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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Incidentally 80-90k is pretty normal pay in Europe too. High, even, for southern Europe.

Exactly. That’s around salary for senior engineer at big corp according union tables in Germany. If you’re really good or a manager, 110k is in there. More is doable at senior manager/director level or in key position in a company led by owner. US faang salaries sound here like science fiction.

Yes, 90 to 110k is pretty much TOP. A lot of seniority and experience. If you want to go higher, you have to go management path (even lower management is included in the union)

If you look at the table of salaries of a big union [1], you can multiply that number by about 13.5 to get the annual salary. Can vary a little %, but a good estimation.

The salaries in the EU stagnated in the last years, whereas in USA they were moving.

[1] https://www.igmetall.de/download/20240809_Metall_Elektroindu...

Currently the going annual salary for a senior developer in Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) is somewhere between EUR 50k - 75 EUR net, with 25-30 days of paid time off. The gross will be about 25% more (income tax is 10%, social security around 40%, but there is a cap on the salary base, so effectively it is less). For freelance senior developer, the (B2B) daily rate is in the range EUR 350 to EUR 550, depending on the technology and project complexity. Of course, there are rare examples outside of these ranges (e.g. top talent in ML, BigData etc). Leadership roles are usually at 10-20% premium.

Wow, income tax seems to be pretty low in Bulgaria compared to other European countries?

For 50k net per year, or ~4k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~80k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~57k EUR.

For 75k net per year, or ~6k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~130k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~85k EUR.

Go figure, these are really large differences and that very well might be the reason why we see a lot of big companies there. Tax is unusually low.

here a script to calculate these - net-vs-gross-vs-cost in Bulgaria, for 2025

  $ python zaplata.py 10000
  10000 
   neto : 10000 -> bruto= 11680.23, razhod: 12445.10
   bruto: 10000 -> neto = 8487.80, razhod: 10764.88

prepend negative year for 2024 or 2023 (max cap of social-security rises YoY):

  $ python zaplata.py  -2024 10000
  -2024 
  10000 
   neto : 10000 -> bruto= 11627.86, razhod: 12322.36
   bruto: 10000 -> neto = 8534.93, razhod: 10694.50

https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin/blob/master/misc/zap...

p.s. And no, i do not see a change here - all is still dead - am looking since september

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