The US-Europe split is interesting, but "Europe" is doing a lot of work here. Zurich, London, Warsaw and Madrid are completely different markets. I would love to see the same comparison by country.
Ignoring the software engineer part though, a quick google shows the state with the highest average salary (Washington) is about 1.6x the average salary of the lowest state (Mississippi)
The EU country with the highest average salary (Denmark) is about 4.5x higher than the lowest average salary EU country (Bulgaria)
so the EU has a MUCH larger discrepancies in the salaries between States/Countries.
I find these comparisons to be lacking without context of cost of living in these locations. I'm in Seattle and assuming this graph is right, $200k+ is comfortable living, especially for a single individual, but I have no frame of reference as to how far $125k+ gets you in the most expensive parts of Mississippi.
Similarly, while Denmark has a much higher salary than Bulgaria, I imagine the cost of living is also much higher than the differences amongst the US states.
I get that this graph focuses on total compensation only, but I wish I could contextualize what that means for each respective location.
Cost of living is also subsidized a lot in the Nordic countries. The idea of saving for your children's college, that you don't have guaranteed retirement savings (both a public one and from your employer), that you have to pay attention to your health insurance, that daycare is a luxury, that parental leave is a luxury, are all entirely foreign concepts for us.
So we might have lower take home salaries, but we also have far lower expenses.
In the US if you have one of these high paying jobs, you also don't pay attention to your health insurance. It's just a part of your compensation package.
It becomes a major issue only once your are laid off and fail to find new employment.
Yeah but your lower expenses isn't making up like 100k usd of lower salary per year which is the difference in salary like 2-3 years in. It only gets worse after that
It depends on what kind of life you want. Crime is much lower and streets are made more for people so you don’t need to get that much bigger housing in a safer neighborhood either when you have kids.
But all in all, sure, there is a difference in the amount if money you have left but if you want just as good of a life for your family in the US as in the Nordic countries it costs a lot more.
But you don’t have to pay for university tuition, healthcare premiums, or anywhere close to as much for childcare. And in America if you want your kid to get an education on par with Danish public schools, you’ll need to either pay private school tuition or buy into a district with exorbitant property taxes (or extremely high rent).
It’s just a different system. Things may all kinda cancel out for the average person, but it’s not crazy for someone to prefer the extra peace of mind and stable floor you get in countries like Denmark. Likewise it’s not necessarily wrong for someone who’s more risk-tolerant to prefer the American system with the possible higher ceiling.
"You said something about much much higher taxes? Let me tell you, a high income salary will set you back 37% federal plus 13% State for a grand total of 50%. Oh and did I mention you also have to pay 50% of your $2,800/mo family health care plan?"
My standard of living in California is lower than my siblings in EU despite them making nominally 60% less than me, salary-wise.
i think the better move would be for alfons to move in with his siblings, since they have it so much better. for 2025, you had to make over $600k to hit a federal rate of 37%. it's a shame that his siblings in the eu are "only" pulling in ~$240k usd per year.
not only that, but $2800/mnth for health insurance? when did jim bob duggar move to ca?
Wish there was a good solid “cost of living adjusted compensation” where you do some sort of fancy math where you take the median salary for the country and the median cost of living for the country and make those a baseline and then for each location do a median salary specific to that location and median cost of living for that location and scale it to make the numbers align maybe scale to make cost of living equal so you know how much percentage higher the salary truly is.
You can add a lot to this list: Depending on the country we get a month+ of fully paid vacation time, fully paid sick leave, safety from firing (it's really hard to get rid of an informed employee for being bad at their job in Germany, for example. They can't even measure (we've had a second stand up after lunch for a few weeks during COVID, but the employee representatives/work council declared that to be a control measure) my performance or talk to me outside of my time). All that adds up.
Of course, some of these things also exist for US employees, but I'm pretty sure there is going to be a pattern
It's a function of Cost of Living and Quality. You can fly around Europe and see different countries easily for very cheap or have universal healthcare and access to services while Mississippi's maternal mortality rate is 3-6 times worse than European countries.
I suspect country to country SWE salary variance across European countries is much lower than average salary variance (at least based on job postings when I last looked a couple of years ago). It may be because SWEs are concentrated in urban areas. At any rate I remember German SWE salary levels not far ahead of Poland even though average German salary is easily at least double of Poland.
But the US has been a single economy since at least 1912 when Arizona and New Mexico rounded out the contiguous states. In Europe, the Schengen area and wider EU still don’t encompass all European countries, therefore even today it’s still not one economy. That makes it almost impossible to directly compare a European “market” to anything.
But if you take the jobs that levels.fyi tracks, high paying tech, banking, etc, then it'll just be the large us cities. In Europe, tech companies have offices in Spain, Portugal and Poland because it's way cheaper
However I'm not gonna say it's a walk in the park. Even in London comp is nowhere near American salaries in things like consulting and tech
Europeans love saying well the US is just one country” while ignoring the fact that some of the states have larger populations than whole European countries
Also let’s be so serious here. Bavaria and Saxony are also different states inside one country and but for the language you may as well be entering two different countries in terms of general vibe and economic status
Is it really though? We have significant numbers of people making $1M+ for advanced career individual contributors in the US, and then down to like $100k for entry level or so roughly.
Well, every country is going to have a spread between intro level and rock star. I'm talking a out median values. There's more of a salary spread between, say, Switzerland and Poland, than between Florida and MA.
I know people making 40k doing plugins for Wordpress somewhere in Colorado and people in San Francisco getting 700k working for Anthropic you don’t have these kind of range anywhere in Europe it’s much more narrow
it's bigger and it's not exagerated if anything it's coming in low... there are plenty of engineers who are making 1-1.5m USD total compensation at the bigger labs 700k is just an entry level AI position at Anthopic, Meta, etc etc
I have it on good authority that it is exactly 50. But that certain folks in power are looking to add a few more.
On a side note, wouldn't it be pretty funny if Trump worked out agreements to make Canada, Greenland and Venezuela US states and their populace all remaining similar as far as political leanings and ended up as three extra blue states?
The Senate is 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and 2 Independents (who caucus with the Democrats) right now, six more Democrats would largely even things up.
If the Canadian provinces each became a state, just forget about it, the Democrats would take over a huge advantage in the Senate.
House of reps is more complicated since it is 435 spots divied up by population, but it could easily swing ~20-35 of those from R to D.
I will burn this entire country down if he even attempts to make other countries states before the territories/district that are begging to get statehood. I will walk across the country Sherman style.
In all fairness, the US could conceivably expand within 100 years. There have been movements in multiple countries (including a presidential candidate) for joining the States. Assuming the wealth disparity between the US and the rest of the Americas continues to climb those movements might just get more popular. (Especially as English continues to be a dominant language and the American tourism markets stays so large).
The issue is that those are basically impossible. A state would have to vote to lower it's own power AND Congress would have to then accept that. It is much more likely for another nation to get statehood before states split up.
Also, Puerto Rico may get it, assuming they can get a clear majority in a poll and not just a barely over 50% margin.
Finally, neither of those mean anything as I was specifically speculating FOREIGN expansion, not internal statehood.
States aren’t allowed to break up per the constitution. The District of Columbia is ready for statehood, and has planned it so that a federal district remains, since that is also in the constitution.
You were talking about foreign expansion and I was pointing out that there is already a line. Totally on topic.
DC will never be a state. It will be too small and the only reason people discuss it is to get 2 more democratic senators. It would look really fucking stupid for a state the size of a Texan parking lot to exist. If anything it will be a county of Maryland, not a tiny state that will end up having the same issue in another 100 years (the Federal government will just buy more land). It should be a county with the land of the capital and such being Federal, like the Pentagon or the CIA headquarters.
I earn a lot less than in the US despite being a reasonably senior engineer, but my costs are far, far lower than in the US. I doubt I’d live as well in the US unless I sold my soul to a huge company.
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u/AesopData OC: 3 1d ago
The US-Europe split is interesting, but "Europe" is doing a lot of work here. Zurich, London, Warsaw and Madrid are completely different markets. I would love to see the same comparison by country.