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

6 months to
20 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 120 109 165
Rank change year-on-year -11 +56 -36
Contract jobs citing Kafka 933 743 647
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.28% 2.41% 1.46%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.30% 10.71% 7.05%
Number of daily rates quoted 596 455 499
10th Percentile £363 £366 £400
25th Percentile £416 £463 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £585 £550
Median % change year-on-year -10.26% +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 14 4 4
10th Percentile £40.00 £52.23 £27.16
25th Percentile £64.00 £71.69 £35.32
Median hourly rate £69.72 £88.75 £53.60
Median % change year-on-year -21.44% +65.59% -28.54%
75th Percentile £87.25 £93.75 £68.25
90th Percentile £95.00 - £74.10
UK excluding London median hourly rate £66.72 £85.00 £65.00
% change year-on-year -21.51% +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 9,054 6,938 9,180
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.17% 22.49% 20.68%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,049 4,493 6,438
10th Percentile £358 £360 £350
25th Percentile £413 £425 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £513 £525 £534
Median % change year-on-year -2.38% -1.59% -7.22%
75th Percentile £619 £650 £650
90th Percentile £725 £774 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £500
% change year-on-year - - -4.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 222 85 202
10th Percentile £35.03 £25.65 £24.10
25th Percentile £52.50 £38.50 £43.75
Median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £53.50
Median % change year-on-year +4.00% +16.82% -17.69%
75th Percentile £73.46 £65.75 £69.38
90th Percentile £81.00 £77.96 £76.53
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £65.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year - +23.81% -19.23%

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 20 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 20 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 20 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 -12 820 £550 -9.84% 174
London -13 529 £600 -6.80% 104
Work from Home +6 338 £575 -6.12% 91
UK excluding London -30 263 £462 -1.81% 105
North of England -27 116 £500 -4.76% 36
South East 0 62 £433 -21.36% 43
North West -16 59 £450 -8.16% 22
Yorkshire -36 47 £525 -27.59% 10
Midlands -31 44 £500 +40.45% 6
Scotland -11 27 £463 +21.07% 8
West Midlands -30 27 £550 -8.33% 4
South West -2 26 £550 -13.73% 10
East Midlands -21 17 £402 +12.92% 2
North East -6 16 £506 -6.62% 4
East of England -34 5 £500 +57.23% 1
Wales -3 1 £250 - 1

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
1 103 (11.04%) Apache Spark
2 60 (6.43%) Apache
3 46 (4.93%) Apache Airflow
4 35 (3.75%) Confluence
5 8 (0.86%) Palantir Foundry
6 6 (0.64%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.64%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.54%) Camunda
8 4 (0.43%) Microsoft Exchange
9 3 (0.32%) CMS
9 3 (0.32%) MQSeries
9 3 (0.32%) OpenStack
9 3 (0.32%) WebSphere
10 2 (0.21%) Apache Pulsar
10 2 (0.21%) JBoss
10 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
10 2 (0.21%) SharePoint
10 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
11 1 (0.11%) Apache Synapse
11 1 (0.11%) SAS
Applications
1 5 (0.54%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.11%) CPLEX
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%) Exchequer
4 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.11%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
Cloud Services
1 553 (59.27%) AWS
2 242 (25.94%) Azure
3 164 (17.58%) GitHub
4 157 (16.83%) GCP
5 130 (13.93%) Serverless
6 118 (12.65%) GitHub Actions
7 109 (11.68%) Amazon S3
8 100 (10.72%) AWS Lambda
9 77 (8.25%) Amazon EKS
10 75 (8.04%) AWS CloudFormation
11 57 (6.11%) Amazon ECS
12 50 (5.36%) OpenShift
13 49 (5.25%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 45 (4.82%) Power Platform
15 43 (4.61%) Amazon Kinesis
15 43 (4.61%) Amazon SQS
16 38 (4.07%) Azure DevOps
17 37 (3.97%) Azure Data Factory
18 33 (3.54%) Amazon EC2
19 29 (3.11%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.71%) Firewall
2 14 (1.50%) HTTP
3 11 (1.18%) DNS
3 11 (1.18%) SSL
4 6 (0.64%) FTP
4 6 (0.64%) Kerberos
4 6 (0.64%) SMS
4 6 (0.64%) SSH
5 4 (0.43%) TCP/IP
6 3 (0.32%) VPN
7 2 (0.21%) MQTT
8 1 (0.11%) 4G
8 1 (0.11%) 5G
8 1 (0.11%) Broadband
8 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
8 1 (0.11%) Internet
8 1 (0.11%) NAS
8 1 (0.11%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 177 (18.97%) PostgreSQL
2 158 (16.93%) MongoDB
3 135 (14.47%) NoSQL
4 81 (8.68%) Apache Cassandra
5 65 (6.97%) Relational Database
6 55 (5.89%) Data Warehouse
7 53 (5.68%) Elasticsearch
8 48 (5.14%) Big Data
8 48 (5.14%) Data Lake
9 45 (4.82%) Amazon RDS
10 44 (4.72%) DynamoDB
11 42 (4.50%) Redis
12 41 (4.39%) SQL Server
13 37 (3.97%) Hadoop
14 35 (3.75%) Amazon Athena
15 33 (3.54%) Power BI
16 32 (3.43%) Amazon Redshift
16 32 (3.43%) MySQL
17 31 (3.32%) Flink
18 29 (3.11%) BigQuery
Development Applications
1 155 (16.61%) Jenkins
2 137 (14.68%) GitLab
3 102 (10.93%) Git
4 87 (9.32%) JUnit
5 61 (6.54%) JIRA
6 42 (4.50%) Mockito
7 29 (3.11%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.57%) JMeter
8 24 (2.57%) Sonatype Nexus
9 21 (2.25%) Gradle
10 16 (1.71%) Gatling
11 13 (1.39%) Maven
12 10 (1.07%) CircleCI
12 10 (1.07%) Selenium
13 9 (0.96%) Artifactory
13 9 (0.96%) Jaeger
13 9 (0.96%) REST Assured
14 7 (0.75%) Postman
15 6 (0.64%) Serenity BDD
15 6 (0.64%) SoapUI
General
1 258 (27.65%) Finance
2 208 (22.29%) Social Skills
3 136 (14.58%) Banking
4 80 (8.57%) Analytical Skills
5 67 (7.18%) Public Sector
6 50 (5.36%) Investment Banking
7 43 (4.61%) Front Office
8 25 (2.68%) Documentation Skills
9 17 (1.82%) Financial Institution
10 10 (1.07%) Influencing Skills
11 9 (0.96%) Marketing
12 6 (0.64%) Retail
12 6 (0.64%) Telecoms
13 5 (0.54%) Law
14 4 (0.43%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
14 4 (0.43%) Military
15 3 (0.32%) Corporate Banking
15 3 (0.32%) Legal
16 2 (0.21%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 353 (37.83%) Developer
2 266 (28.51%) Senior
3 199 (21.33%) Java Developer
4 133 (14.26%) Senior Developer
5 127 (13.61%) Data Engineer
6 109 (11.68%) Lead
7 87 (9.32%) Software Engineer
8 83 (8.90%) Architect
9 82 (8.79%) Senior Java Developer
10 56 (6.00%) DevOps Engineer
11 46 (4.93%) Full-Stack Developer
12 44 (4.72%) Kafka Developer
13 40 (4.29%) AWS Developer
14 39 (4.18%) AWS Engineer
14 39 (4.18%) Java Engineer
15 38 (4.07%) AWS Architect
16 36 (3.86%) Kafka Engineer
17 32 (3.43%) Senior Data Engineer
18 28 (3.00%) Solutions Architect
19 27 (2.89%) Platform Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 226 (24.22%) Spring
2 190 (20.36%) Spring Boot
3 109 (11.68%) REST
4 97 (10.40%) gRPC
5 89 (9.54%) Node.js
5 89 (9.54%) React
6 88 (9.43%) RESTful
7 72 (7.72%) RabbitMQ
8 43 (4.61%) AngularJS
9 40 (4.29%) Middleware
10 34 (3.64%) JSON
11 33 (3.54%) OpenTelemetry
12 31 (3.32%) Hibernate
12 31 (3.32%) Keycloak
13 30 (3.22%) ActiveMQ
13 30 (3.22%) GraphQL
13 30 (3.22%) PySpark
14 29 (3.11%) JMS
15 28 (3.00%) OAuth
16 26 (2.79%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 138 (14.79%) Distributed Systems
2 122 (13.08%) Cloud Native
3 43 (4.61%) Management Information System
4 37 (3.97%) Product Ownership
5 33 (3.54%) Fixed Income
6 28 (3.00%) Data Structures
7 26 (2.79%) Equities
8 24 (2.57%) Derivative
9 21 (2.25%) Hybrid Cloud
10 18 (1.93%) Market Risk
11 16 (1.71%) Replication
12 15 (1.61%) Legacy Applications
13 13 (1.39%) Algorithms
14 12 (1.29%) Distributed Computing
14 12 (1.29%) Legacy Systems
14 12 (1.29%) Onboarding
15 11 (1.18%) Data Protection Act
16 10 (1.07%) Greenfield Project
17 8 (0.86%) SWIFT Messaging Network
18 7 (0.75%) Public Cloud
Operating Systems
1 161 (17.26%) Linux
2 83 (8.90%) Unix
3 28 (3.00%) Windows
4 14 (1.50%) Mac OS X
5 6 (0.64%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.54%) AIX
7 4 (0.43%) CentOS
8 3 (0.32%) zOS
9 2 (0.21%) VMS
10 1 (0.11%) Mac OS
10 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 401 (42.98%) CI/CD
2 365 (39.12%) Microservices
3 318 (34.08%) Agile
4 256 (27.44%) DevOps
5 230 (24.65%) Software Engineering
6 195 (20.90%) Problem-Solving
7 190 (20.36%) Event-Driven
8 189 (20.26%) Containerisation
9 174 (18.65%) Observability
10 154 (16.51%) Infrastructure as Code
11 146 (15.65%) Analytics
12 141 (15.11%) Data Pipeline
13 130 (13.93%) Data Engineering
13 130 (13.93%) Test Automation
14 118 (12.65%) ETL
15 117 (12.54%) Data Modelling
16 111 (11.90%) Event-Driven Architecture
17 110 (11.79%) Open Source
17 110 (11.79%) TDD
18 99 (10.61%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 463 (49.62%) Java
2 325 (34.83%) Python
3 268 (28.72%) SQL
4 131 (14.04%) Go
5 77 (8.25%) JavaScript
6 68 (7.29%) C#
7 61 (6.54%) TypeScript
8 41 (4.39%) Shell Script
9 40 (4.29%) C++
10 39 (4.18%) Bash
11 28 (3.00%) Scala
12 17 (1.82%) Rust
13 12 (1.29%) PL/SQL
14 10 (1.07%) PowerShell
15 9 (0.96%) Bicep
16 7 (0.75%) Korn
16 7 (0.75%) Perl
17 6 (0.64%) R
18 5 (0.54%) Kotlin
18 5 (0.54%) RPG IV
Qualifications
1 209 (22.40%) Security Cleared
2 186 (19.94%) SC Cleared
3 44 (4.72%) Degree
4 35 (3.75%) BPSS Clearance
5 28 (3.00%) Azure Certification
6 26 (2.79%) AWS Certification
7 22 (2.36%) DV Cleared
8 19 (2.04%) Computer Science Degree
9 14 (1.50%) Master's Degree
10 8 (0.86%) OCP
10 8 (0.86%) Oracle Certification
11 7 (0.75%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
12 3 (0.32%) AWS Certified Developer
12 3 (0.32%) ITIL Certification
12 3 (0.32%) TOGAF Certification
13 2 (0.21%) CBAP
13 2 (0.21%) CSPO
13 2 (0.21%) Microsoft Certification
14 1 (0.11%) MySQL Certification
14 1 (0.11%) Postgraduate
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 93 (9.97%) Data Quality
2 47 (5.04%) QA
3 36 (3.86%) GDPR
4 15 (1.61%) Accessibility
5 11 (1.18%) ISO 20022
5 11 (1.18%) NCSC
6 9 (0.96%) PCI DSS
7 8 (0.86%) NIST
8 7 (0.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
9 6 (0.64%) SEPA
10 5 (0.54%) SLA
11 3 (0.32%) Def Stans
11 3 (0.32%) HL7
11 3 (0.32%) ISO 8583
12 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
12 2 (0.21%) PSD2
12 2 (0.21%) WCAG
13 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
System Software
1 325 (34.83%) Docker
2 8 (0.86%) VMware Infrastructure
3 4 (0.43%) HDFS
4 3 (0.32%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.21%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 376 (40.30%) Kubernetes
2 217 (23.26%) Terraform
3 108 (11.58%) Grafana
4 103 (11.04%) Prometheus
5 62 (6.65%) Ansible
6 26 (2.79%) Argo
7 15 (1.61%) Progress Chef
8 10 (1.07%) Istio
9 9 (0.96%) Kiali
10 8 (0.86%) linkerd
11 7 (0.75%) Packer
12 6 (0.64%) logstash
13 5 (0.54%) Puppet
14 4 (0.43%) Fluentd
14 4 (0.43%) Kibana
14 4 (0.43%) Rancher
14 4 (0.43%) Single Sign-On
15 3 (0.32%) Hadoop YARN
15 3 (0.32%) Jamf Pro
16 2 (0.21%) QRadar
Vendors
1 76 (8.15%) Oracle
2 74 (7.93%) Databricks
3 67 (7.18%) Splunk
4 38 (4.07%) Google
5 35 (3.75%) Confluent
5 35 (3.75%) Microsoft
6 32 (3.43%) IBM
7 24 (2.57%) VMware
8 20 (2.14%) Sybase
9 17 (1.82%) Informatica
10 16 (1.71%) Dynatrace
11 13 (1.39%) Cloudera
12 12 (1.29%) Red Hat
13 9 (0.96%) ServiceNow
13 9 (0.96%) Talend
14 8 (0.86%) Atlassian
14 8 (0.86%) Foundry
14 8 (0.86%) Palantir
15 7 (0.75%) Bloomberg
15 7 (0.75%) SAP