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

6 months to
24 Jun 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 136 104 145
Rank change year-on-year -32 +41 -3
Contract jobs citing Kafka 960 759 704
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.89% 2.53% 1.62%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.66% 11.06% 7.61%
Number of daily rates quoted 564 492 512
10th Percentile £375 £400 £400
25th Percentile £425 £458 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £543 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -1.36% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £650 £678 £688
90th Percentile £800 £825 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £465 £470 £493
% change year-on-year -1.06% -4.67% -17.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 17 3 9
10th Percentile £61.10 £47.14 £22.55
25th Percentile £65.00 £58.98 £27.00
Median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -64.10%
75th Percentile £90.00 £86.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £95.00 £90.74 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £70.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -11.05% +181.07% -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 9,934 6,861 9,250
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.51% 22.84% 21.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,532 4,676 6,354
10th Percentile £363 £356 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £513 £538
Median % change year-on-year +2.44% -4.65% -2.27%
75th Percentile £625 £638 £650
90th Percentile £738 £763 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £475 £500
% change year-on-year +5.26% -5.00% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 282 134 280
10th Percentile £30.05 £29.12 £22.45
25th Percentile £51.25 £39.84 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £55.00
Median % change year-on-year +18.18% - -15.38%
75th Percentile £74.82 £68.00 £68.75
90th Percentile £85.00 £81.01 £74.44
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £62.50 £57.13
% change year-on-year +4.00% +9.41% -11.43%

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 June 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 June 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 24 June 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 -32 831 £550 - 138
London -21 519 £588 -6.00% 84
UK excluding London -55 324 £465 -1.06% 77
Work from Home -51 273 £600 +4.35% 68
North of England -37 153 £438 -6.81% 24
Yorkshire -12 72 £464 -15.68% 4
North West -45 67 £429 -8.63% 18
South East -44 49 £483 +7.22% 25
Scotland -22 45 £450 -4.76% 7
Midlands -48 40 £495 +10.00% 6
South West -17 26 £500 -9.09% 10
North East -20 21 £425 -8.11% 2
West Midlands -53 21 £500 - 5
East Midlands -14 19 £413 +15.55% 1
East of England -20 17 £550 +10.00% 4
Northern Ireland -5 2 - - 2
Wales -12 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
1 128 (13.33%) Apache Spark
2 64 (6.67%) Apache
3 54 (5.63%) Apache Airflow
4 15 (1.56%) Confluence
5 7 (0.73%) Camunda
6 6 (0.63%) Ethereum
6 6 (0.63%) Hyperledger
7 5 (0.52%) Apache Pulsar
7 5 (0.52%) WebSphere
8 4 (0.42%) Microsoft Exchange
9 2 (0.21%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.21%) OpenStack
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.21%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.21%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.21%) WebSphere Portal
10 1 (0.10%) JBoss
10 1 (0.10%) Palantir Foundry
Applications
1 8 (0.83%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.21%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
Business Applications
1 4 (0.42%) Payment Gateway
2 3 (0.31%) Bloomberg AIM
2 3 (0.31%) Fidessa
3 2 (0.21%) Endur
3 2 (0.21%) Shopify
3 2 (0.21%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
4 1 (0.10%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
4 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.10%) R3 Corda
4 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 560 (58.33%) AWS
2 282 (29.38%) Azure
3 177 (18.44%) GCP
4 138 (14.38%) GitHub
5 120 (12.50%) Serverless
6 103 (10.73%) GitHub Actions
7 92 (9.58%) Amazon S3
8 91 (9.48%) AWS Lambda
9 69 (7.19%) OpenShift
10 66 (6.88%) Amazon EKS
11 62 (6.46%) Azure DevOps
12 54 (5.63%) Power Platform
12 54 (5.63%) Snowflake
13 45 (4.69%) Amazon ECS
14 44 (4.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
15 42 (4.38%) dbt
16 40 (4.17%) AWS CloudFormation
17 37 (3.85%) Amazon SQS
18 31 (3.23%) Amazon Kinesis
19 30 (3.13%) Azure Synapse Analytics
Communications & Networking
1 15 (1.56%) HTTP
2 13 (1.35%) Firewall
3 10 (1.04%) Network Security
4 9 (0.94%) DNS
5 7 (0.73%) MQTT
6 6 (0.63%) SSL
7 5 (0.52%) NAS
7 5 (0.52%) SAN
8 4 (0.42%) Internet
8 4 (0.42%) SMS
9 3 (0.31%) TCP/IP
10 2 (0.21%) NaaS
10 2 (0.21%) OpenVPN
10 2 (0.21%) Reverse Proxy
10 2 (0.21%) WAN
11 1 (0.10%) 4G
11 1 (0.10%) 5G
11 1 (0.10%) FIX Connectivity
11 1 (0.10%) MIMO
11 1 (0.10%) SSH
Database & Business Intelligence
1 187 (19.48%) PostgreSQL
2 153 (15.94%) MongoDB
3 129 (13.44%) NoSQL
4 99 (10.31%) Relational Database
5 63 (6.56%) Big Data
6 58 (6.04%) Data Warehouse
7 57 (5.94%) SQL Server
8 53 (5.52%) Data Lake
9 49 (5.10%) Redis
10 44 (4.58%) Power BI
11 41 (4.27%) Elasticsearch
12 40 (4.17%) Apache Cassandra
13 37 (3.85%) DynamoDB
13 37 (3.85%) MySQL
14 35 (3.65%) Flink
15 33 (3.44%) Hadoop
16 28 (2.92%) Amazon Athena
16 28 (2.92%) Amazon RDS
16 28 (2.92%) BigQuery
17 27 (2.81%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 160 (16.67%) Jenkins
2 128 (13.33%) Git
3 126 (13.13%) GitLab
4 72 (7.50%) JUnit
5 50 (5.21%) Mockito
6 45 (4.69%) JIRA
7 36 (3.75%) Gradle
8 31 (3.23%) Selenium
9 25 (2.60%) Cucumber
10 23 (2.40%) REST Assured
11 20 (2.08%) Gatling
12 17 (1.77%) Liquibase
13 16 (1.67%) Maven
13 16 (1.67%) Postman
14 15 (1.56%) Serenity BDD
15 14 (1.46%) SonarQube
16 6 (0.63%) Cypress.io
16 6 (0.63%) Jaeger
16 6 (0.63%) JMeter
16 6 (0.63%) Snyk
General
1 265 (27.60%) Finance
2 180 (18.75%) Social Skills
3 131 (13.65%) Banking
4 86 (8.96%) Public Sector
5 83 (8.65%) Analytical Skills
6 46 (4.79%) Front Office
7 36 (3.75%) Investment Banking
8 27 (2.81%) Documentation Skills
9 21 (2.19%) Financial Institution
9 21 (2.19%) Retail
10 14 (1.46%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 14 (1.46%) Law
11 10 (1.04%) Influencing Skills
11 10 (1.04%) Marketing
11 10 (1.04%) Telecoms
12 9 (0.94%) Publishing
13 8 (0.83%) Corporate Banking
13 8 (0.83%) Military
14 7 (0.73%) Automotive
14 7 (0.73%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 312 (32.50%) Developer
2 197 (20.52%) Senior
3 158 (16.46%) Java Developer
4 152 (15.83%) Data Engineer
5 116 (12.08%) Lead
6 115 (11.98%) Architect
7 99 (10.31%) Software Engineer
8 81 (8.44%) Senior Developer
9 80 (8.33%) Java Engineer
10 54 (5.63%) AWS Architect
11 48 (5.00%) Senior Java Developer
12 43 (4.48%) Solutions Architect
13 40 (4.17%) DevOps Engineer
14 38 (3.96%) Full-Stack Developer
15 36 (3.75%) Developer/Software Engineer
16 33 (3.44%) Lead Developer
17 32 (3.33%) Java Software Engineer
17 32 (3.33%) Principal Engineer
17 32 (3.33%) Senior Java Engineer
18 31 (3.23%) Kafka Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 243 (25.31%) Spring
2 234 (24.38%) Spring Boot
3 143 (14.90%) REST
4 134 (13.96%) RESTful
5 128 (13.33%) React
6 102 (10.63%) RabbitMQ
7 87 (9.06%) Node.js
8 64 (6.67%) GraphQL
9 58 (6.04%) OpenTelemetry
10 53 (5.52%) JSON
11 50 (5.21%) Redux
12 49 (5.10%) gRPC
13 42 (4.38%) Middleware
14 41 (4.27%) OAuth
15 39 (4.06%) AngularJS
15 39 (4.06%) Apache Avro
15 39 (4.06%) Swagger
16 38 (3.96%) OpenAPI
17 36 (3.75%) PySpark
18 35 (3.65%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 193 (20.10%) Distributed Systems
2 176 (18.33%) Cloud Native
3 38 (3.96%) Fixed Income
4 37 (3.85%) Product Ownership
5 36 (3.75%) Management Information System
6 34 (3.54%) Data Structures
7 24 (2.50%) Algorithms
7 24 (2.50%) Enterprise Software
8 23 (2.40%) Onboarding
9 18 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
10 16 (1.67%) Self-Motivation
11 15 (1.56%) Derivative
11 15 (1.56%) Equities
11 15 (1.56%) Hybrid Cloud
12 14 (1.46%) Clustering
12 14 (1.46%) Data Protection Act
12 14 (1.46%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
12 14 (1.46%) Public Cloud
13 12 (1.25%) Virtual Team
14 10 (1.04%) Greenfield Project
Operating Systems
1 89 (9.27%) Linux
2 53 (5.52%) Unix
3 26 (2.71%) Windows
4 8 (0.83%) Mac OS X
5 7 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.52%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.31%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.21%) Debian
8 2 (0.21%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.21%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.21%) zOS
9 1 (0.10%) Android
9 1 (0.10%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.10%) VMS
9 1 (0.10%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 437 (45.52%) CI/CD
2 362 (37.71%) Microservices
3 317 (33.02%) Agile
4 293 (30.52%) DevOps
5 289 (30.10%) Event-Driven
6 223 (23.23%) Observability
7 204 (21.25%) Containerisation
8 198 (20.63%) Event-Driven Architecture
9 191 (19.90%) Software Engineering
10 178 (18.54%) Data Pipeline
11 159 (16.56%) Infrastructure as Code
12 157 (16.35%) Data Modelling
13 152 (15.83%) Problem-Solving
13 152 (15.83%) Test Automation
14 149 (15.52%) Analytics
15 140 (14.58%) Data Engineering
16 138 (14.38%) ETL
17 123 (12.81%) AI
18 109 (11.35%) TDD
19 104 (10.83%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 445 (46.35%) Java
2 327 (34.06%) Python
3 299 (31.15%) SQL
4 118 (12.29%) TypeScript
5 87 (9.06%) Go
6 82 (8.54%) JavaScript
7 58 (6.04%) C#
8 42 (4.38%) Bash
9 26 (2.71%) Scala
10 22 (2.29%) PowerShell
11 18 (1.88%) Rust
12 17 (1.77%) PL/SQL
13 14 (1.46%) C++
14 13 (1.35%) Shell Script
15 12 (1.25%) Bicep
15 12 (1.25%) Kotlin
16 10 (1.04%) Search Processing Language
17 9 (0.94%) Groovy
18 7 (0.73%) PHP
19 6 (0.63%) Perl
Qualifications
1 195 (20.31%) Security Cleared
2 151 (15.73%) SC Cleared
3 51 (5.31%) Degree
4 29 (3.02%) BPSS Clearance
5 18 (1.88%) AWS Certification
5 18 (1.88%) DV Cleared
6 17 (1.77%) Computer Science Degree
7 13 (1.35%) Master's Degree
8 10 (1.04%) Azure Certification
9 8 (0.83%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 7 (0.73%) SnowPro
11 3 (0.31%) DBS Check
11 3 (0.31%) ITIL Certification
12 2 (0.21%) AWS Certified Developer
12 2 (0.21%) PhD
12 2 (0.21%) Postgraduate
12 2 (0.21%) TOGAF Certification
13 1 (0.10%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
13 1 (0.10%) CISSP
13 1 (0.10%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 100 (10.42%) Data Quality
2 56 (5.83%) QA
3 38 (3.96%) Accessibility
4 36 (3.75%) GDPR
5 17 (1.77%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.04%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 9 (0.94%) NIST
8 8 (0.83%) PCI DSS
9 7 (0.73%) SEPA
10 4 (0.42%) WCAG
11 3 (0.31%) ISO 8583
11 3 (0.31%) PSD2
12 2 (0.21%) Actionable Recommendations
12 2 (0.21%) EMIR
12 2 (0.21%) IFRS
12 2 (0.21%) IFRS 17
12 2 (0.21%) ISO 15022
12 2 (0.21%) MiFID
12 2 (0.21%) NCSC
12 2 (0.21%) Solvency II
System Software
1 319 (33.23%) Docker
2 6 (0.63%) etcd
3 5 (0.52%) Apache ZooKeeper
4 2 (0.21%) VMware Infrastructure
5 1 (0.10%) Apache Flume
5 1 (0.10%) HDFS
5 1 (0.10%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.10%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 381 (39.69%) Kubernetes
2 198 (20.63%) Terraform
3 122 (12.71%) Prometheus
4 118 (12.29%) Grafana
5 58 (6.04%) Ansible
6 19 (1.98%) Argo
7 10 (1.04%) Kibana
8 9 (0.94%) Control-M
8 9 (0.94%) Istio
8 9 (0.94%) Puppet
9 8 (0.83%) Podman
10 7 (0.73%) Fluentd
11 6 (0.63%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.52%) Kiali
12 5 (0.52%) logstash
12 5 (0.52%) Rancher
13 3 (0.31%) NetBackup
14 2 (0.21%) CA Wily
14 2 (0.21%) Sysdig
14 2 (0.21%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 83 (8.65%) Databricks
2 70 (7.29%) Oracle
3 65 (6.77%) Splunk
4 43 (4.48%) Microsoft
5 37 (3.85%) Google
6 27 (2.81%) Confluent
7 24 (2.50%) Informatica
8 18 (1.88%) Dynatrace
8 18 (1.88%) IBM
9 13 (1.35%) Salesforce
9 13 (1.35%) Solace
10 10 (1.04%) MuleSoft
10 10 (1.04%) OpenAI
11 9 (0.94%) Sybase
11 9 (0.94%) Talend
12 8 (0.83%) Red Hat
12 8 (0.83%) ServiceNow
13 7 (0.73%) SAP
14 6 (0.63%) AppDynamics
14 6 (0.63%) Pega