Kotlin, Google's preferred language for Android development since 2019, is showing clear signs of a cooling job market in the UK — one of the few regions with enough job-board data to track the trend in detail.

The numbers

According to data from ITJobsWatch, covering the six months to mid-January 2026, UK permanent job postings citing Kotlin fell to 160, down from 264 in the same period a year earlier and 417 two years earlier — a steep two-year decline in demand. Kotlin's overall rank among UK tech skills slipped to 495th, from 451st the year before. Median pay moved with it: the median advertised salary for Kotlin roles fell to £75,000, down 6.25% from £80,000 a year earlier. Interestingly, the 25th percentile actually rose over the same period, from £52,000 to £57,500 — a sign that the lowest-paying Kotlin listings are thinning out even as the overall market shrinks, rather than every part of the pay range falling in step.

Context: the whole coding market is soft

Kotlin's slide isn't happening in isolation. Across all UK permanent vacancies requiring coding skills, the median salary fell 3.85% over the same period. That means Kotlin's decline is in the same direction as the broader developer job market, just somewhat steeper — this looks more like a language losing relative share than a market collapsing around it specifically.

Why Kotlin specifically might be cooling

A few plausible explanations, none mutually exclusive: cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native continue to pull some mobile work away from native Android development; broader enterprise hiring softness is hitting mobile roles alongside everything else; and some companies have simply finished their Java-to-Kotlin migrations, meaning fewer net-new postings explicitly requiring the switch.

Should you still learn it in 2026?

Yes, with a caveat. Kotlin remains Google's recommended language for Android, it's still used across a huge existing codebase of apps that need maintaining, and its UK median salary of £75,000 still sits well above the £62,500 median across all coding roles — the decline is real, but Kotlin hasn't stopped being a premium skill, just a smaller and slightly less lucrative one than two years ago.

What this means practically

• Don't learn Kotlin in isolation. Pairing it with cross-platform skills (Flutter/Dart, Compose Multiplatform) or backend Kotlin (increasingly used server-side) widens your options if native Android roles stay scarce.
• Watch your own market, not just the UK's. Demand and pay trends vary significantly by region — India's Android hiring picture, for instance, doesn't necessarily mirror the UK's.
• Treat this as one data point among several. A single country's job board data over one year is a useful signal, not a verdict on the language's future.