US is best place to be a software engineer, salary survey finds

Followed by Switzerland, Canada, and the UK

A survey has highlighted the disparity in engineer salaries around the world, with US developers pocketing far more than their British equivalents.

The report, from gamified programming outfit Codingame, was culled from its community of two million developers (along with tech recruiters) and showed that the US remained the top-paying country for software engineers, with an average annual salary of $95,879.

Furthermore, more than 40 percent of developers working in the US raked in over $100k a year and 5 percent pull in more than $200k per annum, according to the report.

Close behind was Switzerland, with a $90,462 average salary, Canada was at $71,193, while UK techies trailed in fourth, with an average salary of $68,664. Still nothing to be sneezed at, but quite some way behind the US.

It could be worse. Germany came in at sixth place with $61,390. France was down at ninth with $47,617, and Spain rounded out the top 10 with an average salary of $39,459 for software engineers.

Before anyone feels too hard done by, software engineers in India, Morocco, and Tunisia were at the bottom of the table, with averages of $19,553, $18,318, and $16,796 respectively.

The survey did not take into account the cost of living in the countries featured in the league table (comparing the cost of a house in San Francisco with one in Pune would provide more context), nor did it break down the numbers into what languages paid the best. It did, however, tell us that the average it cited was the mean rather than median.

A glance at the Stack Overflow survey for 2021 shows that Clojure is a high-paying language, DynamoDB engineers are making the big bucks, while AWS is just beating Azure on salary for cloud experts.

Still, while UK coders may not be the highest salaried in the world, the average salary has comfortably broken through the £50k ($66,300) barrier and remains higher than the national average. After Switzerland, Brits also pocket the most cash compared to their European equivalents.

Is that enough to stop techies in search of a better deal jumping through the hoops set by certain companies? Well, we are in the midst of the Great Resignation after all... ®

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