The average salary for a software developer in Switzerland is €105,000
The median salary for a software developer in Switzerland is estimated to be €113,000 with an average salary of €105,000. That’s €8,670 per month or €6,140 per month after tax (29.2%).
Entry-level software developers in Switzerland positions start at €91,000 per year. Experienced senior software developer positions can get up to €116,000 per year. For more accurate salary estimates check out our salary calculator.
📚 TL;DR
- Avg. salary €105,000
- Junior vs. Senior (€91,000 vs €116,000)
- After-tax: €6,140/mo (€73,680/year)
- Avg. Frontend €88,000
- Avg. Backend €113,000
- Avg. Fullstack €98,000
💰 more salaries…
Salary by Experience 🎓
It is very hard to estimate entry-level salary and senior salary ranges. For an entry-level position, there could be a pay difference of ~€30,000 depending on education and the company. Someone with a master's or bachelor's in Computer Science will probably get offers in the 90s. I’m not sure how a candidate would fare with only a boot camp certificate — they’ll probably end up on the lower end of the scale around €80,000.
Senior developers in Switzerland also have a sliding pay scale. They can easily earn over €100,000 and upwards of €130,000 (if they are working for a growing startup or established company). For quick estimates see the chart below — please note that these are benchmark salaries that are generally lower for senior developers and higher for juniors. While it’s always important to not underestimate your worth, overestimating can also hamper your negotiations.
Taxes in Switzerland🇨🇭
As we go through salary by city, experience, role, and technology you can refer to the Swiss tax brackets so that you can roughly estimate your monthly income after tax. Or you can open up a tax calculator.
If you are living in Switzerland and earning a gross annual salary of €105,000, or €8,750 per month, the total amount of taxes and contributions that will be deducted from your salary is €30,400. This means that your net income, or salary after tax, will be €74,600 per year, € 6,220 per month, or €1,430 per week.
Salary by type and technology 🎮
There are a lot of different types of software developers. So let’s compare how much developers in Switzerland earn by developer type.
As we all know, some technologies are more sort after than others. While speicalised developers will most certainly earn more, they are not as in high demand as more generalised roles like frontend or backend. With that in mind, let’s look at what roles recruiters are trying to fill the most on our platform. This chart represents the number of job postings per technology (Germany/Austria/Switzerland).
Most desired developer skills:
Average salary by year 📈
Let’s track salary data over time for the top developer roles (frontend, backend, and fullstack). As you can see there is a generally upward trend in average salary, this data is based on the StackOverflow surveys (2017-2022).
Software developer frontend vs backend vs fullstack (EUR):
Average salary by city 💰
These salaries are benchmarks — they are not gospel. Software developers in Zurich are reporting the highest pay on average followed by Geneva and Bern. Interestingly, software developers working in Switzerland report far higher salaries than those working just across the border in Germany and Austria.
Top Swiss companies 🚀
Swiss cheese isn’t the only thing to have come out of Switzerland… In all seriousness, there are a lot of great Swiss companies that you’d recognise including Nestle, Lindt, and Rolex. We’ve taken the top Swiss companies by market cap and found what they pay software developers. Now, you might not recognise some of these companies but they are very successful and actively hire developers.
