourly rates quoted 238 96 196
10th Percentile £35.00 £26.25 £20.77
25th Percentile £52.50 £39.06 £39.29
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £48.72
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +28.28% -25.05%
75th Percentile £73.09 £68.19 £65.00
90th Percentile £81.00 £82.53 £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 24 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 24 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 24 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 -19 828 £550 -5.98% 194
London -9 531 £600 -5.88% 119
Work from Home -2 347 £600 - 83
UK excluding London -47 267 £463 -1.60% 107
North of England -41 115 £465 -7.00% 34
South East -16 63 £434 -14.11% 35
North West -33 57 £475 +4.91% 25
Yorkshire -31 50 £463 -33.93% 6
Midlands -39 49 £500 +40.45% 6
West Midlands -38 32 £550 -8.33% 4
South West -15 29 £550 -12.00% 13
Scotland -15 23 £475 +7.95% 7
East Midlands -27 17 £407 +14.40% 2
North East -10 14 £450 -16.99% 3
East of England -36 7 £475 +49.37% 13
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
1 118 (12.55%) Apache Spark
2 61 (6.49%) Apache
3 46 (4.89%) Apache Airflow
4 30 (3.19%) Confluence
5 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
5 6 (0.64%) Palantir Foundry
6 5 (0.53%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.53%) OpenStack
7 4 (0.43%) Camunda
8 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
8 3 (0.32%) WebSphere
9 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
10 1 (0.11%) CMS
10 1 (0.11%) IBM HTTP Server
10 1 (0.11%) Oracle HTTP Server
10 1 (0.11%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 5 (0.53%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.21%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Maya
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.11%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 4 (0.43%) Bloomberg AIM
1 4 (0.43%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.43%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Payment Gateway
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 585 (62.23%) AWS
2 260 (27.66%) Azure
3 166 (17.66%) GCP
3 166 (17.66%) GitHub
4 128 (13.62%) Serverless
5 120 (12.77%) Amazon S3
6 117 (12.45%) GitHub Actions
7 93 (9.89%) AWS Lambda
8 78 (8.30%) Amazon EKS
9 70 (7.45%) AWS CloudFormation
10 60 (6.38%) OpenShift
11 57 (6.06%) Power Platform
12 55 (5.85%) Amazon ECS
13 51 (5.43%) Amazon SQS
14 47 (5.00%) Azure DevOps
15 42 (4.47%) Amazon Kinesis
16 41 (4.36%) Azure Data Factory
17 39 (4.15%) Amazon CloudWatch
18 37 (3.94%) Amazon EC2
19 36 (3.83%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 19 (2.02%) Firewall
2 15 (1.60%) HTTP
3 11 (1.17%) SSL
4 9 (0.96%) DNS
5 6 (0.64%) FTP
5 6 (0.64%) Kerberos
5 6 (0.64%) SMS
5 6 (0.64%) SSH
6 4 (0.43%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.32%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) NaaS
8 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.21%) WAN
9 1 (0.11%) 4G
9 1 (0.11%) 5G
9 1 (0.11%) Broadband
9 1 (0.11%) Internet
9 1 (0.11%) MQTT
9 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 194 (20.64%) PostgreSQL
2 140 (14.89%) MongoDB
3 139 (14.79%) NoSQL
4 79 (8.40%) Apache Cassandra
5 68 (7.23%) Relational Database
6 64 (6.81%) Data Warehouse
7 59 (6.28%) Data Lake
8 50 (5.32%) Big Data
9 49 (5.21%) Elasticsearch
10 47 (5.00%) DynamoDB
11 45 (4.79%) Power BI
12 42 (4.47%) SQL Server
13 40 (4.26%) Amazon RDS
14 39 (4.15%) Redis
15 36 (3.83%) Amazon Athena
15 36 (3.83%) Flink
15 36 (3.83%) Hadoop
16 34 (3.62%) MySQL
17 33 (3.51%) Amazon Redshift
18 32 (3.40%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 157 (16.70%) Jenkins
2 129 (13.72%) GitLab
3 105 (11.17%) Git
4 79 (8.40%) JUnit
5 61 (6.49%) JIRA
6 31 (3.30%) Mockito
7 30 (3.19%) Cucumber
8 21 (2.23%) Gradle
8 21 (2.23%) JMeter
9 19 (2.02%) Gatling
9 19 (2.02%) Sonatype Nexus
10 12 (1.28%) Maven
11 11 (1.17%) Artifactory
12 10 (1.06%) CircleCI
12 10 (1.06%) REST Assured
12 10 (1.06%) Selenium
13 9 (0.96%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.96%) Postman
14 6 (0.64%) Liquibase
14 6 (0.64%) SonarQube
General
1 266 (28.30%) Finance
2 189 (20.11%) Social Skills
3 128 (13.62%) Banking
4 74 (7.87%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (7.13%) Public Sector
6 58 (6.17%) Front Office
7 38 (4.04%) Investment Banking
8 24 (2.55%) Documentation Skills
9 18 (1.91%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.06%) Marketing
11 9 (0.96%) Influencing Skills
12 8 (0.85%) Law
12 8 (0.85%) Telecoms
13 6 (0.64%) Retail
14 4 (0.43%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.43%) Billing
14 4 (0.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 3 (0.32%) Automotive
15 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.32%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 341 (36.28%) Developer
2 253 (26.91%) Senior
3 170 (18.09%) Java Developer
4 146 (15.53%) Data Engineer
5 120 (12.77%) Lead
6 119 (12.66%) Senior Developer
7 103 (10.96%) Software Engineer
8 96 (10.21%) Architect
9 64 (6.81%) Senior Java Developer
10 52 (5.53%) Java Engineer
11 46 (4.89%) AWS Architect
12 45 (4.79%) DevOps Engineer
13 44 (4.68%) Full-Stack Developer
14 39 (4.15%) Kafka Developer
15 37 (3.94%) AWS Engineer
15 37 (3.94%) Senior Data Engineer
16 36 (3.83%) Solutions Architect
17 34 (3.62%) AWS Developer
18 33 (3.51%) Developer/Software Engineer
19 31 (3.30%) Full-Stack Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 210 (22.34%) Spring
2 186 (19.79%) Spring Boot
3 120 (12.77%) REST
4 107 (11.38%) Node.js
5 104 (11.06%) React
6 96 (10.21%) gRPC
7 89 (9.47%) RESTful
8 81 (8.62%) RabbitMQ
9 46 (4.89%) AngularJS
9 46 (4.89%) GraphQL
10 41 (4.36%) Middleware
10 41 (4.36%) OpenTelemetry
11 39 (4.15%) JSON
11 39 (4.15%) PySpark
12 34 (3.62%) Redux
13 30 (3.19%) Keycloak
13 30 (3.19%) OAuth
14 27 (2.87%) OAuth2
15 26 (2.77%) Apache Avro
15 26 (2.77%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 153 (16.28%) Distributed Systems
2 136 (14.47%) Cloud Native
3 50 (5.32%) Fixed Income
4 47 (5.00%) Management Information System
5 35 (3.72%) Product Ownership
6 23 (2.45%) Data Structures
6 23 (2.45%) Hybrid Cloud
7 21 (2.23%) Derivative
7 21 (2.23%) Equities
8 19 (2.02%) Onboarding
9 15 (1.60%) Market Risk
10 14 (1.49%) Legacy Systems
11 13 (1.38%) Algorithms
12 12 (1.28%) Data Protection Act
13 11 (1.17%) Clustering
13 11 (1.17%) Legacy Applications
13 11 (1.17%) Replication
14 10 (1.06%) Greenfield Project
15 9 (0.96%) Virtual Team
16 8 (0.85%) Enterprise Software
Operating Systems
1 120 (12.77%) Linux
2 57 (6.06%) Unix
3 32 (3.40%) Windows
4 7 (0.74%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.53%) AIX
6 3 (0.32%) zOS
7 2 (0.21%) CentOS
7 2 (0.21%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7 2 (0.21%) VMS
8 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
8 1 (0.11%) Oracle Linux
8 1 (0.11%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 414 (44.04%) CI/CD
2 332 (35.32%) Microservices
3 322 (34.26%) Agile
4 274 (29.15%) DevOps
5 227 (24.15%) Software Engineering
6 199 (21.17%) Event-Driven
7 192 (20.43%) Observability
8 181 (19.26%) Containerisation
9 177 (18.83%) Problem-Solving
10 165 (17.55%) Analytics
11 160 (17.02%) Infrastructure as Code
12 154 (16.38%) Data Pipeline
13 150 (15.96%) Data Engineering
14 144 (15.32%) Data Modelling
15 140 (14.89%) ETL
16 129 (13.72%) Test Automation
17 126 (13.40%) Event-Driven Architecture
18 111 (11.81%) Full-Stack Development
19 110 (11.70%) Open Source
20 99 (10.53%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 448 (47.66%) Java
2 329 (35.00%) Python
3 279 (29.68%) SQL
4 143 (15.21%) Go
5 94 (10.00%) JavaScript
6 86 (9.15%) TypeScript
7 66 (7.02%) C#
8 37 (3.94%) Bash
9 31 (3.30%) Scala
10 27 (2.87%) C++
11 24 (2.55%) Shell Script
12 19 (2.02%) Rust
13 16 (1.70%) PowerShell
14 11 (1.17%) Bicep
15 9 (0.96%) PL/SQL
16 7 (0.74%) Korn
16 7 (0.74%) Perl
17 5 (0.53%) Groovy
17 5 (0.53%) R
17 5 (0.53%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 208 (22.13%) Security Cleared
2 173 (18.40%) SC Cleared
3 46 (4.89%) Degree
4 31 (3.30%) BPSS Clearance
5 26 (2.77%) Azure Certification
6 22 (2.34%) AWS Certification
7 20 (2.13%) Computer Science Degree
8 17 (1.81%) DV Cleared
9 14 (1.49%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.85%) OCP
10 8 (0.85%) Oracle Certification
11 6 (0.64%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 4 (0.43%) SnowPro
13 3 (0.32%) AWS Certified Developer
13 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
13 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
14 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
14 1 (0.11%) PMP
14 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 115 (12.23%) Data Quality
2 50 (5.32%) QA
3 46 (4.89%) GDPR
4 19 (2.02%) Accessibility
5 9 (0.96%) ISO 20022
5 9 (0.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 9 (0.96%) NCSC
6 8 (0.85%) NIST
7 7 (0.74%) PCI DSS
8 5 (0.53%) SEPA
9 4 (0.43%) SLA
10 3 (0.32%) Def Stans
10 3 (0.32%) HL7
10 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
10 3 (0.32%) WCAG
11 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) MiFID
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
System Software
1 325 (34.57%) Docker
2 6 (0.64%) etcd
2 6 (0.64%) VMware Infrastructure
3 2 (0.21%) HDFS
3 2 (0.21%) Virtual Machines
4 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 376 (40.00%) Kubernetes
2 212 (22.55%) Terraform
3 116 (12.34%) Grafana
4 114 (12.13%) Prometheus
5 53 (5.64%) Ansible
6 25 (2.66%) Argo
7 10 (1.06%) Istio
8 9 (0.96%) Fluentd
8 9 (0.96%) Kiali
8 9 (0.96%) Progress Chef
9 8 (0.85%) linkerd
10 7 (0.74%) Rancher
11 5 (0.53%) Puppet
12 4 (0.43%) Kibana
12 4 (0.43%) logstash
12 4 (0.43%) Packer
12 4 (0.43%) Podman
13 2 (0.21%) QRadar
13 2 (0.21%) rkt
13 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
Vendors
1 83 (8.83%) Databricks
2 75 (7.98%) Oracle
3 68 (7.23%) Splunk
4 45 (4.79%) Google
5 43 (4.57%) Microsoft
6 31 (3.30%) Confluent
7 25 (2.66%) IBM
7 25 (2.66%) Informatica
8 20 (2.13%) VMware
9 16 (1.70%) Dynatrace
10 14 (1.49%) Red Hat
10 14 (1.49%) Sybase
11 13 (1.38%) ServiceNow
12 10 (1.06%) Cloudera
12 10 (1.06%) Talend
13 8 (0.85%) AppDynamics
13 8 (0.85%) SAP
13 8 (0.85%) Solace
14 7 (0.74%) Bloomberg
14 7 (0.74%) PagerDuty