It is only natural for developers to wonder how their salaries stack up against the average. It is also normal to wonder how your earning potential differs from city to city. For software engineers in the UK, London is the epicenter of tech in the country, despite a number of other cities such as Manchester and Bristol.
We are going to give you an insight into how much software engineers make in London as well as some other things you need to consider such as cost of living and other factors that might affect your career decisions.
Post-Brexit vote software engineering salaries in London
Surprisingly, investment into UK based companies has not seemed to have felt the impact of the Brexit decisions. With European investments into British tech companies reaching a record high in 2018. Tech giants are also doubling down on Europe’s unicorn capital, with Facebook, Amazon, Google as well as Apple all investing in office space to house their growing London workforce.
Tech salaries have also been growing since 2016. According to Hired’s 2019 State of Salaries Report, the average tech salary in London was 62 thousand Euros last year. This was up 4 thousand Euros from the year prior and 5 thousand Euros since 2016.
Let’s take a look at some of the salaries that were earned:
- Embedded engineer: $90K (£71K)
- Block-chain engineer: $89K (£69K)
- Data engineer: $87K (£68K)
- Machine learning engineer: $87K (£68K)
- Search engineer: $86K (£68K)
- Security engineer: $86K (£67K)
- Natural language processing engineering: $84K (£66K)
- Gaming engineer: $81K (£64K)
- Backend engineer: $80K (£63K)
- Full-stack engineer: $77K (£61K)
- Mobile engineer: $75K (£58K)
- Frontend engineer: $73K (£57K)
London salaries averages across the board are the highest when compared to other UK cities. London is a compelling option for technical talent in the UK and beyond. Taken together with job and investment growth, London is a great option for you and your personal growth in your career.
Cost of living factors
It is important to keep your cost of living in mind when you consider your terms of salaries. London is known as a relatively expensive city however, it is not world-leading in terms of cost. The cost of living in London, based on consumer prices and rent, for example, is about 30% less than in San Francisco.
Rent prices are higher in London however, consumer prices for things such as groceries are actually lower. When you are deciding to look for jobs, whether I the UK or abroad, remember to account for the cost of living based on your lifestyle decisions.
Factors such as whether you eat out or takeaways, do you take the train or will you walk, and where you work will impact your monthly costs. This means that you need to consider how far you can stretch your paycheck.
You also need to keep in mind that you should try and save some money for a rainy day. You never know what could happen and if anything Corona has taught us, is that we do not what is coming so it is best to have some savings on hand just in case you have a bad month.
