Best Countries and Cities for Software Engineers in Europe in 2025
By software engineers I mean everyone working a tech/engineering job in IT (SWE/MLE/DS/DE/TPM etc)
What’s up guys
We haven’t done one of these in a while. As you know, Euro Top Tech includes:
Crowdsourced-data on how much devs in Europe earn, save, spend and can afford
(the green box below)
Which leads us to this hyper-informative money stats page
If you haven’t contributed yet, please do so HERE.
To see the entire doc with all the data, go here (then you can filter also by country/city by doing Data → Create Filter View → applying filter on your column of choice).
Today, we’ll share some updates and comment the data
Lets go!
1. Romania performing well
Some time ago, I briefly mentioned how Romania entered the chat and seemed, from its few submissions, to have good data
Then, a few more people entered data for Romania, and I ended up comparing it with Germany (on LinkedIn), showing that basically Romanian devs are richer than Germans, on average:
2. Switzerland remains the best place to stack up cash
See the above post to see the details, caveats and limitations of “big money Swiss”.
3. Big Techs are back at hiring in Western Europe
After a few years of quite reduced hiring there, and strict focus on hiring in Central/Eastern Europe and India, now hiring has picked up again in Germany, Netherlands and Ireland as well.
What are the best countries and best cities right now?
Financial data from Euro Top Tech tells us:
Bucharest top city, Poland best country
Let’s check the full TOP 5s
Top 5 cities:
Top 5 countries:
See full data here.
See articles on Poland and Switzerland.
Let’s remind ourselves what these rankings show:
Cities/Countries ranked by how much people save there, how many people they support with the salary, and their lifestyle level.
These 3 variables roughly track ‘economic success’:
How much you can save
How many dependants (kids/partner) you can support with that saving rate
What purchasing power you have, while saving the amount you save and supporting the nr. of dependants that you support
Basically: if you can save a lot, while living like a king/queen and affording a large family → you’re rich.
What’s missing?
1. How happy you are
(non-material aspect of your life in your city/country)
2. How satisfied you are from the “system”
Much of the stuff that we track on Remote Compass: infra, healthcare, schools, safety, tax-paid services in general.
That’s why I recently added 2 parameters tracking these 2 dimensions in the data gathering form for these stats.
What’s the result so far?
Note: not a lot of data in yet, so only partially telling.
Best/worst countries by infra & happiness
Best/worst cities by infra & happiness
See the full data by going here and selecting the right tabs.
What do you think of these last 2 rankings?
Interesting data!
I’ll let you share what you think replying to this email and/or contributing to the doc, and I’ll comment it again in the near future :)
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