Software engineer pay heatmap for Europe | Hacker News Reader

Software engineer pay heatmap for Europe

levels.fyi

52 pointszuhayeer78 comments

Am I missing a setting or is it just a per country map? When I read heatmap in the title I was expecting the data to be way more granular.

Yeah, having the whole of the UK being one colour is pretty useless, given the huge disparity in wages and cost of living between central London and the rest of the UK.

They didn't even manage to get the UK right. Apparently whoever made this map doesn't know that the UK is the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and that Éire is only the bottom bit.

I wonder how that skews the figures. Are folk in NI paid more in line with GB or with Éire? I'm sure currency comes into play too, what with Éire using the euro.

NI is poorly paid. the UK as a whole is poorly paid outside of London and maybe Oxford/Cambridge and a couple of other industry specific areas.

I suspect Ireland also has the same problem, with the higher salaries being Dublin only.

The "zones" are way too big.

For example working in west Germany is quite different to working in east Germany. The same goes for north and south Spain, north and south Italy, and so on.

We plan to work on city / region granularity and additional zoom levels. We just released this to gauge interest before going further.

It's not just by region, but at the city level too. There are often significant differences between salaries in capital cities vs others, as one would expect.

The cost of living is different, larger companies in major population centers have more capital, etc.

I'm surprised to see Poland ahead of so many richer countries, like France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. CoL is also almost certainly lower in Poland.

Polish SEs are very good, that's not my point! Rather, I am surprised Polish salaries caught up and exceeded many Western European economies on a national basis, and more so adjusted for CoL.

I know of Italian SEs moving to Poland for better salaries.

Italy? Portugal? You must be new to tech, eh?

Policemen in Italy make many times more than software engineers.

DocPlanner has opened an office in Barcelona over 10 years ago to save on dev salaries, people got paid more in Warsaw even back then.

Portugal is kinda dead as a country.

What I found more fascinating is that Poland surpassed Sweden, not a tech powerhouse for sure but it’s Scandinavia, super freaking expensive.

Pressure, with a remote work as a threat to supply the wages in this sector must be competitive, though there are known bad companies that keep the wages down preying on the loyal employee trope and brand name

Take care, if some numbers seem a bit high, it's because the median pay here is only based on those who submitted their data to levels.fyi which tends to be mostly FAANGs and big-tech it seems therefore skewing some numbers really high, not based on national statistics for SW jobs of each country which would also include all of of mom and pop shops, bringing the numbers down to realistic levels.

That’s what I thought these are pretty high numbers.

Really? Even if they're accurate I feel like I should be going to Switzerland asap.

As I commented elsewhere: when you see how much the rent for a small apartment is, and prices in the supermarkets, you may change options.

The pay in Switzerland is because of cost of living, mostly food, apartments.

I'd like to see a version of this in PPP for that reason. Or adjusted by median rents.

They're from levels.fyi, and if you look at Switzerland, something like 20% of all salaries are from Google employees. 100-110k is probably a better number.

I kinda disagree with other posters, even after CoL adjustments you're way ahead in Switzerland, especially given the usually low taxes. RE is totally unaffordable though, the rest is fine.

In my fairly large UK firm we have about 900 software engineers. Internally salaries are transparent, and tend to be in the region of

Junior (34k) / Normal (49k) / Senior (62k) / Principal (71k) / Team Lead (73k) / Senior Principal (89k) / Engineering Manager (104k)

(Throwaway obviously)

About 100 Junior, 300 Normal, 300 Senior, 100 Principal, 100 Team leads, 30 Engineering Managers, and under a dozen Senior Principals.

That seems more realistic, maybe a little on the low side but it definitely varies by industry (e.g. game developers get paid way less).

what does a day in the life look like for a junior swe being paid 34k

TBH when I was looking for SWE jobs in the UK in 2012 the salaries were… About the same? Maybe less for juniors but got quite a lot of 45-60k offers for mid dev. WTF, Brexit?

Are the numbers before taxes or after? Incredibly, I can not find this information on the site.

The data is gross total compensation.

Can anyone get this to work, it shows everything as the same colour

Works for me on FF.

As a EU citizen who no longer lives there, in part because of the poor salaries, I can't say I'm surprised by the EU 'brain drain'. The EU published a paper on this in 2024, about how they are leaking talent because the high-talented individuals by and large don't stick around.

Not just salaries, the other issue is regulation and moving slowly.

EDIT, the doc I referred to: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3...

Where are these EU people going to?

Is a whole circle, people from IT and SP go to DE, from DE to CH, from CH to USA, or Australia.

Australia is really not that attractive software wise

Seems to attract mostly the British and the Irish with an interest for sunnier but English speaking places

US is a big one, CA maybe secondary.

To add to the not-so-great salaries, there are high taxes and social fees + VAT of round 20%…

OTOH, the typical/mean competence in SW seems relatively low if compared with high salaries countries.

For example, as I was hiring last year, it was just impossible to get a candidate that have even heard about functional programming, or anything outside Python and C.

A friend of mine was hiring EEs, and the best one he found (hold to your seat!) said an inductor is to resistors in series.

There are exceptional good people, but they seem to bot be free in the market.

I work in Germany and my colleagues are all competent. Maybe the difference is that competent people are hired very early (before they become very competent?) and then tend to stick to the company that trained them?

That is what I said. I know very competent people. But if you search for new people, is HARD to get good ones.

According to

https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#

and

https://listentotaxman.com/?ingr=100000

Someone on £100k a year in the UK will keep £68,561

Someone on £100k a year in California will keep £69,291.73

That doesn't feel a massive difference.

But earning 'only' £100k would be on the lower end in Cali.

"The median salary for full-time workers in California is $66,986" -- https://www.incomebyzipcode.com/california

Salary difference isn't because of tax (employer NI contributions in the UK are high - £12,500 for £100k, but employer healthcare is high in the US)

The assertion was that employee taxes were high in europe. Now they may be in mainland, but in the UK that's not particularly true, not at 100k range anyway.

On the California median salary of $67k, in the US you keep $51,915, in the UK you keep $51,741, practically the same.

At $500k, in California you'd keep $287k, in the UK $279k, so 3% difference there at the 8-times median CA wage, I'll admit that.

At that salary though the employer contribution to tax in the UK is significantly higher than healthcare contribution in the US, so sure, probably around 10% difference in total.

There's basically no difference in income taxes between the UK and US, that doesn't explain the massive salary difference.

I thought this discussion was focused on engineering. Median salary of 67k for SDEs sounds .. low? Any Californians want to weigh in? :)

EDIT: median salary in SF: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... would be >350k USD.

The assertion was there are high taxes. There aren't, even for those on $500k a year.

Gotcha, sorry, missed that that was your point. Agreed, the taxes issue is kind of blown out of proportion. I'd rather pay more taxes and have good (/ cheap) healthcare and education to be honest.

In the UK, taxes are abnormally high in the 100k-125k band.

In Germany you'd keep less then 50K of that.

https://salaryaftertax.com/de/salary-calculator says you'd keep £57,705, £10k less.

Oh oh hold your horses. That is TAX, above TAX in Germany you will have to pay "social loads" for health, pension fonds, church, etc... You get to keep much less than that!

Even when in UK is the same, you still have to pay the TV-tax, VAT 19%, fuel prices are high because of gigantic taxes, all of those do not exist in USA.

Also in Germany public health is getting more expensive (there was an increase of 1% this year) and worse (although still good). Also education is getting more expensive slowly.

it is just plain wrong

California has the worst taxation scheme in the US, living and working there is not the way to get ahead financially in America anymore

According to that link, income tax in NYC at $200k is even higher ($69,160 tax rather than $68,504 in San Francisco)

Either the pay you offered was too low or your recruiters didn't do their job. Multiple functional languages have been created in Europe, there is a big and competent Rust (which is not exactly an fp language, but is not Python or C either) community etc.

> Multiple functional languages have been created in Europe

Which ones? just out of curiosity, because is totally irrelevant for the discussion: The car was invented in Germany, and for long years the best cars were German, but right now the industry is falling down non-stop... So there may be many people inventing whatever languages, when you search people to program, you just do not find good candidates.

I'm not arguing that people in Germany does not know functional languages. I just say, if you search somebody, is hard to find. The pay was damn good 80k/year. I was in a company in south Germany, maybe that is the difference?

> Which ones?

OCaml, Scala, Coq, Isabelle ...

> The pay was damn good 80k/year.

Check levels.fyi. Comments say it's skewed upwards, but that's what people working for international companies with respective skill set get. Employment is not marriage, people are always ready for a change if you offer conditions better that what they have. You wouldn't find a graduate in the US for this money.

And I bet you are on site or at most hybrid, so are restricted to people living in your city if not town/village.

> And I bet you are on site or at most hybrid, so are restricted to people living in your city if not town/village.

Yes absolutely. That is why I said it was in south. That is a big problem. I know for a fact, that in Berlin there are much more good SW devs. but here around they are scarse.

Oh, I missed that part. Berlin has experienced a COL explosion recently, so not sure how easy it is to find a good engineer for 80K. Dresden would do probably, but south is also crazy expensive AFAIK.

ML? I think.

Yeah, that too. I've listed some above, but also forgot Erlang, that's pretty important one.

I'd love to make more money, but if it requires moving to the US, I am instantly much less interested. Not that I consider myself particularly high-talented.

It worked for me (Brave). Shows Switzerland as the highest paying (if I had to guess it's due to the financial sector there) with the UK following close behind.

Was happy to see Iceland relatively up there, I've heard there's a strong tech sector in Reykjavik and my wife and I are in love with the country and have entertained hypothetical discussions about relocating there (from Canada), even if temporary.

I don't think it is only because the financial sector pays more than average. They don't reach the pay level of FAANG companies having their R&D in Switzerland. Also be assured that this level is only reached in Zurich.

And there, after rent and utilities, I do not think is much difference.

Switzerland has high salaries because of the high cost of living. I would like to see aap adjusted by cost of living.

yes, definitely needs to be adjusted for COE.

>high salaries because of the high cost of living

high salaries will cause high cost of living more than high cost of living will require high salaries (because those jobs could just move away (except for those jobs that can't move away because they are needed to support industries with high pay))

I think the Icelandic data is a bit skewed upwards. It’s showing senior and principal level salaries in large companies, most “normal” devs earn maybe 70% of that.

Works for me in safari.

It is so disheartening to see Europe's tech industry flounder so much. Living in Europe and then seeing how the salary gap with the USA is just increasing is flat out demoralising. However I do not see a way out until salaries start increasing.

From what I understand, a lot of the pay gap is the result of European workers getting more things taken care of that are not tied to their employer or employment. i.e. healthcare

The salary is less than U.S. but their actual take home pay may be more.

Of course, it depends on your situation, but even taking that into account the gap is usually still quite massive

Both pre-tax and take-home are lower in europe. Difference is lower than it looks at first sight. But it's still there.

Eastern europe is doing pretty good though. Salaries are very close to western part, but cost of living is waaaay lower.

    The salary is less than U.S. but their actual take home pay may be more.

Unless the social services in Europe are worth $50-100k/year more than in America there is just no way this is true. That’s around $4-8k/month. I’d expect transit and public attractions to be free across Europe at that price (they’re not). Healthcare is another matter…do Europeans feels like they get $50k+ of healthcare coverage a year on average? That would be about $4 million in a lifetime

A comment earlier said that the average senior software engineer salary at a large UK firm was 62k pounds per year. Even adjusting for PPP that’s about half of what a senior swe in a MCOL city in America can expect to make.

Also, contrary to popular belief, we have health insurance in America, with max deductibles. As in, after a certain amount (usually in the 4 digits), all healthcare costs are covered by insurance

The high-earning individual might not get the 50k-100k USD/year back directly, but it supports a social safety net where people dying of cancer et al do not have to resort to GoFundMe campaigns. It also supports infrastructure and sociatal building with reduced influence of private companies acting as gatekeepers for individual participation.

To me, that is worth the taxation even I myself (probably) will never have to use most of the safety net.

Pre-tax salary is lower too though. And health insurance is paid on top of taxes.

Fair, one could say that Europe has better cultural institutions and safety nets, and is overall a nicer place to live (qualitatively and subjectively) than most of the US

I think that's much more true around the median income whereas highly paid professionals tend to get good healthcare paid for by their employer.

I moved from the UK to US a decade ago. Software engineer salaries in the UK are on the 75th percentile of earnings vs the 90th percentile in the US. The US also has higher variance of income, so at the 90th percentile one would earn 2.6x the median salary vs 2.0x in the UK. If you are a highly paid professional the US is a pretty good place to be.

The downside is of course you live in a much more unequal place with all the societal problems that implies. After having a kid we're thinking of moving back to Europe, though whether we can find jobs and visas in the places we'd like to live is an open question. It's a lot more complicated having lost my EU citizenship post Brexit.

> The salary is less than U.S. but their actual take home pay may be more.

Simply not true. For example, I have a high deductible plan. I pay no premiums, and my max out of pocket is around $5-6K/year.

So that's the max I'd pay per year for medical expenses for the whole family. Throw in a few more thousand for transportation related expenses. Probably shouldn't even do that as the cost to own a car is generally cheaper in the US than Europe (cars are cheaper, and auto related taxes are lower).

What else?

As long as you're healthy.

Nope. It's the max - as long as I stay in network.

Max out of pocket in The Netherlands at least is 385 euro. That's it.

I'm not saying the US system is better. Just pointing out that for SW engineers, the delta in health care costs between the US and Europe doesn't account for the much higher delta in salaries.

No, take home is less, and we pay for our healthcare, it's part of mandatory social contributions (on top of taxes, that are normally higher too).

At least in Germany we do have more paid time off though, but I don't think that's enough to offset the salary gap with the US

Italy where I am from is so fucked

One of my fav countries in the world.

I visit it multiple times a year and I can confirm. Nothing has changed in Italy since 2008. At least not for the better. And with one of the oldest populations… It will only get worse.

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