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 19 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 144 102 134
Rank change year-on-year -42 +32 +22
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,077 836 701
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.96% 2.54% 1.82%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.06% 9.81% 7.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 679 536 462
10th Percentile £375 £381 £400
25th Percentile £425 £450 £485
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £545 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year -0.91% -8.33% -7.69%
75th Percentile £633 £675 £725
90th Percentile £738 £750 £810
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £493
% change year-on-year +6.61% -4.87% -21.12%
Number of hourly rates quoted 13 4 7
10th Percentile £43.85 £40.58 £24.34
25th Percentile £56.25 £48.56 £26.20
Median hourly rate £77.00 £59.25 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +29.96% +111.61% -64.10%
75th Percentile £87.00 £75.31 £33.88
90th Percentile £94.00 £96.13 £39.35
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 - £28.00
% change year-on-year - - -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 11,886 8,520 9,597
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 21.67% 25.86% 24.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,817 5,696 6,345
10th Percentile £375 £354 £356
25th Percentile £437 £413 £431
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £550
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -6.82% -
75th Percentile £635 £630 £650
90th Percentile £738 £734 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £501 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.37% -5.00% -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 299 187 189
10th Percentile £29.07 £31.25 £25.60
25th Percentile £50.00 £41.42 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.70 £61.60
Median % change year-on-year +18.83% -11.20% -1.44%
75th Percentile £76.00 £65.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £90.00 £72.20 £74.57
UK excluding London median hourly rate £67.50 £57.50 £65.00
% change year-on-year +17.39% -11.54% +8.33%

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 19 September 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 19 September 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 17 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 19 September 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 -40 902 £550 - 1,049
London -36 538 £575 -4.17% 737
UK excluding London -27 396 £500 +6.61% 432
Work from Home -54 278 £545 -5.22% 417
North of England -24 190 £500 +5.26% 145
Yorkshire +9 97 £501 -14.63% 36
North West -39 74 £550 +18.28% 94
South East -29 63 £460 +5.75% 72
Scotland -31 55 £410 -13.23% 71
Midlands -49 38 £500 +14.94% 31
East of England -1 29 £488 -4.88% 21
South West -15 29 £500 -9.09% 53
West Midlands -46 25 £700 +40.00% 25
North East -34 24 £425 -8.55% 15
East Midlands -16 13 £495 +17.86% 6
Northern Ireland +2 4 - - 35
Wales - 1 £375 - 5

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 (11.98%) Apache Spark
2 76 (7.06%) Apache Airflow
3 67 (6.22%) Apache
4 24 (2.23%) Confluence
5 16 (1.49%) Camunda
6 7 (0.65%) OpenStack
6 7 (0.65%) Oracle SOA Suite
7 6 (0.56%) CMS
8 5 (0.46%) SharePoint
9 4 (0.37%) Apache Pulsar
9 4 (0.37%) MQSeries
9 4 (0.37%) PowerExchange
10 3 (0.28%) Anypoint
10 3 (0.28%) Mule
10 3 (0.28%) nginx
10 3 (0.28%) WebSphere
11 2 (0.19%) Apache Pig
11 2 (0.19%) JBoss
12 1 (0.093%) CICS
12 1 (0.093%) Oracle HTTP Server
Applications
1 6 (0.56%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.19%) Mingle
3 1 (0.093%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.093%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 4 (0.37%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 3 (0.28%) Finacle
2 3 (0.28%) FLEXCUBE
2 3 (0.28%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (0.28%) Temenos T24
3 2 (0.19%) Endur
3 2 (0.19%) Payment Gateway
4 1 (0.093%) Actimize
4 1 (0.093%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.093%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.093%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.093%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.093%) SAP IS-U
Cloud Services
1 616 (57.20%) AWS
2 392 (36.40%) Azure
3 257 (23.86%) GCP
4 177 (16.43%) GitHub
5 121 (11.23%) GitHub Actions
6 103 (9.56%) Serverless
7 86 (7.99%) AWS Lambda
8 77 (7.15%) Amazon EKS
9 76 (7.06%) Amazon S3
10 74 (6.87%) Snowflake
11 71 (6.59%) Azure DevOps
12 69 (6.41%) OpenShift
13 51 (4.74%) dbt
14 49 (4.55%) Amazon SQS
15 43 (3.99%) Amazon ECS
16 40 (3.71%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 39 (3.62%) Power Platform
18 35 (3.25%) Azure Data Factory
19 31 (2.88%) Google Kubernetes Engine
20 27 (2.51%) AWS CloudFormation
Communications & Networking
1 31 (2.88%) HTTP
2 20 (1.86%) DNS
3 12 (1.11%) Network Security
4 9 (0.84%) TCP/IP
5 7 (0.65%) Firewall
5 7 (0.65%) MQTT
5 7 (0.65%) SSH
6 6 (0.56%) SAN
6 6 (0.56%) SSL
7 5 (0.46%) 4G
7 5 (0.46%) 5G
8 4 (0.37%) NAS
9 3 (0.28%) Internet
10 2 (0.19%) Kerberos
11 1 (0.093%) Broadband
11 1 (0.093%) FIX Connectivity
11 1 (0.093%) MIMO
11 1 (0.093%) RTP
11 1 (0.093%) VPN
11 1 (0.093%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 189 (17.55%) PostgreSQL
2 169 (15.69%) MongoDB
3 132 (12.26%) NoSQL
4 94 (8.73%) Relational Database
5 74 (6.87%) Data Warehouse
6 66 (6.13%) SQL Server
7 58 (5.39%) Redis
8 53 (4.92%) Big Data
9 49 (4.55%) Data Lake
9 49 (4.55%) MySQL
10 43 (3.99%) Elasticsearch
11 39 (3.62%) BigQuery
12 38 (3.53%) Power BI
13 34 (3.16%) Flink
14 33 (3.06%) Metadata
15 27 (2.51%) Delta Lake
16 25 (2.32%) Hadoop
17 24 (2.23%) Amazon Redshift
17 24 (2.23%) DynamoDB
18 23 (2.14%) Apache Cassandra
Development Applications
1 217 (20.15%) Jenkins
2 188 (17.46%) Git
3 163 (15.13%) GitLab
4 72 (6.69%) JUnit
5 68 (6.31%) Gradle
6 61 (5.66%) Mockito
7 55 (5.11%) Selenium
8 47 (4.36%) Maven
9 45 (4.18%) JIRA
10 35 (3.25%) Cucumber
11 32 (2.97%) SonarQube
12 24 (2.23%) REST Assured
13 23 (2.14%) Postman
14 19 (1.76%) JMeter
15 18 (1.67%) Bitbucket
16 16 (1.49%) Gatling
17 15 (1.39%) Liquibase
18 13 (1.21%) Cypress.io
18 13 (1.21%) LoadRunner
18 13 (1.21%) SoapUI
General
1 271 (25.16%) Finance
2 209 (19.41%) Social Skills
3 166 (15.41%) Banking
4 113 (10.49%) Analytical Skills
5 100 (9.29%) Public Sector
6 37 (3.44%) Retail
7 26 (2.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 25 (2.32%) Investment Banking
9 19 (1.76%) Front Office
10 18 (1.67%) Telecoms
11 16 (1.49%) Financial Institution
12 13 (1.21%) Law
13 11 (1.02%) Documentation Skills
14 10 (0.93%) Influencing Skills
14 10 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
15 9 (0.84%) Military
16 8 (0.74%) Billing
16 8 (0.74%) Publishing
16 8 (0.74%) Retail Banking
17 7 (0.65%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 332 (30.83%) Developer
2 231 (21.45%) Senior
3 188 (17.46%) Java Developer
4 165 (15.32%) Architect
5 128 (11.88%) Data Engineer
6 99 (9.19%) Lead
7 71 (6.59%) Senior Developer
8 70 (6.50%) Java Engineer
9 67 (6.22%) Solutions Architect
10 63 (5.85%) DevOps Engineer
10 63 (5.85%) Software Engineer
11 44 (4.09%) Full-Stack Developer
11 44 (4.09%) Senior Java Developer
12 42 (3.90%) Senior Data Engineer
13 39 (3.62%) AWS Engineer
14 38 (3.53%) Kafka Engineer
14 38 (3.53%) Python Engineer
15 35 (3.25%) Python Developer
15 35 (3.25%) Test Engineer
16 34 (3.16%) AWS Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 289 (26.83%) Spring
1 289 (26.83%) Spring Boot
2 247 (22.93%) REST
3 227 (21.08%) Terraform
4 155 (14.39%) RESTful
5 132 (12.26%) React
6 126 (11.70%) RabbitMQ
7 74 (6.87%) JSON
8 61 (5.66%) OAuth
9 57 (5.29%) Node.js
10 53 (4.92%) HTML
11 50 (4.64%) GraphQL
11 50 (4.64%) OpenTelemetry
11 50 (4.64%) PySpark
12 46 (4.27%) .NET
13 45 (4.18%) Elastic Stack
14 44 (4.09%) Swagger
15 43 (3.99%) Middleware
16 42 (3.90%) OpenAPI
16 42 (3.90%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 245 (22.75%) Cloud Native
2 228 (21.17%) Distributed Systems
3 73 (6.78%) Product Ownership
4 44 (4.09%) Data Structures
4 44 (4.09%) Enterprise Software
5 39 (3.62%) Onboarding
6 36 (3.34%) AI Agents
7 33 (3.06%) Self-Motivation
8 29 (2.69%) Legacy Systems
9 27 (2.51%) Algorithms
9 27 (2.51%) Replication
9 27 (2.51%) SWIFT Messaging Network
10 24 (2.23%) Greenfield Project
11 20 (1.86%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 19 (1.76%) Distributed Architecture
13 17 (1.58%) Data Protection Act
13 17 (1.58%) Private Cloud
13 17 (1.58%) Public Cloud
14 16 (1.49%) Management Information System
15 15 (1.39%) Equities
Operating Systems
1 140 (13.00%) Linux
2 72 (6.69%) Unix
3 24 (2.23%) Windows
4 11 (1.02%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 6 (0.56%) Ubuntu
6 5 (0.46%) Mac OS X
7 3 (0.28%) CentOS
7 3 (0.28%) VMS
8 2 (0.19%) Android
8 2 (0.19%) Debian
8 2 (0.19%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.093%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.093%) Oracle Linux
9 1 (0.093%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
9 1 (0.093%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.093%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 597 (55.43%) CI/CD
2 453 (42.06%) Event-Driven
3 443 (41.13%) Microservices
4 390 (36.21%) DevOps
5 383 (35.56%) Agile
6 317 (29.43%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 286 (26.56%) Observability
8 241 (22.38%) Test Automation
9 238 (22.10%) Infrastructure as Code
10 233 (21.63%) Containerisation
11 197 (18.29%) Software Engineering
12 180 (16.71%) AI
13 172 (15.97%) Data Pipeline
14 153 (14.21%) Problem-Solving
15 146 (13.56%) Data Modelling
16 137 (12.72%) Technical Leadership
17 132 (12.26%) ETL
18 131 (12.16%) Continuous Improvement
19 125 (11.61%) Analytics
20 123 (11.42%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 479 (44.48%) Java
2 364 (33.80%) Python
3 344 (31.94%) SQL
4 102 (9.47%) JavaScript
5 101 (9.38%) TypeScript
6 83 (7.71%) Bash
7 62 (5.76%) C#
8 51 (4.74%) Go
9 43 (3.99%) Scala
10 30 (2.79%) PowerShell
11 29 (2.69%) PL/SQL
12 26 (2.41%) Shell Script
13 25 (2.32%) Kotlin
14 12 (1.11%) Groovy
15 9 (0.84%) Perl
16 8 (0.74%) C++
16 8 (0.74%) Rust
16 8 (0.74%) Search Processing Language
17 7 (0.65%) Bicep
17 7 (0.65%) PHP
Qualifications
1 261 (24.23%) Security Cleared
2 214 (19.87%) SC Cleared
3 65 (6.04%) Degree
4 42 (3.90%) Computer Science Degree
5 40 (3.71%) BPSS Clearance
6 23 (2.14%) DV Cleared
7 13 (1.21%) Azure Certification
8 12 (1.11%) Master's Degree
9 11 (1.02%) AWS Certification
10 10 (0.93%) ISTQB
11 6 (0.56%) DBS Check
11 6 (0.56%) ISEB
12 5 (0.46%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
12 5 (0.46%) SnowPro
12 5 (0.46%) TOGAF Certification
13 4 (0.37%) Microsoft Certified Professional
14 3 (0.28%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
14 3 (0.28%) PhD
15 2 (0.19%) Microsoft Certification
16 1 (0.093%) ITIL Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 88 (8.17%) Data Quality
2 85 (7.89%) QA
3 44 (4.09%) Accessibility
4 34 (3.16%) ISO 20022
5 20 (1.86%) GDPR
6 15 (1.39%) SEPA
7 5 (0.46%) Actionable Recommendations
7 5 (0.46%) ISO 15022
7 5 (0.46%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 5 (0.46%) PSD2
7 5 (0.46%) SLA
7 5 (0.46%) WCAG
8 4 (0.37%) NIST
9 2 (0.19%) Basel III
9 2 (0.19%) EMIR
9 2 (0.19%) GRC
9 2 (0.19%) HIPAA
9 2 (0.19%) IFRS 17
9 2 (0.19%) MiFID
9 2 (0.19%) Sarbanes-Oxley
System Software
1 381 (35.38%) Docker
2 17 (1.58%) VMware Infrastructure
3 8 (0.74%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 3 (0.28%) Active Directory
5 2 (0.19%) Apache Flume
5 2 (0.19%) HDFS
6 1 (0.093%) etcd
6 1 (0.093%) OpenSSH
Systems Management
1 493 (45.78%) Kubernetes
2 143 (13.28%) Grafana
3 126 (11.70%) Prometheus
4 69 (6.41%) Ansible
5 30 (2.79%) Argo
6 25 (2.32%) Control-M
7 14 (1.30%) Istio
7 14 (1.30%) Kibana
7 14 (1.30%) Kustomize
8 11 (1.02%) Puppet
9 9 (0.84%) Podman
10 8 (0.74%) logstash
11 7 (0.65%) Rancher
11 7 (0.65%) Single Sign-On
12 5 (0.46%) Check_MK
12 5 (0.46%) HP Fortify
13 4 (0.37%) Bosun
13 4 (0.37%) Consul
14 3 (0.28%) Cilium
14 3 (0.28%) NetBackup
Vendors
1 124 (11.51%) Oracle
2 101 (9.38%) Databricks
3 62 (5.76%) Splunk
4 57 (5.29%) IBM
5 56 (5.20%) Microsoft
6 52 (4.83%) Google
7 38 (3.53%) Dynatrace
8 31 (2.88%) Confluent
9 30 (2.79%) Informatica
10 21 (1.95%) MuleSoft
10 21 (1.95%) VMware
11 19 (1.76%) OpenAI
12 17 (1.58%) Salesforce
13 16 (1.49%) SAP
14 15 (1.39%) Solace
15 13 (1.21%) TIBCO
16 11 (1.02%) New Relic
17 9 (0.84%) Sybase
17 9 (0.84%) Veracode
17 9 (0.84%) WSO2