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 1 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 117 119 173
Rank change year-on-year +2 +54 -60
Contract jobs citing Kafka 873 748 661
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 2.44% 2.08% 1.45%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 10.83% 9.56% 6.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 576 445 507
10th Percentile £363 £384 £450
25th Percentile £424 £490 £506
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £600 £625
Median % change year-on-year -8.33% -4.00% -
75th Percentile £661 £725 £775
90th Percentile £738 £810 £825
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £475 £525
% change year-on-year -5.26% -9.52% -12.50%
Number of hourly rates quoted 6 5 8
10th Percentile £37.63 £26.04 £57.45
25th Percentile £43.25 £27.00 £72.50
Median hourly rate £59.25 £37.50 £77.50
Median % change year-on-year +58.00% -51.61% +5.80%
75th Percentile £68.44 £87.50 £80.70
90th Percentile £90.00 £91.25 £87.59
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.00 £56.50 £71.50
% change year-on-year -29.20% -20.98% -2.05%

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 8,062 7,822 10,128
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 22.56% 21.74% 22.18%
Number of daily rates quoted 5,353 4,928 7,215
10th Percentile £350 £350 £363
25th Percentile £413 £425 £444
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £550 £550
Median % change year-on-year -9.09% - -4.35%
75th Percentile £625 £650 £650
90th Percentile £720 £777 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £485 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.00% - -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 180 116 184
10th Percentile £30.23 £22.00 £32.90
25th Percentile £43.00 £37.88 £46.18
Median hourly rate £55.50 £65.00 £54.53
Median % change year-on-year -14.62% +19.20% -13.44%
75th Percentile £65.06 £70.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £77.85 £74.22 £78.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £64.75 £65.00 £52.50
% change year-on-year -0.38% +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 1 December 2025.

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 1 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Kafka in the UK

Kafka
Top 15 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 1 December 2025. 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 +5 763 £550 -10.90% 129
London +3 502 £600 -4.76% 74
Work from Home +30 313 £600 +9.09% 154
UK excluding London -3 257 £450 -5.26% 102
North of England -22 97 £470 -17.90% 23
North West -2 57 £435 -11.33% 16
South East +7 56 £434 -12.02% 41
Scotland +28 52 £450 +20.00% 8
Midlands -5 44 £500 +17.65% 9
Yorkshire -36 35 £598 -8.08% 6
West Midlands -7 27 £540 -4.00% 8
South West +11 19 £550 -15.38% 14
East Midlands +1 17 £420 +17.98% 1
North East -4 7 £575 -7.89% 1
East of England -29 1 £538 +69.83% 3

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 68 (7.79%) Apache Spark
2 49 (5.61%) Apache
3 40 (4.58%) Apache Airflow
4 37 (4.24%) Confluence
5 10 (1.15%) Mule
6 8 (0.92%) Anypoint
6 8 (0.92%) MQSeries
7 6 (0.69%) CMS
8 5 (0.57%) Camunda
8 5 (0.57%) JBoss
8 5 (0.57%) Microsoft Exchange
9 4 (0.46%) WebSphere
10 3 (0.34%) Luigi
10 3 (0.34%) OpenStack
11 2 (0.23%) SharePoint
11 2 (0.23%) Tomcat
11 2 (0.23%) WebLogic
11 2 (0.23%) WebSphere Application Server
12 1 (0.11%) Apache Pig
12 1 (0.11%) IIS
Applications
1 4 (0.46%) Chatbot
2 2 (0.23%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.11%) Microsoft Project
3 1 (0.11%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 4 (0.46%) Fidessa
1 4 (0.46%) Oracle 11i
2 2 (0.23%) Actimize
2 2 (0.23%) SAP BRIM
3 1 (0.11%) Bloomberg AIM
3 1 (0.11%) Endur
3 1 (0.11%) Exchequer
3 1 (0.11%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
3 1 (0.11%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.11%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 439 (50.29%) AWS
2 214 (24.51%) Azure
3 126 (14.43%) GitHub
4 117 (13.40%) GCP
5 94 (10.77%) Serverless
6 80 (9.16%) GitHub Actions
7 66 (7.56%) Amazon S3
7 66 (7.56%) AWS Lambda
8 48 (5.50%) AWS CloudFormation
9 46 (5.27%) OpenShift
10 45 (5.15%) Azure DevOps
11 44 (5.04%) Amazon EKS
12 37 (4.24%) Amazon ECS
13 36 (4.12%) Amazon SQS
14 32 (3.67%) Amazon CloudWatch
14 32 (3.67%) Amazon Kinesis
14 32 (3.67%) Azure Data Factory
15 27 (3.09%) Amazon EC2
15 27 (3.09%) Snowflake
16 19 (2.18%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 10 (1.15%) HTTP
1 10 (1.15%) SSL
2 8 (0.92%) DNS
3 7 (0.80%) AMQP
3 7 (0.80%) DSL
4 6 (0.69%) Firewall
4 6 (0.69%) Kerberos
5 5 (0.57%) SSH
6 4 (0.46%) FTP
6 4 (0.46%) MQTT
7 2 (0.23%) TCP/IP
7 2 (0.23%) VPN
8 1 (0.11%) HTTPS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 175 (20.05%) PostgreSQL
2 174 (19.93%) MongoDB
3 129 (14.78%) NoSQL
4 74 (8.48%) Apache Cassandra
5 71 (8.13%) Relational Database
6 60 (6.87%) Big Data
7 51 (5.84%) Redis
8 43 (4.93%) SQL Server
9 41 (4.70%) Amazon RDS
10 38 (4.35%) DB2
11 37 (4.24%) Data Warehouse
12 36 (4.12%) DynamoDB
12 36 (4.12%) Elasticsearch
13 34 (3.89%) Hadoop
14 31 (3.55%) Data Lake
15 25 (2.86%) Metadata
16 20 (2.29%) Amazon Redshift
17 18 (2.06%) Oracle Database
17 18 (2.06%) Power BI
17 18 (2.06%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 173 (19.82%) Jenkins
2 119 (13.63%) GitLab
3 110 (12.60%) Git
4 106 (12.14%) JUnit
5 59 (6.76%) JIRA
6 48 (5.50%) Mockito
7 29 (3.32%) Cucumber
8 24 (2.75%) Gradle
8 24 (2.75%) JMeter
9 23 (2.63%) Sonatype Nexus
10 21 (2.41%) Maven
10 21 (2.41%) SonarQube
11 14 (1.60%) Artifactory
12 12 (1.37%) Liquibase
13 11 (1.26%) Gatling
13 11 (1.26%) SoapUI
13 11 (1.26%) Subversion
14 7 (0.80%) Atlassian Bamboo
14 7 (0.80%) Cypress.io
14 7 (0.80%) TeamCity
General
1 243 (27.84%) Finance
2 241 (27.61%) Social Skills
3 138 (15.81%) Banking
4 100 (11.45%) Analytical Skills
5 73 (8.36%) Public Sector
6 67 (7.67%) Investment Banking
7 49 (5.61%) Front Office
8 12 (1.37%) Documentation Skills
9 9 (1.03%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 8 (0.92%) Influencing Skills
11 7 (0.80%) Military
12 6 (0.69%) Financial Institution
12 6 (0.69%) Retail
13 5 (0.57%) Telecoms
14 4 (0.46%) Aerospace
14 4 (0.46%) Retail Banking
15 3 (0.34%) Back Office
15 3 (0.34%) Law
15 3 (0.34%) Manufacturing
15 3 (0.34%) Marketing
Job Titles
1 359 (41.12%) Developer
2 237 (27.15%) Senior
3 221 (25.32%) Java Developer
4 121 (13.86%) Senior Developer
5 86 (9.85%) Data Engineer
6 84 (9.62%) Software Engineer
7 80 (9.16%) Senior Java Developer
8 79 (9.05%) Lead
9 65 (7.45%) Architect
10 63 (7.22%) DevOps Engineer
11 40 (4.58%) Kafka Developer
11 40 (4.58%) Platform Engineer
12 39 (4.47%) AWS Engineer
13 37 (4.24%) AWS Developer
13 37 (4.24%) Python Engineer
14 36 (4.12%) Kafka Engineer
15 35 (4.01%) Full-Stack Developer
16 31 (3.55%) Java Engineer
17 30 (3.44%) SQL Developer
18 28 (3.21%) Investment Banking Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 204 (23.37%) Spring
2 145 (16.61%) Spring Boot
3 103 (11.80%) REST
4 102 (11.68%) React
5 100 (11.45%) gRPC
6 89 (10.19%) RabbitMQ
7 79 (9.05%) RESTful
8 52 (5.96%) Node.js
9 47 (5.38%) JMS
10 46 (5.27%) ActiveMQ
11 41 (4.70%) AngularJS
12 39 (4.47%) .NET
13 35 (4.01%) GraphQL
14 34 (3.89%) Hibernate
14 34 (3.89%) JSON
14 34 (3.89%) Keycloak
15 32 (3.67%) OAuth
16 30 (3.44%) Middleware
16 30 (3.44%) SOAP
17 29 (3.32%) Apache NiFi
Miscellaneous
1 115 (13.17%) Distributed Systems
2 85 (9.74%) Cloud Native
3 44 (5.04%) Equities
4 39 (4.47%) Data Structures
5 30 (3.44%) Management Information System
6 29 (3.32%) Fixed Income
7 28 (3.21%) Product Ownership
8 26 (2.98%) Replication
9 22 (2.52%) Derivative
10 21 (2.41%) Market Risk
11 13 (1.49%) Distributed Computing
12 12 (1.37%) Hybrid Cloud
13 11 (1.26%) Data Protection Act
13 11 (1.26%) PKI
14 10 (1.15%) Algorithms
14 10 (1.15%) Legacy Systems
15 9 (1.03%) Greenfield Project
15 9 (1.03%) Legacy Applications
15 9 (1.03%) Onboarding
16 8 (0.92%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 165 (18.90%) Linux
2 78 (8.93%) Unix
3 22 (2.52%) Windows
4 13 (1.49%) Mac OS X
5 12 (1.37%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 7 (0.80%) CentOS
7 5 (0.57%) AIX
8 1 (0.11%) Debian
8 1 (0.11%) Ubuntu
8 1 (0.11%) VMS
8 1 (0.11%) Windows Server
8 1 (0.11%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 361 (41.35%) Microservices
2 358 (41.01%) Agile
3 348 (39.86%) CI/CD
4 250 (28.64%) Software Engineering
5 242 (27.72%) DevOps
6 206 (23.60%) Problem-Solving
7 165 (18.90%) Containerisation
8 133 (15.23%) Event-Driven
9 131 (15.01%) Infrastructure as Code
10 127 (14.55%) TDD
11 124 (14.20%) Open Source
12 121 (13.86%) Observability
13 119 (13.63%) Test Automation
14 104 (11.91%) Data Pipeline
15 102 (11.68%) SDLC
16 93 (10.65%) Analytics
17 91 (10.42%) Scrum
18 83 (9.51%) Data Engineering
19 82 (9.39%) Mentoring
20 81 (9.28%) ETL
Programming Languages
1 436 (49.94%) Java
2 321 (36.77%) Python
3 242 (27.72%) SQL
4 131 (15.01%) Go
5 65 (7.45%) JavaScript
6 62 (7.10%) C#
7 58 (6.64%) Shell Script
8 50 (5.73%) C++
9 47 (5.38%) Bash
10 39 (4.47%) TypeScript
11 31 (3.55%) Scala
12 14 (1.60%) Perl
13 12 (1.37%) PL/SQL
14 9 (1.03%) Groovy
15 8 (0.92%) Korn
15 8 (0.92%) T-SQL
16 7 (0.80%) DataWeave
17 6 (0.69%) R
17 6 (0.69%) Rust
18 5 (0.57%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 173 (19.82%) Security Cleared
2 151 (17.30%) SC Cleared
3 49 (5.61%) Degree
4 32 (3.67%) Computer Science Degree
5 26 (2.98%) DV Cleared
6 23 (2.63%) Azure Certification
6 23 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
7 18 (2.06%) AWS Certification
8 16 (1.83%) Master's Degree
9 7 (0.80%) OCP
9 7 (0.80%) Oracle Certification
10 5 (0.57%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
10 5 (0.57%) Numerate Degree
11 2 (0.23%) CBAP
11 2 (0.23%) CSPO
11 2 (0.23%) Microsoft Certification
11 2 (0.23%) TOGAF Certification
12 1 (0.11%) IBM Certification
12 1 (0.11%) PMI Certification
12 1 (0.11%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 54 (6.19%) Data Quality
2 40 (4.58%) QA
3 21 (2.41%) GDPR
4 10 (1.15%) NCSC
5 5 (0.57%) MiFID
5 5 (0.57%) WCAG
6 4 (0.46%) HIPAA
6 4 (0.46%) HL7
6 4 (0.46%) SEPA
7 3 (0.34%) Def Stans
7 3 (0.34%) EMIR
7 3 (0.34%) SLA
8 2 (0.23%) Accessibility
8 2 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
8 2 (0.23%) ISO 20022
8 2 (0.23%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 2 (0.23%) PCI DSS
9 1 (0.11%) California Consumer Privacy Act
9 1 (0.11%) JSP 440
9 1 (0.11%) Section 508
System Software
1 297 (34.02%) Docker
2 8 (0.92%) VMware Infrastructure
3 5 (0.57%) HDFS
4 3 (0.34%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.23%) Active Directory
6 1 (0.11%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 341 (39.06%) Kubernetes
2 180 (20.62%) Terraform
3 93 (10.65%) Grafana
4 81 (9.28%) Prometheus
5 72 (8.25%) Ansible
6 20 (2.29%) Argo
7 17 (1.95%) Progress Chef
8 15 (1.72%) Packer
9 9 (1.03%) logstash
10 7 (0.80%) Jamf Pro
11 6 (0.69%) Kibana
11 6 (0.69%) Single Sign-On
12 5 (0.57%) Kustomize
12 5 (0.57%) Puppet
12 5 (0.57%) Rancher
13 4 (0.46%) Fluentd
13 4 (0.46%) Hadoop YARN
13 4 (0.46%) Istio
14 3 (0.34%) linkerd
14 3 (0.34%) Oozie
Vendors
1 78 (8.93%) Oracle
2 49 (5.61%) Splunk
3 39 (4.47%) Databricks
4 37 (4.24%) Microsoft
5 34 (3.89%) Sybase
6 30 (3.44%) IBM
7 29 (3.32%) Confluent
8 28 (3.21%) Google
9 23 (2.63%) Dynatrace
10 20 (2.29%) VMware
11 17 (1.95%) Cloudera
12 15 (1.72%) Red Hat
13 14 (1.60%) CA Agile Central
14 13 (1.49%) Foundry
14 13 (1.49%) MuleSoft
14 13 (1.49%) Palantir
15 12 (1.37%) ServiceNow
16 11 (1.26%) TIBCO
17 10 (1.15%) Informatica
17 10 (1.15%) SAP