2026 European Technology Salary Guide

Compensation benchmarks age faster than most hiring teams update them. The bands below reflect offers we saw accepted between January and July 2026 across nine European markets, not advertised ranges - the gap between the two remains around eight percent.

+6.4%

Median engineering salary growth YoY

+14%

AI and ML role premium

38%

Roles advertised with a published range

The headline movement

Broad engineering compensation grew more slowly than in the previous two years. The exception is anything adjacent to applied AI, where the premium over an equivalent backend role widened again - a function of a small candidate pool rather than a general market correction.

• Senior backend engineers in Germany: €85K–€115K
• Senior backend engineers in Poland: PLN 240K–310K
• Machine learning engineers in the Netherlands: €95K–€135K
• Senior product managers in the UK: £85K–£110K
• Platform engineers in Portugal: €65K–€85K

Where the pressure is

Two categories consistently break their own bands: applied AI engineers with production deployment history, and security engineers who can read code. In both cases the constraint is supply, and no amount of process improvement compensates for a candidate pool of a few hundred people.

Central and Eastern Europe

Poland, Romania and Czechia continue to converge upwards, but the differential against Western Europe is still material at senior level. The more interesting shift is that CEE candidates increasingly benchmark against remote-first Western employers rather than local ones.

What this means for your next hire

1. 01Benchmark against accepted offers, not job board listings.
2. 02Establish the candidate's expectation in the first conversation, not the fourth.
3. 03Decide your ceiling before you meet someone you want.
4. 04Move quickly - speed is now worth more than a five percent premium.