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

6 months to
4 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 148 97 145
Rank change year-on-year -51 +48 +9
Contract jobs citing Kafka 1,000 845 667
As % of all contract jobs in the UK 1.89% 2.57% 1.70%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 9.91% 11.36% 7.75%
Number of daily rates quoted 620 545 463
10th Percentile £380 £386 £400
25th Percentile £425 £452 £475
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.26% -7.77%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £725
90th Percentile £800 £813 £788
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £490
% change year-on-year +6.61% -4.29% -18.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 14 3 9
10th Percentile £56.40 £54.65 £22.55
25th Percentile £65.00 £57.13 £27.00
Median hourly rate £71.25 £62.50 £28.00
Median % change year-on-year +14.00% +123.21% -64.10%
75th Percentile £88.75 £71.23 £38.75
90th Percentile £90.00 £75.71 £45.95
UK excluding London median hourly rate £77.00 £78.70 £28.00
% change year-on-year -2.16% +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 10,090 7,440 8,609
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 19.09% 22.61% 21.96%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,588 5,024 5,854
10th Percentile £363 £350 £350
25th Percentile £425 £413 £428
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -9.09% -
75th Percentile £638 £634 £666
90th Percentile £738 £750 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £469 £500
% change year-on-year +6.61% -6.20% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 266 165 248
10th Percentile £28.72 £30.10 £22.50
25th Percentile £41.59 £40.75 £43.00
Median hourly rate £65.00 £54.88 £53.75
Median % change year-on-year +18.45% +2.09% -10.42%
75th Percentile £73.00 £67.00 £70.00
90th Percentile £81.25 £79.48 £74.46
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £55.00 £58.60
% change year-on-year +18.18% -6.15% +0.02%

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 4 August 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 4 August 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 4 August 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 -48 846 £550 - 438
London -37 496 £575 -8.00% 321
UK excluding London -29 381 £500 +6.61% 164
Work from Home -59 267 £550 -4.35% 184
North of England -9 176 £485 +4.19% 45
Yorkshire 0 82 £498 -0.50% 18
North West -37 73 £430 -8.42% 17
South East -40 62 £513 +15.82% 51
Scotland -27 55 £447 -4.89% 19
Midlands -50 41 £500 +19.05% 9
North East -18 28 £463 +0.05% 10
South West -31 28 £500 -9.09% 25
West Midlands -50 26 £500 - 8
East of England -2 23 £550 +10.00% 6
East Midlands -12 15 £470 +29.66% 1
Northern Ireland +2 3 - - 10
Wales -12 2 £313 - 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
1 131 (13.10%) Apache Spark
2 71 (7.10%) Apache
3 58 (5.80%) Apache Airflow
4 18 (1.80%) Confluence
5 7 (0.70%) Camunda
6 6 (0.60%) CMS
6 6 (0.60%) WebSphere
7 4 (0.40%) Apache Pulsar
7 4 (0.40%) OpenStack
8 3 (0.30%) Anypoint
8 3 (0.30%) Mule
9 2 (0.20%) Apache Pig
9 2 (0.20%) IBM HTTP Server
9 2 (0.20%) JBoss
9 2 (0.20%) MQSeries
9 2 (0.20%) Oracle HTTP Server
9 2 (0.20%) Oracle SOA Suite
9 2 (0.20%) WebLogic
9 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Application Server
9 2 (0.20%) WebSphere Portal
Applications
1 8 (0.80%) CPLEX
2 2 (0.20%) PlantUML
3 1 (0.10%) Chatbot
3 1 (0.10%) Maya
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Excel
3 1 (0.10%) Microsoft Office
Business Applications
1 2 (0.20%) Bloomberg AIM
1 2 (0.20%) Endur
1 2 (0.20%) Fidessa
1 2 (0.20%) Payment Gateway
1 2 (0.20%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
2 1 (0.10%) Actimize
2 1 (0.10%) FIS Private Capital Suite
2 1 (0.10%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
2 1 (0.10%) SAP IS-U
2 1 (0.10%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 590 (59.00%) AWS
2 311 (31.10%) Azure
3 197 (19.70%) GCP
4 144 (14.40%) GitHub
5 104 (10.40%) Serverless
6 103 (10.30%) GitHub Actions
7 82 (8.20%) AWS Lambda
8 77 (7.70%) Amazon S3
9 71 (7.10%) OpenShift
10 68 (6.80%) Amazon EKS
11 66 (6.60%) Azure DevOps
12 59 (5.90%) Snowflake
13 51 (5.10%) Amazon SQS
14 48 (4.80%) Amazon ECS
14 48 (4.80%) dbt
15 43 (4.30%) Power Platform
16 41 (4.10%) Amazon CloudWatch
17 33 (3.30%) AWS CloudFormation
18 30 (3.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
19 29 (2.90%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 16 (1.60%) HTTP
2 10 (1.00%) Network Security
3 9 (0.90%) Firewall
4 8 (0.80%) DNS
5 7 (0.70%) MQTT
5 7 (0.70%) SSL
6 4 (0.40%) NAS
6 4 (0.40%) SAN
7 3 (0.30%) Internet
7 3 (0.30%) TCP/IP
8 2 (0.20%) NaaS
8 2 (0.20%) OpenVPN
8 2 (0.20%) Reverse Proxy
8 2 (0.20%) WAN
9 1 (0.10%) 4G
9 1 (0.10%) 5G
9 1 (0.10%) FIX Connectivity
9 1 (0.10%) MIMO
9 1 (0.10%) SSH
9 1 (0.10%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 180 (18.00%) PostgreSQL
2 164 (16.40%) MongoDB
3 130 (13.00%) NoSQL
4 104 (10.40%) Relational Database
5 62 (6.20%) Big Data
6 60 (6.00%) SQL Server
7 57 (5.70%) Data Warehouse
8 50 (5.00%) Data Lake
9 43 (4.30%) Redis
10 40 (4.00%) Power BI
11 37 (3.70%) Flink
11 37 (3.70%) MySQL
12 36 (3.60%) Apache Cassandra
13 34 (3.40%) BigQuery
13 34 (3.40%) Elasticsearch
14 32 (3.20%) Hadoop
15 31 (3.10%) DynamoDB
16 29 (2.90%) Metadata
17 25 (2.50%) Delta Lake
17 25 (2.50%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 179 (17.90%) Jenkins
2 144 (14.40%) Git
3 127 (12.70%) GitLab
4 71 (7.10%) JUnit
5 64 (6.40%) Mockito
6 49 (4.90%) Gradle
7 41 (4.10%) JIRA
8 31 (3.10%) Selenium
9 27 (2.70%) Cucumber
10 25 (2.50%) Maven
11 20 (2.00%) REST Assured
12 18 (1.80%) Liquibase
12 18 (1.80%) SonarQube
13 15 (1.50%) Gatling
14 13 (1.30%) Postman
15 10 (1.00%) Bitbucket
15 10 (1.00%) Cypress.io
15 10 (1.00%) Serenity BDD
16 7 (0.70%) Claude Code
17 6 (0.60%) MLflow
General
1 263 (26.30%) Finance
2 177 (17.70%) Social Skills
3 133 (13.30%) Banking
4 100 (10.00%) Public Sector
5 95 (9.50%) Analytical Skills
6 51 (5.10%) Front Office
7 30 (3.00%) Retail
8 29 (2.90%) Investment Banking
9 21 (2.10%) Financial Institution
10 18 (1.80%) Documentation Skills
10 18 (1.80%) Inclusion and Diversity
11 16 (1.60%) Telecoms
12 15 (1.50%) Law
13 11 (1.10%) Billing
13 11 (1.10%) Organisational Skills
14 9 (0.90%) Publishing
15 8 (0.80%) Influencing Skills
15 8 (0.80%) Military
16 7 (0.70%) Marketing
16 7 (0.70%) Retail Banking
Job Titles
1 332 (33.20%) Developer
2 187 (18.70%) Senior
3 173 (17.30%) Java Developer
4 144 (14.40%) Data Engineer
5 136 (13.60%) Architect
6 106 (10.60%) Lead
7 94 (9.40%) Software Engineer
8 76 (7.60%) Java Engineer
9 72 (7.20%) Senior Developer
10 59 (5.90%) Solutions Architect
11 48 (4.80%) DevOps Engineer
12 43 (4.30%) Senior Java Developer
13 41 (4.10%) Full-Stack Developer
14 38 (3.80%) AWS Architect
15 36 (3.60%) Developer/Software Engineer
15 36 (3.60%) Java Software Engineer
15 36 (3.60%) Lead Developer
16 35 (3.50%) Python Engineer
17 33 (3.30%) Data Architect
18 32 (3.20%) AWS Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 240 (24.00%) Spring
2 230 (23.00%) Spring Boot
3 179 (17.90%) REST
4 153 (15.30%) React
5 141 (14.10%) RESTful
6 116 (11.60%) RabbitMQ
7 84 (8.40%) Node.js
8 71 (7.10%) GraphQL
9 67 (6.70%) JSON
10 60 (6.00%) Redux
11 52 (5.20%) OpenTelemetry
12 46 (4.60%) OAuth
13 44 (4.40%) PySpark
13 44 (4.40%) Swagger
14 43 (4.30%) OpenAPI
15 37 (3.70%) AngularJS
16 35 (3.50%) .NET
16 35 (3.50%) Middleware
16 35 (3.50%) OAuth2
17 31 (3.10%) Apache Avro
Miscellaneous
1 202 (20.20%) Distributed Systems
2 188 (18.80%) Cloud Native
3 43 (4.30%) Data Structures
4 40 (4.00%) Fixed Income
5 36 (3.60%) Product Ownership
6 33 (3.30%) Algorithms
7 30 (3.00%) Enterprise Software
8 26 (2.60%) Legacy Systems
9 25 (2.50%) Self-Motivation
10 24 (2.40%) Onboarding
11 22 (2.20%) Management Information System
12 21 (2.10%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
13 19 (1.90%) AI Agents
14 17 (1.70%) Data Protection Act
14 17 (1.70%) Public Cloud
15 16 (1.60%) Replication
16 15 (1.50%) Hybrid Cloud
17 14 (1.40%) Equities
18 13 (1.30%) SWIFT Messaging Network
19 12 (1.20%) Clustering
Operating Systems
1 106 (10.60%) Linux
2 60 (6.00%) Unix
3 25 (2.50%) Windows
4 10 (1.00%) Mac OS X
5 8 (0.80%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 5 (0.50%) Ubuntu
7 3 (0.30%) Mac OS
8 2 (0.20%) Android
8 2 (0.20%) Debian
8 2 (0.20%) Oracle Linux
8 2 (0.20%) SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
8 2 (0.20%) VMS
9 1 (0.10%) Apple iOS
9 1 (0.10%) CentOS
9 1 (0.10%) Windows Server
9 1 (0.10%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 480 (48.00%) CI/CD
2 378 (37.80%) Microservices
3 355 (35.50%) Agile
4 344 (34.40%) Event-Driven
5 325 (32.50%) DevOps
6 243 (24.30%) Event-Driven Architecture
7 232 (23.20%) Observability
8 224 (22.40%) Containerisation
9 198 (19.80%) Software Engineering
10 189 (18.90%) Data Pipeline
11 177 (17.70%) Test Automation
12 174 (17.40%) Infrastructure as Code
13 154 (15.40%) AI
14 153 (15.30%) Problem-Solving
15 150 (15.00%) Data Modelling
16 148 (14.80%) Analytics
17 138 (13.80%) ETL
18 132 (13.20%) Data Engineering
19 122 (12.20%) TDD
20 110 (11.00%) Full-Stack Development
Programming Languages
1 456 (45.60%) Java
2 353 (35.30%) Python
3 312 (31.20%) SQL
4 130 (13.00%) TypeScript
5 98 (9.80%) JavaScript
6 77 (7.70%) Go
7 60 (6.00%) Bash
8 56 (5.60%) C#
9 35 (3.50%) Scala
10 28 (2.80%) PowerShell
11 24 (2.40%) PL/SQL
12 17 (1.70%) Kotlin
12 17 (1.70%) Shell Script
13 11 (1.10%) Rust
14 10 (1.00%) Bicep
14 10 (1.00%) Groovy
14 10 (1.00%) Search Processing Language
15 9 (0.90%) C++
16 7 (0.70%) PHP
17 6 (0.60%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 218 (21.80%) Security Cleared
2 169 (16.90%) SC Cleared
3 45 (4.50%) Degree
4 31 (3.10%) BPSS Clearance
5 22 (2.20%) Computer Science Degree
6 21 (2.10%) DV Cleared
7 14 (1.40%) AWS Certification
8 10 (1.00%) Master's Degree
9 8 (0.80%) Azure Certification
10 6 (0.60%) SnowPro
11 4 (0.40%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 4 (0.40%) TOGAF Certification
12 3 (0.30%) DBS Check
12 3 (0.30%) PhD
13 2 (0.20%) Microsoft Certification
13 2 (0.20%) Postgraduate
14 1 (0.10%) CISM
14 1 (0.10%) ITIL Certification
14 1 (0.10%) MBA
14 1 (0.10%) SSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 97 (9.70%) Data Quality
2 55 (5.50%) QA
3 45 (4.50%) Accessibility
4 31 (3.10%) GDPR
5 19 (1.90%) ISO 20022
6 10 (1.00%) SEPA
7 7 (0.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 6 (0.60%) WCAG
9 4 (0.40%) NIST
10 3 (0.30%) ISO 15022
10 3 (0.30%) SLA
11 2 (0.20%) Actionable Recommendations
11 2 (0.20%) EMIR
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS
11 2 (0.20%) IFRS 17
11 2 (0.20%) MiFID
11 2 (0.20%) NCSC
11 2 (0.20%) Solvency II
12 1 (0.10%) California Consumer Privacy Act
12 1 (0.10%) GRC
System Software
1 347 (34.70%) Docker
2 6 (0.60%) Apache ZooKeeper
2 6 (0.60%) etcd
3 3 (0.30%) VMware Infrastructure
4 2 (0.20%) Apache Flume
4 2 (0.20%) HDFS
5 1 (0.10%) OpenSSH
5 1 (0.10%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 425 (42.50%) Kubernetes
2 198 (19.80%) Terraform
3 113 (11.30%) Prometheus
4 112 (11.20%) Grafana
5 61 (6.10%) Ansible
6 26 (2.60%) Argo
7 16 (1.60%) Control-M
8 12 (1.20%) Podman
9 11 (1.10%) Kibana
10 9 (0.90%) Istio
10 9 (0.90%) Puppet
11 7 (0.70%) Fluentd
11 7 (0.70%) Kustomize
12 6 (0.60%) logstash
13 5 (0.50%) Check_MK
13 5 (0.50%) Rancher
14 3 (0.30%) Bosun
14 3 (0.30%) NetBackup
15 2 (0.20%) CA Wily
15 2 (0.20%) Tivoli
Vendors
1 85 (8.50%) Oracle
2 81 (8.10%) Databricks
3 54 (5.40%) Splunk
4 49 (4.90%) Microsoft
5 45 (4.50%) Google
6 27 (2.70%) Confluent
7 25 (2.50%) Dynatrace
8 22 (2.20%) Informatica
9 21 (2.10%) IBM
10 17 (1.70%) Salesforce
11 16 (1.60%) Solace
12 15 (1.50%) MuleSoft
13 14 (1.40%) OpenAI
14 11 (1.10%) SAP
15 8 (0.80%) Red Hat
15 8 (0.80%) ServiceNow
15 8 (0.80%) Sybase
16 7 (0.70%) VMware
17 6 (0.60%) Pega
17 6 (0.60%) TIBCO