How to Make 100k as a Software Engineer in Europe

How hard is it really?

Hello everyone,

In my last post titled How to Reach FIRE as a Software Engineer in Europe, I mentioned how the first step for reaching Financial Independence in Europe as a software engineer is to reach the 100k total compensation mark (I said anything in the 100k-250k range would be good).

As the first follow-up article to that blueprint plan, I would like to expand on its first step.

Why it is important [skip this section if you just want to know how to get a 100k salary]

Before diving deep into how to technically achieve that salary level, let’s clear out why this step is important and why I chose the 100k-250k salary range.

In that article, I highlighted how a requirement for reaching a coast-FIRE financial level - following the “European Engineer Blueprint” - would be to have 100k-250k in savings invested in assets with a return of over 15%.

This is quite a broad range, that’s why I didn’t specify the currency. Let’s say it’s euros.

Why 100k-250k in savings

Because if invested in a 15% ROI ‘machine’, this would result in 15k-37.5k euros/year.

This should be almost enough to support your living cost in a low-cost (LCOL) location in Europe. Which means that you could decide to actively/progressively start moving your affairs over to that location (from your HCOL one) and potentially move from your high-paying full-time job, to something that covers for your expenses only (letting the interests from your investments compound until you’re fully FIREd).

Of course, the faster you’d like to reach full-FIRE, the bigger the offset from your [income + investments ROI] and your living costs should be:

• let’s say K = [income + investments ROI] - living costs (basically your saving rate);

• then, your YTF (years to FIRE) would be a function of K and time;

• in particular, given Q = amount (money) necessary to FIRE;

• then, YTF = Q / K (so, the bigger K is, the smaller YTF is, meaning the faster you’ll be FIREd).

I didn’t go too much into the details of the step between reaching coast-FIRE and full-FIRE because:

1. I haven’t walked that path myself yet, so my experience on the subject is limited.

2. In my opinion, coast-FIRE is already a comfortable financial state, where you’re already in the position of doing things relevant to your long-term life, such as settling in one (or more) location(s) that you chose for your long-term plans, starting a family, choosing less remunerative but more rewarding jobs etc. So people could choose to take it easy and not rush to FIRE.

3. Other people would prefer to rush things to full-FIRE.

4. Yet other people would prefer to fat-FIRE, etc.

I think the ethos of this blueprint was around creating an harmonious plan that leverages high paying tech jobs and location arbitrage to relatively quickly achieve a privileged financial and lifestyle condition in society. And therefore there are more important things to talk about than the details on how to go from coast-FIRE to full-FIRE.

How to get a 100k software salary in Europe

Disclaimer

While 100k is catchy and somewhat useful to talk about, notice how in my guide I actually mentioned a 100k-250k range, which is a broad range.

This is because in the end we’re actually interested in a good saving rate, rather than a salary, but of course the most important variable that’s gonna influence our saving rate is the salary.

The saving rate, in order to achieve coast-FIRE (remember: 100k-250k in savings for coast-FIRE in LCOL in Europe with an implemented 15%+ ROI ‘machine’) in 3-6 years, should be around 20k-70k a year in savings over those 3-6 years.

A 100k-250k yearly salary is a very good foundation for saving rates of these types. Location and lifestyle of course matter too: making 100k in a cheaper location might be better than making 120k in an expensive location, and having a frugal lifestyle would increase saving rates. Said in a another way: while 100k will be enough for someone who lives frugally in a LCOL location, 250k might be required for someone who lives very comfortably in a HCOL location.

If you want to nerd out on these numbers’ combos, give a look at my website codecapitals.com for saving rates across jobs in Europe (note: I’m using salaries for big-tech companies, which notoriously pay more than regular companies, that’s why those saving rates might seem high, but in the related blog post you can see how you can still use the rates you find on the website for non big-tech jobs).

How to get these damn 100k jobs

Ok… The answer to this is actually quite straight-forward and can be summarised in optimising over one or more of these axes

1. location

2. company

Location

Switzerland is the best country in Europe for high salaries. A 100k there is achievable by a new-grad getting a junior job at a local/regular company.

Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, UK, Germany are other decent/good countries to get high salaries for average companies as well. But Switzerland has a strong edge over those.

Let’s say you are a new-grad, and you don’t want to stress out about getting into top tech companies, but want to follow this blueprint, your best bet would be to get a 100k job in Switzerland - which is around 80k after taxes -, live frugally for a few years (let’s say 4k a month which is enough for decent rent + living cost + weekly dinner out + a couple of trips per year) and you’d be saving about 30k a year which is almost 100k in 3 years, and especially if your salary would go up a bit, you’re basically guaranteed to reach 100k-250k in savings in 3-6 years.

Now, in my guide I said that it should take someone who’s motivated in following this blueprint maximum/about 3 years to get to the 100k-250k salary range. If you have an EU passport and you work in IT (software engineering, data science etc), I can guarantee you that it can’t possibly take you more than 3 years to get a 100k job in Switzerland, if you actively and consistently go for it.

This is probably the easiest and least risky way to reach this salary threshold.

Company

Instead of (or, in addition to) optimising for location, you can also optimise for company: some companies are notoriously harder to get into and pay much more than other companies. For an intro to this topic you can check this article: The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe.

But, basically: big tech companies pay a lot more than regular companies.

By big tech companies here we usually mean publicly traded American companies whose products are software products. Some very large and well-known (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc), others potentially smaller and lesser known (Datadog, Databricks, Confluence, Twilio etc).

For a very good list of such companies per location in Europe, you can checkout this article: Best Companies by City for Software Engineers in Europe

Joining one of such companies can be game changing and make locations somewhat irrelevant: as you can see in codecapitals.com, basically everywhere in Europe you can save more than 10k/15k a year as a junior engineer and 20k/25k as a mid-level engineer (which at these companies, is the level you get after being at junior level for 1 to 3 years).

In my opinion, 3 years of focused preparation and consistent attempts should be enough also for joining a big tech company in Europe.

Check out this article which dives deeper into the top 3 cities in Europe for software engineers, including salary numbers, saving rates and companies’ names.

Various disclaimers

Stating the obvious…

This blueprint is NOT for everyone.

Sometimes I get resistance on social networks such as Reddit for talking about a certain level of salaries or saving rates, or talking about achieving coast-FIRE in 3-6 years, or having 15%+ semi-active investments etc…

All this stuff of course takes effort!

When I say “this is almost guaranteed with 3 years of focused and dedicated work”, I am clearly trying to make you aware of this: there is no point in saying “these numbers are off”, “this is just about a tiny minority of people”, “this is just about the top 2% of jobs” etc etc etc.

In my opinion, this plan is not all that difficult… But you need to be either smart or hard-working to pull it off (being both wouldn’t hurt): if you’re not willing to sacrifice some weekends or evenings the outcomes will be less guaranteed, if you don’t seek mentorship or advice from people in the same positions you’re trying to get you’re not increasing your chances of success, if you’re not willing to relocate to follow an opportunity, if you’re not willing to keep your CV sharp and send many applications and go through many interview processes and all these things, chances of this happening will be lower.

I am also not saying that this is the best life/career plan ever and everyone should strive for it. Actually, this is not a good plan probably for many people out there, so you should evaluate for yourself if it sounds like something that is for you or not, I can’t make that call for you.

My goal is simply to:

1. Make people aware of such dynamics and to show what is possible out there;

2. Give people who would be interested in following this path actionable steps, valuable resources and information to help them do it.

That’s it.

Hope this cleared out some doubts and shed some light on the first step of achieving financial independence as a software engineer in Europe (i.e. getting a good salary :)). I did already publish a post around this same topic some time ago, maybe you want to check that out as well: Which regions offer the best compensation for a European web developer aiming for around $140k?

Feel free to comment this post or email me if you need some more clarifications.

Otherwise, I will be expanding on the other components of this blueprint (locations and geo-arbitrage, 15%+ ROI etc) in follow-up articles.

Cheers!

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