Are salaries in the UK really that low? I live in the EU, my salary is similar to the OP and I just started working as a developer _this year_, with 5 years of a fairly unrelated career prior to that.
To be honest, the wages are quite low compared to other tech centres. As someone in the UK I'd definitely like them to be higher.
I'd be surprised if even 1% of the devs in the UK are contractors in London.
I’m a manager at a consulting company in France. My total comp is a bit shy of €70k which looks ridiculous next to an American but you have to factor in that I have a full medical coverage, access to free education for my family, unemployment insurance and retirement benefits plus a wide array of perks on top of that.
From having experience with both, that’s simply untrue.
First, education here is free - technically university is a couple euros if you are rich enough but free-adjacent - at all level. Medical coverage is not tied to your job and covers everything properly including chronic disease, heavy procedure and potential long-term inability to work. Unemployment last two years and fully covers your salary for the first six months.
You will win a lot more in the US if you work in IT because the salaries are incredibly high in the US but for anything else I would stay in Europe. Well, I would even stay in Europe for IT personally because I hate the US culture but that’s another story.
In my understanding, when you consider total wages and benefits, it’s not only IT professionals that are better off than in Europe, it’s at least everyone above median income. The class of people who’d probably be better off in Europe are low skill, low wage working class people: US welfare system is much less generous towards them, especially compared to people who don’t actually work at all.