Salary benchmarks for full-stack talent in Europe
What competitive compensation looks like across European hubs and why the spread is narrowing faster than expected.
Remote hiring has compressed the gap between hubs. Where a London senior full-stack role once commanded a substantial premium over Lisbon or Warsaw, the difference today is far smaller for companies competing for the same shortlist of candidates.
Broadly, mid-level full-stack engineers in Western European hubs sit in a band that clears six figures only with equity, while senior product engineers with a track record of owning a surface end-to-end command meaningfully more. Specialist AI-adjacent experience adds a further premium that has held steady for two years.
Two structural forces are at work. First, companies increasingly benchmark against a role band rather than a location, because location-based bands create awkward internal comparisons on distributed teams. Second, candidates now have transparent access to ranges through job postings in several jurisdictions.
Our advice to hiring teams is to compete on the parts of the offer that are not cash: scope, autonomy, the quality of the engineering environment and a genuinely fast interview process. In our placements, a five-day process converts dramatically better than a three-week one at identical compensation.
If you would like the full breakdown by hub and seniority for your specific stack, get in touch and we will share our current dataset.