The average salary for a software engineer in UK is £51,600
The Average salary for a software engineer in the UK is estimated to be £51,600. That’s £4,300 per month or £3,200 per month after tax (~25%).
Entry-level software engineers in the UK start at around £41,000 per year (Glassdoor). Experienced senior software engineer positions earn upwards of £60,000 per year with bonus and equity options. We’ve included a few estimates from various salary sites in the UK to give you a more accurate picture of the average engineer salary. You can check out our salary calculator for more specific information.
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Salary by Experience
As we know, the more experienced a developer the higher the salary. Junior and entry level salaries are harder to pinpoint as they can vary quite significantly based on what company a developer works at and their educational background. The base salary is around £40k which is about £20k less than a senior dev (5+ years of experience). Let’s explore salary ranges for the three main categories junior, mid, and senior.
Taxes in UK 🇬🇧
It’s important to understand how taxes in the UK affect your take home pay. Your contract might state £5,000 monthly gross pay but your bank account will only receive £3,500. As a software engineer working in the UK, you’ll most likely be in the 40% tax bracket. Here’s an example of net pay versus gross pay.
On a £51,600 salary, your take home pay will be £38,133 after tax and National Insurance. This equates to £3,178 per month and £733 per week. If you work 5 days per week, this is £147 per day, or £18 per hour at 40 hours per week.
UK tax brackets:
Salary by type and technology
When we look at the median yearly salaries (in GBP) for different roles, there are some interesting things to note. Backend, Mobile, and Fullstack developers all bring home similar median salaries, around ₤69,600. DevOps folks earn a bit less, with a median of ₤71,500. Game developers, unfortunately, make a bit less dough, coming in at ₤59,600. Frontend developers and Fullstack engineers fall somewhere in the middle, with median salaries of ₤59,600 and ₤61,600, respectively. Now, the big bucks go to Cloud engineers and Security pros, both raking in ₤79,500. So, it seems like Cloud engineering and Security gigs offer the fattest paychecks in the tech industry.
The best way to identify what technologies are the most in demand in the UK is to look at the number of job postings in a year. Yahoo finance examined this data in 2020, and found that SQL skills were highly desired, almost double that of developers skilled in Java. Here are the top six skills in demand in the UK.
Average salary by city
When we compare the median software engineer salaries in the biggest cities in the UK, some interesting things pop up. London takes the crown with the highest median salary at £59,000, no surprises there. Right behind is Bristol, not too far off, with a median salary of £44,000. Now, things get interesting as Leeds, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Glasgow all hover around the same range of £42,000 to £43,000. Birmingham and Liverpool offer slightly lower salaries at £40,000 and £41,000 respectively, while Belfast brings up the rear with a median salary of £36,000.
Salary by Company in UK
Salary averages only go so far, sometimes it’s more helpful to see specific salaries at real companies to get an idea of what other software engineers are earning. These are not the best companies in the UK but a handful of some of the larger companies in the country where devs have reported salaries. Majority of these companies are paying software engineers between £40k - £60k. While far from the highest paying developer salaries, these salaries are generally considered to be good.
