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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

I mean, okay, but the 42% tax bracket in Germany starts at around 60k Euros. It certainly seems possible that a person who makes what we'd consider a fairly normal-for-HN amount of money is seeing an overall tax rate that's pretty close to 42%.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you'd have to be making well over €300k in order to have an effective tax rate above 40% there—normal for senior engineers at FAANG in the US maybe, but definitely not as normal for the same roles in Europe.

...unless you count Social security contributions as taxes, in which case you will reach 42% taxes a lot quicker, especially if you also account for the 50% your employer pays or you are self-employed.

I used a german tax calculator and put in a 200k Euro income and it told me my take-home would be 102k. I dunno if I screwed it up or anything -- I don't know a lot of German tax law.

€200k is not a normal developer salary in Berlin. In fact, it's more like 3x a normal salary. It doesn't make sense applying Silicon Valley salaries to other places.

Okay, but on the other hand my parent poster made the claim that you'd need a salary of well over 300k to get an above-40% effective tax rate, and I notice that you don't seem to have taken issue with him. This feels like an isolated demand for rigor.

The person who set off this thread made no claim to be a typical Berlin developer, he just said that he paid 42% taxes, and someone challenged that claim. If everyone's being super careful about using very precise language, fine, but that needs to be everyone being super careful about using very precise language, not just people you disagree with.

Other people had already responded with what I'd have said. There was no need for me to chime in too.

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