Kafka Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Apache Kafka
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Kafka skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 5 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
5 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 462 267 246
Rank change year-on-year -195 -21 +19
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 96 236 746
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.16% 0.91% 1.16%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.03% 4.94% 5.56%
Number of salaries quoted 45 147 339
10th Percentile £50,250 £45,750 £46,250
25th Percentile £53,750 £54,713 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £70,000 £67,500 £69,447
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% -2.80% +6.84%
75th Percentile £95,000 £93,750 £81,250
90th Percentile £97,500 £111,000 £91,934
UK median annual salary £100,000 £84,115 £77,500
% change year-on-year +18.89% +8.54% -13.41%

All Software Libraries and Frameworks
UK excluding London

Kafka falls under the Software Libraries and Frameworks category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills in the UK excluding London.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for technical specification, industry standards, software libraries and framework skills 4,732 4,781 13,409
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.11% 18.50% 20.84%
Number of salaries quoted 3,644 3,700 10,090
10th Percentile £31,250 £33,750 £33,750
25th Percentile £45,000 £45,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £60,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year - +9.09% -4.35%
75th Percentile £72,500 £73,750 £70,000
90th Percentile £85,000 £86,250 £81,250
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,209 £60,000
% change year-on-year -1.83% +10.35% -11.11%

Kafka
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Kafka relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Kafka job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Kafka
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kafka.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Kafka

Kafka
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing Kafka in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 5 April 2026.

Salary histogram for Kafka in the UK excluding London

Kafka
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Kafka within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 5 April 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
South East -74 32 £65,000 -8.77% 31
North of England -96 31 £71,250 +0.36% 33
North West -55 18 £95,000 +40.74% 22
Yorkshire -64 11 £53,500 -27.46% 6
East of England -25 9 £62,500 -19.35% 9
Midlands -41 8 £72,500 +11.54% 5
Scotland -57 8 £65,000 -1.89% 7
South West -54 7 £75,000 +36.36% 16
Wales -23 5 £56,631 +27.71% 2
West Midlands -20 4 £72,500 +3.57% 4
East Midlands -41 4 £120,000 +84.62% 1
North East -24 2 - - 5
Northern Ireland -45 1 - -
Kafka
UK

Kafka
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 18 (18.75%) Apache Airflow
2 16 (16.67%) Apache Spark
3 8 (8.33%) Apache
3 8 (8.33%) OpenStack
4 2 (2.08%) Apache Qpid
4 2 (2.08%) CICS
5 1 (1.04%) Apache Synapse
5 1 (1.04%) Appian
5 1 (1.04%) Camunda
5 1 (1.04%) PegaRULES
Applications
1 1 (1.04%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 1 (1.04%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 60 (62.50%) AWS
2 44 (45.83%) Azure
3 33 (34.38%) GCP
4 18 (18.75%) Serverless
5 15 (15.63%) Amazon S3
5 15 (15.63%) dbt
5 15 (15.63%) Snowflake
6 13 (13.54%) Amazon EKS
6 13 (13.54%) Amazon SQS
7 11 (11.46%) GitHub
8 10 (10.42%) Amazon ECS
8 10 (10.42%) Azure Synapse Analytics
8 10 (10.42%) Power Platform
9 8 (8.33%) AWS CloudFormation
9 8 (8.33%) AWS Lambda
10 7 (7.29%) Azure DevOps
10 7 (7.29%) SaaS
11 6 (6.25%) Azure Service Bus
12 5 (5.21%) Amazon Kinesis
13 3 (3.13%) Kong
Communications & Networking
1 5 (5.21%) MQTT
2 3 (3.13%) HTTP
3 2 (2.08%) Firewall
3 2 (2.08%) SSL
4 1 (1.04%) AMQP
4 1 (1.04%) Broadband
4 1 (1.04%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 30 (31.25%) NoSQL
2 18 (18.75%) PostgreSQL
3 14 (14.58%) MongoDB
4 13 (13.54%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (11.46%) Data Lake
5 11 (11.46%) Elasticsearch
5 11 (11.46%) Relational Database
6 10 (10.42%) BigQuery
6 10 (10.42%) Looker
7 9 (9.38%) Amazon Redshift
7 9 (9.38%) Power BI
7 9 (9.38%) Tableau
8 8 (8.33%) SQL Server
9 7 (7.29%) DynamoDB
9 7 (7.29%) MySQL
9 7 (7.29%) Snowflake Schema
10 6 (6.25%) Redis
11 5 (5.21%) Flink
12 3 (3.13%) Big Data
13 2 (2.08%) Amazon RDS
Development Applications
1 22 (22.92%) Git
2 19 (19.79%) Jenkins
3 8 (8.33%) JIRA
4 7 (7.29%) MLflow
5 6 (6.25%) JUnit
6 5 (5.21%) git-flow
6 5 (5.21%) GitLab
7 4 (4.17%) Cucumber
8 3 (3.13%) Eclipse
8 3 (3.13%) IntelliJ
8 3 (3.13%) JMeter
8 3 (3.13%) Selenium
9 2 (2.08%) LoadRunner
9 2 (2.08%) Robot Framework
9 2 (2.08%) SonarQube
10 1 (1.04%) Mockito
10 1 (1.04%) Postman
10 1 (1.04%) REST Assured
10 1 (1.04%) Snyk
10 1 (1.04%) SoapUI
General
1 21 (21.88%) Social Skills
2 13 (13.54%) Finance
3 10 (10.42%) Analytical Skills
4 3 (3.13%) Banking
4 3 (3.13%) Organisational Skills
4 3 (3.13%) Public Sector
5 2 (2.08%) Aerospace
5 2 (2.08%) Games
6 1 (1.04%) Automotive
6 1 (1.04%) Law
6 1 (1.04%) Marketing
6 1 (1.04%) Retail
6 1 (1.04%) Tech for Good
6 1 (1.04%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 28 (29.17%) Developer
2 22 (22.92%) Senior
3 21 (21.88%) Data Engineer
4 16 (16.67%) Lead
5 14 (14.58%) Architect
5 14 (14.58%) Full-Stack Developer
6 13 (13.54%) Java Developer
7 10 (10.42%) Senior Developer
8 9 (9.38%) Solutions Architect
9 8 (8.33%) Senior Systems Engineer
10 7 (7.29%) Systems Engineer
11 6 (6.25%) Full-Stack Java Developer
12 5 (5.21%) Full-Stack Engineer
12 5 (5.21%) Lead Data Engineer
13 4 (4.17%) DevSecOps Engineer
13 4 (4.17%) Java Engineer
13 4 (4.17%) Principal Architect
13 4 (4.17%) Senior Data Engineer
13 4 (4.17%) Senior Full-Stack Developer
13 4 (4.17%) Software Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 24 (25.00%) React
2 23 (23.96%) REST
3 21 (21.88%) Spring
4 19 (19.79%) Spring Boot
5 15 (15.63%) Node.js
6 13 (13.54%) RESTful
7 11 (11.46%) .NET
7 11 (11.46%) CSS
7 11 (11.46%) HTML
7 11 (11.46%) RabbitMQ
8 9 (9.38%) Elastic Stack
9 8 (8.33%) AngularJS
9 8 (8.33%) Mustache
10 7 (7.29%) Apache NiFi
10 7 (7.29%) GraphQL
10 7 (7.29%) LangChain
10 7 (7.29%) PyTorch
10 7 (7.29%) scikit-learn
10 7 (7.29%) TensorFlow
10 7 (7.29%) Web Services
Miscellaneous
1 22 (22.92%) Cloud Native
2 21 (21.88%) Distributed Systems
3 14 (14.58%) Product Ownership
4 7 (7.29%) Clustering
4 7 (7.29%) Public Cloud
5 4 (4.17%) Legacy Systems
6 3 (3.13%) Distributed Computing
7 2 (2.08%) Enterprise Software
7 2 (2.08%) Low-Code
7 2 (2.08%) Mainframe
8 1 (1.04%) Anti-Piracy
8 1 (1.04%) Data Structures
8 1 (1.04%) IoT
8 1 (1.04%) NHS
8 1 (1.04%) Robotics
8 1 (1.04%) Social Media
8 1 (1.04%) Sports Betting
8 1 (1.04%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.17%) Linux
2 1 (1.04%) Android
2 1 (1.04%) Apple iOS
2 1 (1.04%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 1 (1.04%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 60 (62.50%) Agile
2 49 (51.04%) CI/CD
3 45 (46.88%) Microservices
4 33 (34.38%) Analytics
5 32 (33.33%) DevOps
6 29 (30.21%) Data Modelling
6 29 (30.21%) Event-Driven
7 26 (27.08%) Scrum
8 25 (26.04%) Data Pipeline
9 24 (25.00%) AI
10 23 (23.96%) Data Engineering
11 22 (22.92%) Full-Stack Development
12 21 (21.88%) ETL
13 19 (19.79%) Continuous Improvement
14 18 (18.75%) Machine Learning
15 17 (17.71%) Data Governance
15 17 (17.71%) Data Science
15 17 (17.71%) Observability
16 16 (16.67%) Event-Driven Architecture
16 16 (16.67%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 48 (50.00%) Python
2 44 (45.83%) SQL
3 42 (43.75%) Java
4 22 (22.92%) JavaScript
5 18 (18.75%) TypeScript
6 10 (10.42%) C#
7 7 (7.29%) Go
7 7 (7.29%) Rust
8 6 (6.25%) Groovy
9 4 (4.17%) Scala
10 3 (3.13%) PL/SQL
11 2 (2.08%) C++
11 2 (2.08%) T-SQL
12 1 (1.04%) Bash
12 1 (1.04%) C
12 1 (1.04%) Embedded C
12 1 (1.04%) Embedded C++
12 1 (1.04%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 13 (13.54%) Security Cleared
2 8 (8.33%) SC Cleared
3 7 (7.29%) Degree
4 6 (6.25%) DV Cleared
5 2 (2.08%) Computer Science Degree
6 1 (1.04%) AWS Certification
6 1 (1.04%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (1.04%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.04%) Master's Degree
6 1 (1.04%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (11.46%) Data Quality
2 10 (10.42%) QA
3 7 (7.29%) California Consumer Privacy Act
3 7 (7.29%) GDPR
4 1 (1.04%) Accessibility
System Software
1 33 (34.38%) Docker
2 1 (1.04%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 34 (35.42%) Kubernetes
2 21 (21.88%) Terraform
3 9 (9.38%) Ansible
4 6 (6.25%) Grafana
5 5 (5.21%) Prometheus
6 2 (2.08%) HP Fortify
6 2 (2.08%) Progress Chef
6 2 (2.08%) Puppet
7 1 (1.04%) Control-M
7 1 (1.04%) Kibana
Vendors
1 15 (15.63%) Databricks
2 7 (7.29%) Cloudera
2 7 (7.29%) Dell
3 6 (6.25%) Oracle
4 5 (5.21%) Pega
5 4 (4.17%) Informatica
6 3 (3.13%) Adobe
6 3 (3.13%) Confluent
6 3 (3.13%) Google
6 3 (3.13%) Microsoft
6 3 (3.13%) MuleSoft
6 3 (3.13%) Salesforce
6 3 (3.13%) SAP
7 2 (2.08%) HubSpot
7 2 (2.08%) IBM
7 2 (2.08%) Splunk
7 2 (2.08%) UiPath
8 1 (1.04%) ArcSight
8 1 (1.04%) Coverity
8 1 (1.04%) ServiceNow