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

6 months to
25 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 417 345 260
Rank change year-on-year -72 -85 -7
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 102 222 472
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.23% 0.63% 1.09%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.57% 3.21% 4.80%
Number of salaries quoted 55 127 325
10th Percentile £49,800 £44,650 £45,500
25th Percentile £53,750 £52,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £70,576
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% -4.36% +4.35%
75th Percentile £93,750 £87,500 £84,056
90th Percentile £104,500 £110,000 £91,934
UK median annual salary £95,000 £85,000 £80,000
% change year-on-year +11.76% +6.25% -5.88%

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 3,967 6,910 9,841
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.94% 19.61% 22.64%
Number of salaries quoted 3,025 3,811 7,832
10th Percentile £28,250 £36,250 £36,000
25th Percentile £45,000 £46,250 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £59,000 £58,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +1.72% +5.45% -4.35%
75th Percentile £72,500 £73,750 £70,000
90th Percentile £82,500 £85,000 £83,750
UK median annual salary £65,000 £65,000 £62,500
% change year-on-year - +4.00% -7.41%

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 25 January 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 25 January 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
North of England -9 39 £73,750 +1.72% 40
South East -3 29 £62,500 +4.17% 102
North West +9 23 £95,000 +26.67% 26
Yorkshire -23 16 £70,500 +2.55% 8
South West -22 10 £80,000 +60.00% 28
Scotland -49 10 £60,000 -11.11% 12
Midlands +6 9 £72,500 +11.54% 13
West Midlands +24 6 £72,500 +3.57% 7
East of England +13 6 £80,000 +3.23% 32
Wales +7 3 £90,000 +102.96% 13
East Midlands -7 3 £120,000 +84.62% 6
Northern Ireland - 2 - - 5
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 13 (12.75%) Apache
2 10 (9.80%) Apache Airflow
3 9 (8.82%) Apache Spark
4 8 (7.84%) OpenStack
5 3 (2.94%) Appian
5 3 (2.94%) Mule
6 2 (1.96%) Apache Qpid
7 1 (0.98%) Apache Superset
7 1 (0.98%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.98%) JBoss
7 1 (0.98%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (0.98%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.96%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 58 (56.86%) AWS
2 38 (37.25%) Azure
3 21 (20.59%) Amazon S3
3 21 (20.59%) GCP
3 21 (20.59%) Serverless
4 15 (14.71%) Amazon SQS
5 14 (13.73%) Amazon EKS
6 11 (10.78%) SaaS
7 10 (9.80%) Amazon ECS
7 10 (9.80%) AWS Lambda
7 10 (9.80%) GitHub
8 8 (7.84%) Snowflake
9 7 (6.86%) AWS CloudFormation
9 7 (6.86%) Azure Service Bus
10 6 (5.88%) Power Platform
11 5 (4.90%) Azure DevOps
11 5 (4.90%) OpenShift
12 4 (3.92%) Amazon Kinesis
12 4 (3.92%) Kong
13 3 (2.94%) MinIO
Communications & Networking
1 5 (4.90%) HTTP
2 1 (0.98%) AMQP
2 1 (0.98%) MQTT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (27.45%) NoSQL
2 19 (18.63%) PostgreSQL
3 18 (17.65%) MongoDB
4 8 (7.84%) Data Warehouse
4 8 (7.84%) DynamoDB
5 7 (6.86%) Relational Database
6 6 (5.88%) Big Data
7 5 (4.90%) MySQL
8 4 (3.92%) Redis
8 4 (3.92%) SQL Server
9 3 (2.94%) Airbyte
9 3 (2.94%) Oracle Database
9 3 (2.94%) Power BI
9 3 (2.94%) Tableau
10 2 (1.96%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (1.96%) Apache Cassandra
10 2 (1.96%) BigQuery
10 2 (1.96%) Data Lake
10 2 (1.96%) Elasticsearch
10 2 (1.96%) Metadata
Development Applications
1 20 (19.61%) Jenkins
2 15 (14.71%) Git
3 9 (8.82%) JIRA
4 8 (7.84%) JUnit
5 7 (6.86%) Cucumber
6 6 (5.88%) git-flow
6 6 (5.88%) JMeter
6 6 (5.88%) Selenium
7 4 (3.92%) Robot Framework
8 3 (2.94%) LoadRunner
8 3 (2.94%) Snyk
8 3 (2.94%) SonarQube
8 3 (2.94%) Sonatype Nexus
9 2 (1.96%) Cypress.io
9 2 (1.96%) GitLab
9 2 (1.96%) REST Assured
10 1 (0.98%) mountebank
10 1 (0.98%) Postman
10 1 (0.98%) SoapUI
10 1 (0.98%) TestNG
General
1 22 (21.57%) Finance
2 19 (18.63%) Social Skills
3 6 (5.88%) Banking
4 4 (3.92%) Public Sector
5 3 (2.94%) Analytical Skills
5 3 (2.94%) Organisational Skills
5 3 (2.94%) Tech for Good
6 2 (1.96%) Advertising
6 2 (1.96%) Billing
6 2 (1.96%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 2 (1.96%) Influencing Skills
6 2 (1.96%) Law
7 1 (0.98%) Aerospace
7 1 (0.98%) Games
7 1 (0.98%) Retail
Job Titles
1 25 (24.51%) Developer
2 17 (16.67%) Architect
3 15 (14.71%) Data Engineer
4 14 (13.73%) Java Developer
4 14 (13.73%) Lead
4 14 (13.73%) Senior
5 13 (12.75%) Software Engineer
6 12 (11.76%) Full-Stack Developer
7 10 (9.80%) Senior Developer
8 9 (8.82%) Full-Stack Engineer
8 9 (8.82%) Solutions Architect
9 6 (5.88%) Java Engineer
10 5 (4.90%) Principal Engineer
10 5 (4.90%) Principal Software Engineer
10 5 (4.90%) Senior Full-Stack Developer
11 4 (3.92%) Applications Architect
11 4 (3.92%) Full-Stack Java Developer
11 4 (3.92%) Software Developer
12 3 (2.94%) Data Architect
12 3 (2.94%) Senior Java Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 33 (32.35%) React
2 29 (28.43%) Spring
3 27 (26.47%) Spring Boot
4 16 (15.69%) REST
5 14 (13.73%) Node.js
6 12 (11.76%) CSS
6 12 (11.76%) RabbitMQ
7 11 (10.78%) .NET
7 11 (10.78%) AngularJS
7 11 (10.78%) HTML
8 10 (9.80%) Elastic Stack
8 10 (9.80%) RESTful
9 8 (7.84%) Apache NiFi
9 8 (7.84%) Mustache
10 7 (6.86%) Web Services
11 6 (5.88%) GraphQL
11 6 (5.88%) Material-UI
12 5 (4.90%) AWS CDK
12 5 (4.90%) gRPC
13 4 (3.92%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 21 (20.59%) Distributed Systems
2 20 (19.61%) Cloud Native
3 13 (12.75%) Product Ownership
4 4 (3.92%) Legacy Systems
5 3 (2.94%) Data Structures
5 3 (2.94%) Distributed Computing
5 3 (2.94%) Low-Code
6 2 (1.96%) Enterprise Software
6 2 (1.96%) Legacy Code
6 2 (1.96%) Renewable Energy
7 1 (0.98%) Data Fabric
7 1 (0.98%) Hackathon
7 1 (0.98%) IoT
7 1 (0.98%) Management Information System
7 1 (0.98%) Sports Betting
7 1 (0.98%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 6 (5.88%) Linux
2 2 (1.96%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.96%) Windows
3 1 (0.98%) Android
3 1 (0.98%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.98%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 61 (59.80%) Agile
2 59 (57.84%) Microservices
3 49 (48.04%) CI/CD
4 38 (37.25%) DevOps
5 27 (26.47%) Full-Stack Development
6 24 (23.53%) Event-Driven
7 23 (22.55%) Data Modelling
8 22 (21.57%) Scrum
8 22 (21.57%) TDD
9 21 (20.59%) Mentoring
10 20 (19.61%) Software Engineering
11 19 (18.63%) Analytics
12 18 (17.65%) AI
12 18 (17.65%) Data Pipeline
13 14 (13.73%) Architectural Patterns
13 14 (13.73%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 14 (13.73%) Test Automation
14 13 (12.75%) Data Engineering
14 13 (12.75%) ETL
14 13 (12.75%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 58 (56.86%) Java
2 35 (34.31%) Python
3 31 (30.39%) SQL
4 23 (22.55%) JavaScript
5 21 (20.59%) TypeScript
6 15 (14.71%) C#
7 8 (7.84%) Go
8 6 (5.88%) Groovy
9 3 (2.94%) Bash
9 3 (2.94%) Scala
10 2 (1.96%) Rust
10 2 (1.96%) T-SQL
11 1 (0.98%) C++
11 1 (0.98%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 16 (15.69%) Security Cleared
2 11 (10.78%) SC Cleared
3 6 (5.88%) DV Cleared
4 4 (3.92%) AWS Certification
5 2 (1.96%) AWS Certified Developer
5 2 (1.96%) Computer Science Degree
5 2 (1.96%) Degree
6 1 (0.98%) Azure Certification
6 1 (0.98%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (7.84%) QA
2 3 (2.94%) Data Quality
3 2 (1.96%) GDPR
3 2 (1.96%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.96%) PCI DSS
3 2 (1.96%) SOC 2
4 1 (0.98%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.98%) Actionable Recommendations
4 1 (0.98%) Government Security Classifications
System Software
1 28 (27.45%) Docker
2 1 (0.98%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 31 (30.39%) Kubernetes
2 12 (11.76%) Terraform
3 8 (7.84%) Ansible
4 3 (2.94%) HP Fortify
4 3 (2.94%) Kibana
5 2 (1.96%) Control-M
5 2 (1.96%) Grafana
5 2 (1.96%) Progress Chef
6 1 (0.98%) Istio
6 1 (0.98%) Podman
6 1 (0.98%) Puppet
Vendors
1 9 (8.82%) Databricks
2 8 (7.84%) Oracle
3 6 (5.88%) VMware
4 4 (3.92%) Informatica
5 3 (2.94%) Adobe
5 3 (2.94%) BiZZdesign
5 3 (2.94%) Black Duck
5 3 (2.94%) Blue Prism
5 3 (2.94%) Coverity
5 3 (2.94%) Google
5 3 (2.94%) IBM
5 3 (2.94%) Microsoft
5 3 (2.94%) MuleSoft
5 3 (2.94%) OpenAI
5 3 (2.94%) Salesforce
5 3 (2.94%) SAP
5 3 (2.94%) Splunk
5 3 (2.94%) UiPath
6 1 (0.98%) ArcSight
6 1 (0.98%) CA Agile Central