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

6 months to
24 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 430 324 279
Rank change year-on-year -106 -45 -13
Permanent jobs citing Kafka 107 223 491
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 0.22% 0.72% 0.96%
As % of the Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards category 2.51% 3.59% 4.38%
Number of salaries quoted 59 126 318
10th Percentile £50,100 £44,563 £45,000
25th Percentile £54,375 £52,500 £52,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £72,500 £67,500 £70,576
Median % change year-on-year +7.41% -4.36% +5.34%
75th Percentile £95,000 £91,250 £83,450
90th Percentile £100,000 £111,250 £91,934
UK median annual salary £100,000 £87,000 £80,000
% change year-on-year +14.94% +8.75% -8.57%

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 4,257 6,207 11,216
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 8.61% 20.13% 22.03%
Number of salaries quoted 3,249 3,701 8,859
10th Percentile £30,000 £36,250 £35,000
25th Percentile £45,000 £46,250 £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 £83,750 £85,000 £82,500
UK median annual salary £65,000 £66,206 £61,500
% change year-on-year -1.82% +7.65% -8.89%

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 24 February 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 24 February 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 -33 38 £73,750 -1.67% 35
South East -33 37 £60,000 - 40
North West -3 21 £95,000 +26.67% 24
Yorkshire -37 16 £70,500 -1.05% 7
Midlands -11 9 £72,500 +11.54% 6
Scotland -49 9 £60,000 -11.11% 10
East of England +2 8 £71,250 -8.06%
South West -37 8 £80,000 +45.45% 11
West Midlands +5 6 £72,500 +3.57% 4
Wales -3 3 £90,000 +102.96% 1
East Midlands -26 3 £120,000 +84.62% 2
North East -11 1 - - 4
Northern Ireland -29 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 12 (11.21%) Apache Airflow
2 11 (10.28%) Apache
3 10 (9.35%) Apache Spark
4 8 (7.48%) OpenStack
5 3 (2.80%) Appian
5 3 (2.80%) Mule
6 2 (1.87%) Apache Qpid
7 1 (0.93%) Apache Synapse
7 1 (0.93%) Camunda
7 1 (0.93%) JBoss
7 1 (0.93%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (0.93%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 2 (1.87%) Oracle ERP
Cloud Services
1 64 (59.81%) AWS
2 41 (38.32%) Azure
3 27 (25.23%) GCP
4 22 (20.56%) Serverless
5 21 (19.63%) Amazon S3
6 17 (15.89%) Amazon EKS
7 15 (14.02%) Amazon SQS
8 11 (10.28%) AWS Lambda
8 11 (10.28%) GitHub
9 10 (9.35%) Amazon ECS
9 10 (9.35%) SaaS
10 9 (8.41%) Snowflake
11 7 (6.54%) Amazon Kinesis
11 7 (6.54%) AWS CloudFormation
11 7 (6.54%) Azure Service Bus
11 7 (6.54%) dbt
12 5 (4.67%) Azure DevOps
12 5 (4.67%) OpenShift
12 5 (4.67%) Power Platform
13 4 (3.74%) Kong
Communications & Networking
1 5 (4.67%) HTTP
2 4 (3.74%) MQTT
3 2 (1.87%) AMQP
4 1 (0.93%) Broadband
4 1 (0.93%) Radio Access Network
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (29.91%) NoSQL
2 22 (20.56%) PostgreSQL
3 19 (17.76%) MongoDB
4 8 (7.48%) DynamoDB
5 7 (6.54%) Data Warehouse
5 7 (6.54%) Redis
5 7 (6.54%) Relational Database
6 6 (5.61%) Big Data
7 5 (4.67%) Elasticsearch
7 5 (4.67%) MySQL
8 3 (2.80%) Airbyte
8 3 (2.80%) BigQuery
8 3 (2.80%) Data Lake
8 3 (2.80%) Flink
8 3 (2.80%) Looker
8 3 (2.80%) Oracle Database
8 3 (2.80%) SQL Server
8 3 (2.80%) Tableau
9 2 (1.87%) Metadata
9 2 (1.87%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 20 (18.69%) Jenkins
2 18 (16.82%) Git
3 9 (8.41%) JIRA
4 8 (7.48%) JUnit
5 7 (6.54%) Cucumber
6 6 (5.61%) git-flow
6 6 (5.61%) JMeter
6 6 (5.61%) Selenium
7 5 (4.67%) GitLab
8 4 (3.74%) Robot Framework
9 3 (2.80%) LoadRunner
9 3 (2.80%) Snyk
9 3 (2.80%) SonarQube
9 3 (2.80%) Sonatype Nexus
10 2 (1.87%) Cypress.io
10 2 (1.87%) REST Assured
11 1 (0.93%) Mockito
11 1 (0.93%) mountebank
11 1 (0.93%) Postman
11 1 (0.93%) TestNG
General
1 21 (19.63%) Finance
1 21 (19.63%) Social Skills
2 6 (5.61%) Banking
3 3 (2.80%) Organisational Skills
3 3 (2.80%) Public Sector
4 2 (1.87%) Advertising
4 2 (1.87%) Analytical Skills
4 2 (1.87%) Billing
4 2 (1.87%) Influencing Skills
4 2 (1.87%) Law
4 2 (1.87%) Tech for Good
5 1 (0.93%) Aerospace
5 1 (0.93%) Games
5 1 (0.93%) Marketing
5 1 (0.93%) Retail
5 1 (0.93%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 25 (23.36%) Developer
2 18 (16.82%) Architect
3 17 (15.89%) Data Engineer
4 16 (14.95%) Senior
5 14 (13.08%) Lead
6 13 (12.15%) Java Developer
7 12 (11.21%) Full-Stack Developer
7 12 (11.21%) Software Engineer
8 11 (10.28%) Senior Developer
9 10 (9.35%) Solutions Architect
10 9 (8.41%) Full-Stack Engineer
11 8 (7.48%) Java Engineer
12 5 (4.67%) Principal Engineer
12 5 (4.67%) Principal Software Engineer
12 5 (4.67%) Senior Full-Stack Developer
13 4 (3.74%) Applications Architect
13 4 (3.74%) Full-Stack Java Developer
13 4 (3.74%) Software Developer
14 3 (2.80%) Engineering Manager
14 3 (2.80%) Test Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 32 (29.91%) React
2 30 (28.04%) Spring
3 27 (25.23%) Spring Boot
4 19 (17.76%) REST
5 15 (14.02%) Node.js
6 12 (11.21%) .NET
6 12 (11.21%) CSS
7 11 (10.28%) HTML
7 11 (10.28%) RabbitMQ
7 11 (10.28%) RESTful
8 10 (9.35%) AngularJS
8 10 (9.35%) Elastic Stack
9 8 (7.48%) Apache NiFi
9 8 (7.48%) Mustache
10 7 (6.54%) Web Services
11 6 (5.61%) GraphQL
11 6 (5.61%) Material-UI
12 5 (4.67%) AWS CDK
12 5 (4.67%) gRPC
13 4 (3.74%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 22 (20.56%) Cloud Native
1 22 (20.56%) Distributed Systems
2 15 (14.02%) Product Ownership
3 4 (3.74%) Legacy Systems
3 4 (3.74%) Low-Code
4 3 (2.80%) Data Structures
4 3 (2.80%) Distributed Computing
5 2 (1.87%) Enterprise Software
5 2 (1.87%) Renewable Energy
6 1 (0.93%) Anti-Piracy
6 1 (0.93%) Hackathon
6 1 (0.93%) IoT
6 1 (0.93%) Legacy Code
6 1 (0.93%) Management Information System
6 1 (0.93%) NHS
6 1 (0.93%) Social Media
6 1 (0.93%) Sports Betting
6 1 (0.93%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 7 (6.54%) Linux
2 2 (1.87%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 2 (1.87%) Windows
3 1 (0.93%) Android
3 1 (0.93%) Apple iOS
3 1 (0.93%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 64 (59.81%) Agile
2 61 (57.01%) Microservices
3 54 (50.47%) CI/CD
4 39 (36.45%) DevOps
5 27 (25.23%) Event-Driven
6 25 (23.36%) Full-Stack Development
7 23 (21.50%) Scrum
8 22 (20.56%) Analytics
8 22 (20.56%) Data Modelling
8 22 (20.56%) Mentoring
8 22 (20.56%) TDD
9 20 (18.69%) AI
9 20 (18.69%) Data Pipeline
10 19 (17.76%) Software Engineering
11 18 (16.82%) Test Automation
12 16 (14.95%) Architectural Patterns
12 16 (14.95%) Data Engineering
13 15 (14.02%) Continuous Improvement
13 15 (14.02%) Event-Driven Architecture
13 15 (14.02%) Observability
Programming Languages
1 58 (54.21%) Java
2 41 (38.32%) Python
3 32 (29.91%) SQL
4 26 (24.30%) JavaScript
5 25 (23.36%) TypeScript
6 15 (14.02%) C#
7 8 (7.48%) Go
8 6 (5.61%) Groovy
9 5 (4.67%) Rust
10 4 (3.74%) Scala
11 3 (2.80%) Bash
12 2 (1.87%) C++
13 1 (0.93%) PowerShell
13 1 (0.93%) T-SQL
Qualifications
1 18 (16.82%) Security Cleared
2 13 (12.15%) SC Cleared
3 7 (6.54%) Degree
4 6 (5.61%) DV Cleared
5 4 (3.74%) AWS Certification
6 3 (2.80%) Computer Science Degree
7 2 (1.87%) AWS Certified Developer
8 1 (0.93%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
8 1 (0.93%) Azure Certification
8 1 (0.93%) Master's Degree
8 1 (0.93%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (10.28%) QA
2 5 (4.67%) Data Quality
3 2 (1.87%) GDPR
3 2 (1.87%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (1.87%) PCI DSS
3 2 (1.87%) SOC 2
4 1 (0.93%) Accessibility
4 1 (0.93%) Government Security Classifications
System Software
1 33 (30.84%) Docker
2 1 (0.93%) Apache ZooKeeper
Systems Management
1 36 (33.64%) Kubernetes
2 18 (16.82%) Terraform
3 11 (10.28%) Ansible
4 5 (4.67%) Grafana
5 3 (2.80%) HP Fortify
5 3 (2.80%) Kibana
5 3 (2.80%) Prometheus
6 2 (1.87%) Control-M
6 2 (1.87%) Progress Chef
7 1 (0.93%) Istio
7 1 (0.93%) Podman
7 1 (0.93%) Puppet
Vendors
1 8 (7.48%) Oracle
2 7 (6.54%) Databricks
3 6 (5.61%) Google
3 6 (5.61%) VMware
4 4 (3.74%) Informatica
4 4 (3.74%) UiPath
5 3 (2.80%) Adobe
5 3 (2.80%) BiZZdesign
5 3 (2.80%) Black Duck
5 3 (2.80%) Blue Prism
5 3 (2.80%) Confluent
5 3 (2.80%) Coverity
5 3 (2.80%) IBM
5 3 (2.80%) MuleSoft
5 3 (2.80%) OpenAI
5 3 (2.80%) Salesforce
5 3 (2.80%) SAP
5 3 (2.80%) Splunk
6 2 (1.87%) Microsoft
6 2 (1.87%) Pega