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Salaries are way below what the UK pays, or way below what London pays? London often pays close to double other parts of the UK.

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I usually find similar cities and compare them to each other. London is 2-3x better salary wise than Berlin. If you compare other parts of the UK with other parts of Germany, that gap might get smaller but I would argue that in my experience, the gap will most often be around 2x

The payscale links you provide in your blog provide some insight into why you seem to think that. In all of your examples (see links below for the lazy), the salary for a Senior Software Engineer is slightly below what payscale _thinks_ is the average national salary. The huge difference really lies in how payscale determines the "salary" in each country.

So, when compared to the average (which factors in cost of living, social security etc.), the salary really isn't that much better in the US:

US: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Engi... UK: http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Senior_Software_Engi... FR: http://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Senior_Software_Engi... SE: http://www.payscale.com/research/SE/Job=Senior_Software_Engi... DE: http://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...

May correlate with cost of living, maybe?

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