Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodemaker | Hacker News Reader

I dont think we can compare salaries in Silicon Valley and UK like that. In the end its about how much you have after you pay all your basic expenses and I think the person with GBP 77K has much more left than the person with $125K in California.

Edit: Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!

View on HN

Not sure what tax rates are like in San Francisco however if you that kind of money in the UK you are going to be paying 40% income tax on a pretty large chunk of it. So after income tax you are left with maybe 50K.

We also have council tax which in some places will make your eyes pop out. Not to mention VAT which is going to be 20% of pretty much everything you buy. On top of that house prices can be very high here for a family sized home even in a modest area so you're going to be paying a lot for your mortgage.

Plus we have a huge amount of tax on stuff like fuel and anything to do with cars, not to mention that food prices are generally higher here than in the USA.

OTOH medical insurance isn't really an issue as well as other things like more help available from govt to cover higher education.

Exactly that

I'm thinking the 125k in California may be a better deal, except the cost of living may be higher there (not much public transport, housing is expensive as well, etc)

But the UK income taxes are huge. Ireland taxes are similar. Continental Europe has smaller taxes (but then salaries may be smaller, so 'take home money' can be similar)

Not sure about this. In my experience accommodation in the UK is more than in the US (possibly not in the big cities or SV, though it was true of SF last time I visited), gas and electricity are a lot more expensive, and food is about the same price.

  Average annual salary of software developer in US: $93,000
  Average annual salary of software developer in UK: £35,000 = $56,000 approx

  Average house price in the US: $181,500  
  Average house price in the UK: £234,000 = $376,014

Ever feel like you're in the wrong country?

(the 93k figure from this recently front-paged article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4696113>; all other figures from a randomly-selected page from the first few Google results, but the UK figures seem reasonable to me - I'm in the south of England but outside London, and houses here are all above 250k but most programming jobs I see offer 30-35k. Of course using nationwide averages isn't necessarily an accurate picture as the places with most tech jobs available are probably not the ones with most houses on the market)

Average SF single bedroom apartment is more than 2k per month. You'd be hard pressed to find a decent 2 bedroom house for less than a million.

To be fair, "average" is a weird measurement for comparing the US to the UK. The average density of development in the UK is far higher than in the US,a nd housing prices are higher accordingly.

I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.

Living in London was already not cheap before the US civil war. Part of the US advantage during the 20th century was that the cost of living and labour was less than most of the rest of the industrialized world.

Don't you mean the other way around???? I mean, the UK aint a cheap place to live!

Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!

The house-price plague is a worldwide problem and it's still in force. The "crash" was not as much of one as the world needed; brownstones in Manhattan are still over a million.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com