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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

That's a fairly standard wage outside London for senior developers.

UK wages are not great.

i wouldn't call that standard wage, rather the lowest end of the spectrum where you could theoretically shop a "senior" outside of london.

Median senior dev salary is £70k according to recent job postings: https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/senior%20developer.do

And that includes London, it lists "excluding London" as £65k.

People overestimate how much senior devs in the UK earn, even after knowing they're not well paid, my usual response to hearing we should be earning £90k+ is, "well give us a job then"!

A friend is making about £180k / yr in London, and they bought a house recently in London. I think that's a lot, and his wife also makes a similar amount, slightly more. That seems to be the minimum, otherwise you're a renter for life. Pretty nuts.

As a senior dev?

What sector?

Probably FANG or finance.

A product lead/architect in Finance.

Outside of Finance that's high for London.

London property is expensive, but £180k is a lot more than the "minimum". I am on half that, and I managed to buy.

That is an extremely high salary, and very far from the minimum required to buy, even on your own. A dual £350k income is truly astonishing. You could buy most houses in London in cash after saving for 5 years.

What? No that will not allow you to buy "most houses in London in cash after saving for 5 years" unless you live far out of town in a tiny place and eat plain rice for 5 years, and even then it'll be long odds.

First, you'll take home slightly over half of that net of various taxes and deductions, but let's be generous and say your take-home is 200k. You live very frugally, don't go out, don't really buy anything and keep your costs at 50k a year, including rent (!). That leaves you with 150k a year, so after 5 years you have 750k. This allows you to buy a modest 2-3 bed row house with a postage stamp sized garden in one of the less desirable areas of the city.

If you want something that doesn't look like a shed, you are looking at 1 million pounds and up, more like 1.5 million. If you want in a nice area and large garden, make it 2 million.

What are you smoking? The median house price in London is 500k. At 750k you can afford 77% of houses and at a million you are in the top 10%. 50k per year is also a preposterously high expenditure. Rent will be your leading expense by probably a factor of 10. You could put aside 3k a month for rent (again, totally preposterous number) and not touch the sides.

The only thing I can think of that would even come close to making a difference is having children. Then all bets are off, they can cost as much as you like.

They do have children and therefore buying centrally in London got a bit expensive, I believe.

The median terraced house (entry level family home) in London is actually £642K

'Inner London' and it goes up to £876K

Median property price in London is £542k [0]

Assuming a 90% mortgage that's 487k mortgage

That's two people on £70k each at a 3.5 multiple. £60k at a 4x multiple.

Two people on £180k would get you a £1.5m house, twice the average semi.

[0] https://landregistry.data.gov.uk/app/ukhpi/browse?from=2025-...

Partly depends on what you mean by "London". I don't want to work for FAANG/AI/finance/gambling so our combined salary is well under the 180 figure. Yet we bought a 2-bed terraced house with a garden and driveway in south-west London (technically Surrey, but a London borough) just over five years ago. It's still 20 mins to Waterloo and most of central London is under an hour away. As we pay off the mortgage we should be able to further upsize over the years. It's not ideal, but it works.

A salary of £180k put you in the 98th percentile of UK salaries in 2024 (99th percentile was only a little higher at £207k) [1]. With a household income approximately doubling that, i'd suggest your friend is in an even smaller minority.

The average house price in London in July 2025 was £565k [pp33 - 2].

There is not being able to afford something and then there is not being able to afford exactly what you want.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/personal-incomes-s... [2] https://data.london.gov.uk/download/24rpx/37w/Housing%20in%2...

Yeah, but they probably have a £700K mortgage and will have to bulldoze one career to have kids.

The balancing force to this though, is that cost of living outside of London is massively lower

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