"What should I actually be paid as a Python developer in Europe?" It is a fair question, and most of the answers floating around are either US numbers in disguise or averages so broad they are useless.
The bands below are rough, indicative ranges — gross annual figures in EUR, for permanent roles. They are not survey data and they are not PyHires data: pay varies a lot by country and by company. Treat them as a starting point for a conversation, and check them against the ranges on real postings for the role you want.
The rough bands
- Junior (0–2 years): €32k–€48k. Wide, because "junior" means very different things in Warsaw versus Amsterdam.
- Mid (2–5 years): €50k–€75k.
- Senior (5–8 years): €70k–€100k.
- Staff / principal (8+ years): €95k–€140k+, and the ceiling is mostly set by the company, not the country.
Why location still moves the number
Remote did not flatten European salaries the way people predicted in 2021. What actually happened is that companies anchor to their cost base and then adjust.
- A Berlin scale-up and a Lisbon agency can post the same "Senior Python / Django" role with a €25k gap and both feel justified.
- Switzerland remains its own planet — a senior role in Zurich can clear CHF 130k, but rent eats a chunk you would keep in Valencia.
- Eastern Europe has compressed fast: Kraków and Bucharest senior rates now overlap with the lower end of Western Europe.
The practical takeaway: negotiate against the company's band, not your country's average. If a fully-remote company hires across the EU, you have far more leverage than the local market suggests.
What pushes you to the top of a band
It is rarely raw years. What most often moves you up:
- Owning something in production that made or saved real money, and being able to tell that story in one paragraph.
- Comfort across the stack — not full-stack necessarily, but able to reason about the database, the queue and the deploy, not just the view function.
- A specialism that is currently scarce: data engineering, ML platform work, or just being genuinely good at making
asynccode behave.
How to use this without getting burned
Publish or ask for a range early. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970), candidates have the right to know the starting pay or its range before the interview once their country has brought it into national law — and candidates self-select out of vague posts fast. If you are job hunting, anchor high but specific, and always ask what the band is rather than the offer — companies will tell you the band more honestly than they will move the offer.
Every offer on PyHires publishes its salary range, so you can browse open Python roles and compare these bands with what companies actually offer.