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

6 months to
12 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 132 116 162
Rank change year-on-year -16 +46 -26
Contract jobs citing Kafka 932 704 644
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.96% 2.41% 1.50%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.97% 10.63% 7.22%
Number of daily rates quoted 572 465 472
10th Percentile £363 £400 £400
25th Percentile £418 £463 £456
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £539
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +2.09% -17.12%
75th Percentile £650 £738 £675
90th Percentile £800 £838 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £475 £489
% change year-on-year -2.11% -2.86% -11.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 4 6
10th Percentile £40.00 £51.09 £22.24
25th Percentile £64.00 £68.84 £23.81
Median hourly rate £70.00 £85.60 £31.50
Median % change year-on-year -18.22% +171.75% -59.62%
75th Percentile £90.00 £93.75 £38.94
90th Percentile £92.00 - £54.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate £69.72 £78.70 £31.50
% change year-on-year -11.41% +149.84% -59.62%

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 9,351 6,624 8,923
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.69% 22.69% 20.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,165 4,554 6,183
10th Percentile £359 £363 £350
25th Percentile £415 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year - -1.69% -2.91%
75th Percentile £620 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £775 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £483 £500
% change year-on-year +3.52% -3.40% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 270 113 244
10th Percentile £34.75 £29.45 £21.25
25th Percentile £52.50 £50.00 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
Median % change year-on-year - +36.84% -26.92%
75th Percentile £71.13 £68.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £80.10 £82.79 £74.85
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £47.50
% change year-on-year - +36.84% -25.78%

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 12 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 12 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 12 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 -19 809 £530 -9.40% 186
London -15 515 £600 -7.69% 122
Work from Home -16 300 £600 - 111
UK excluding London -37 288 £465 -2.11% 98
North of England -41 127 £455 -9.00% 35
Yorkshire -16 63 £460 -23.33% 8
North West -44 53 £453 -9.50% 20
South East -31 50 £484 +1.20% 33
Midlands -34 45 £500 +36.24% 7
Scotland -9 35 £450 -4.26% 9
South West -13 28 £525 +2.44% 12
West Midlands -49 26 £517 -6.00% 5
East Midlands -27 19 £407 +14.08% 2
North East -9 17 £450 -2.70% 7
East of England -21 14 £550 +72.85% 2
Wales -11 1 £250 -

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
1 129 (13.84%) Apache Spark
2 67 (7.19%) Apache
3 46 (4.94%) Apache Airflow
4 23 (2.47%) Confluence
5 6 (0.64%) Camunda
5 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
5 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
6 5 (0.54%) Microsoft Exchange
6 5 (0.54%) MQSeries
6 5 (0.54%) OpenStack
6 5 (0.54%) WebSphere
7 3 (0.32%) Palantir Foundry
8 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
8 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
8 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
8 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
8 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 4 (0.43%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) Chatbot
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
2 3 (0.32%) Oracle 11i
2 3 (0.32%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.32%) SAP BRIM
3 2 (0.21%) Actimize
3 2 (0.21%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.11%) Aladdin
4 1 (0.11%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
Cloud Services
1 548 (58.80%) AWS
2 274 (29.40%) Azure
3 158 (16.95%) GCP
4 145 (15.56%) GitHub
5 119 (12.77%) Serverless
6 106 (11.37%) Amazon S3
7 104 (11.16%) GitHub Actions
8 88 (9.44%) AWS Lambda
9 75 (8.05%) Amazon EKS
10 66 (7.08%) Azure DevOps
11 65 (6.97%) Power Platform
12 61 (6.55%) OpenShift
13 57 (6.12%) AWS CloudFormation
14 49 (5.26%) Amazon ECS
15 46 (4.94%) Snowflake
16 44 (4.72%) Amazon SQS
17 40 (4.29%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 40 (4.29%) Amazon Kinesis
18 37 (3.97%) dbt
19 36 (3.86%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 20 (2.15%) Firewall
2 17 (1.82%) HTTP
3 13 (1.39%) SSL
4 9 (0.97%) DNS
5 6 (0.64%) SMS
6 5 (0.54%) FTP
6 5 (0.54%) TCP/IP
7 3 (0.32%) SSH
7 3 (0.32%) VPN
8 2 (0.21%) Kerberos
8 2 (0.21%) MQTT
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%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 191 (20.49%) PostgreSQL
2 137 (14.70%) MongoDB
3 121 (12.98%) NoSQL
4 78 (8.37%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.65%) Big Data
6 56 (6.01%) Apache Cassandra
6 56 (6.01%) Data Lake
7 54 (5.79%) Data Warehouse
8 53 (5.69%) SQL Server
9 52 (5.58%) Power BI
10 49 (5.26%) Redis
11 46 (4.94%) Elasticsearch
12 40 (4.29%) DynamoDB
12 40 (4.29%) Flink
13 38 (4.08%) Amazon Athena
14 36 (3.86%) Hadoop
15 32 (3.43%) Metadata
15 32 (3.43%) MySQL
16 31 (3.33%) Amazon Redshift
17 30 (3.22%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 142 (15.24%) Jenkins
2 131 (14.06%) GitLab
3 122 (13.09%) Git
4 63 (6.76%) JUnit
5 57 (6.12%) JIRA
6 42 (4.51%) Mockito
7 25 (2.68%) Gradle
8 20 (2.15%) Cucumber
9 14 (1.50%) Gatling
9 14 (1.50%) Selenium
10 13 (1.39%) Liquibase
10 13 (1.39%) REST Assured
11 12 (1.29%) Maven
12 10 (1.07%) Jaeger
12 10 (1.07%) Postman
13 8 (0.86%) Artifactory
13 8 (0.86%) CircleCI
13 8 (0.86%) JMeter
14 7 (0.75%) Serenity BDD
15 6 (0.64%) Snyk
General
1 261 (28.00%) Finance
2 171 (18.35%) Social Skills
3 120 (12.88%) Banking
4 75 (8.05%) Analytical Skills
4 75 (8.05%) Public Sector
5 48 (5.15%) Front Office
6 32 (3.43%) Investment Banking
7 28 (3.00%) Documentation Skills
8 22 (2.36%) Financial Institution
9 13 (1.39%) Telecoms
10 11 (1.18%) Marketing
11 9 (0.97%) Law
11 9 (0.97%) Publishing
11 9 (0.97%) Retail
12 7 (0.75%) Influencing Skills
13 6 (0.64%) Automotive
13 6 (0.64%) Corporate Banking
14 5 (0.54%) Inclusion and Diversity
15 4 (0.43%) Organisational Skills
15 4 (0.43%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 322 (34.55%) Developer
2 213 (22.85%) Senior
3 158 (16.95%) Data Engineer
4 153 (16.42%) Java Developer
5 111 (11.91%) Architect
6 110 (11.80%) Lead
7 98 (10.52%) Senior Developer
8 90 (9.66%) Software Engineer
9 59 (6.33%) Java Engineer
10 53 (5.69%) AWS Architect
11 50 (5.36%) Senior Java Developer
12 46 (4.94%) Full-Stack Developer
13 43 (4.61%) DevOps Engineer
14 39 (4.18%) Solutions Architect
15 36 (3.86%) Senior Data Engineer
16 33 (3.54%) Developer/Software Engineer
17 32 (3.43%) AWS Engineer
17 32 (3.43%) Data Architect
17 32 (3.43%) Full-Stack Engineer
18 31 (3.33%) Kafka Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 214 (22.96%) Spring
2 198 (21.24%) Spring Boot
3 126 (13.52%) REST
4 112 (12.02%) RESTful
5 110 (11.80%) React
6 107 (11.48%) Node.js
7 78 (8.37%) RabbitMQ
8 65 (6.97%) gRPC
9 57 (6.12%) OpenTelemetry
10 50 (5.36%) GraphQL
11 48 (5.15%) JSON
12 46 (4.94%) Middleware
13 45 (4.83%) PySpark
14 42 (4.51%) Apache Avro
15 39 (4.18%) AngularJS
15 39 (4.18%) Redux
16 36 (3.86%) OAuth
17 33 (3.54%) OpenAPI
17 33 (3.54%) Swagger
18 31 (3.33%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 158 (16.95%) Distributed Systems
2 142 (15.24%) Cloud Native
3 47 (5.04%) Management Information System
4 44 (4.72%) Fixed Income
5 33 (3.54%) Product Ownership
6 26 (2.79%) Data Structures
7 20 (2.15%) Onboarding
8 19 (2.04%) Equities
9 18 (1.93%) Hybrid Cloud
9 18 (1.93%) Legacy Systems
10 15 (1.61%) Algorithms
10 15 (1.61%) Enterprise Software
11 14 (1.50%) Derivative
12 12 (1.29%) Clustering
12 12 (1.29%) Data Protection Act
12 12 (1.29%) SWIFT Messaging Network
13 11 (1.18%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 11 (1.18%) Hedge funds
14 10 (1.07%) Replication
15 9 (0.97%) CMDB
Operating Systems
1 103 (11.05%) Linux
2 56 (6.01%) Unix
3 35 (3.76%) Windows
4 9 (0.97%) Mac OS X
5 5 (0.54%) AIX
6 4 (0.43%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 4 (0.43%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.32%) VMS
7 3 (0.32%) zOS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.11%) Android
9 1 (0.11%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.11%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 414 (44.42%) CI/CD
2 327 (35.09%) Microservices
3 300 (32.19%) Agile
4 278 (29.83%) DevOps
5 239 (25.64%) Event-Driven
6 206 (22.10%) Observability
7 197 (21.14%) Containerisation
8 195 (20.92%) Software Engineering
9 170 (18.24%) Data Pipeline
10 165 (17.70%) Data Modelling
11 160 (17.17%) Analytics
12 157 (16.85%) Infrastructure as Code
13 154 (16.52%) Event-Driven Architecture
14 150 (16.09%) Data Engineering
15 149 (15.99%) Problem-Solving
16 139 (14.91%) ETL
17 137 (14.70%) Test Automation
18 111 (11.91%) Full-Stack Development
19 99 (10.62%) Data Governance
20 98 (10.52%) AI
Programming Languages
1 427 (45.82%) Java
2 328 (35.19%) Python
3 281 (30.15%) SQL
4 109 (11.70%) Go
5 106 (11.37%) TypeScript
6 99 (10.62%) JavaScript
7 60 (6.44%) C#
8 42 (4.51%) Bash
9 30 (3.22%) Scala
10 19 (2.04%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.93%) Rust
12 17 (1.82%) C++
13 16 (1.72%) Shell Script
14 14 (1.50%) Bicep
15 11 (1.18%) PL/SQL
16 9 (0.97%) Search Processing Language
17 7 (0.75%) Perl
18 6 (0.64%) Groovy
19 5 (0.54%) Korn
19 5 (0.54%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 215 (23.07%) Security Cleared
2 173 (18.56%) SC Cleared
3 45 (4.83%) Degree
4 28 (3.00%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.93%) AWS Certification
5 18 (1.93%) Azure Certification
6 17 (1.82%) DV Cleared
7 14 (1.50%) Computer Science Degree
8 12 (1.29%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
9 7 (0.75%) SnowPro
10 4 (0.43%) ITIL Certification
10 4 (0.43%) TOGAF Certification
11 3 (0.32%) OCP
11 3 (0.32%) Oracle Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
13 1 (0.11%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.11%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 109 (11.70%) Data Quality
2 50 (5.36%) QA
3 44 (4.72%) GDPR
4 23 (2.47%) Accessibility
5 17 (1.82%) ISO 20022
6 9 (0.97%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 9 (0.97%) NIST
7 8 (0.86%) SEPA
8 7 (0.75%) NCSC
8 7 (0.75%) PCI DSS
9 4 (0.43%) HL7
9 4 (0.43%) MiFID
9 4 (0.43%) SLA
9 4 (0.43%) WCAG
10 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
11 2 (0.21%) California Consumer Privacy Act
11 2 (0.21%) EMIR
11 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
11 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 1 (0.11%) PMO
System Software
1 319 (34.23%) Docker
2 6 (0.64%) etcd
3 4 (0.43%) VMware Infrastructure
4 3 (0.32%) HDFS
5 1 (0.11%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 1 (0.11%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 371 (39.81%) Kubernetes
2 195 (20.92%) Terraform
3 123 (13.20%) Grafana
4 117 (12.55%) Prometheus
5 54 (5.79%) Ansible
6 31 (3.33%) Argo
7 11 (1.18%) Kibana
8 10 (1.07%) Istio
9 9 (0.97%) Fluentd
9 9 (0.97%) Kiali
10 8 (0.86%) logstash
11 7 (0.75%) linkerd
11 7 (0.75%) Rancher
12 6 (0.64%) Puppet
13 5 (0.54%) Podman
14 3 (0.32%) QRadar
15 2 (0.21%) Amdocs OSS
15 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
15 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
15 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 95 (10.19%) Databricks
2 74 (7.94%) Splunk
3 70 (7.51%) Oracle
4 47 (5.04%) Microsoft
5 41 (4.40%) Google
6 33 (3.54%) Confluent
7 22 (2.36%) Informatica
8 21 (2.25%) IBM
9 14 (1.50%) Dynatrace
10 13 (1.39%) Red Hat
11 12 (1.29%) ServiceNow
12 9 (0.97%) AppDynamics
12 9 (0.97%) Salesforce
12 9 (0.97%) Solace
12 9 (0.97%) Talend
12 9 (0.97%) VMware
13 8 (0.86%) Pega
14 7 (0.75%) MuleSoft
14 7 (0.75%) SAP
15 6 (0.64%) Bloomberg