A developer’s salary is influenced not just by their years of experience but also by their tech stack and role—not to mention the company they work for. With all these variables, it’s not particularly easy for developers to know how much they’re worth.
We analysed data gathered over the past five years to understand what developers can expect to earn in Austria based on factors like role, experience, and location. We also uncovered a few surprises about how COVID-19 has (and hasn’t) affected developers.
Developer salaries in Austria grew in 2023. Find out more HERE.
Report highlights
The average developer salary in Austria is (€54,000).
Average frontend salaries (€ 49,000) are lower than backend and fullstack salaries (€53,000).
Vienna offers developers a lower salary growth progression in relation to years of experience compared to Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt.
The impact of COVID-19
Interview invites decrease but salary stays steady.
When COVID-19 first hit Europe, “business as usual” was completely disrupted, but the virus doesn’t seem to have impacted developer salaries in Austria. However, it has slowed hirings. Between March and April 2020, there was a 30% drop in interview invites sent out to developers. The number of hires also remained quite low for most of 2020.
Fortunately, both of these numbers started picking back up near the end of 2020 and seem to be continuing on an upward trend.
Breakdown of developer salaries in Austria
Average offered salary jumps by almost 30% between junior and senior roles.
On average, new developers in Austria earn around €46k while those with over 6 years earn €59k.
Average offered salary by role
Managers earn 14% more than individual contributors
While fullstack developers earn more than their frontend and backend counterparts, managers come out on top in terms of salary. Backend, frontend, and fullstack developers in Austria are offered an average of €52k, while developers in managerial positions are offered around €60k. That’s nearly 15% more.
For comparison, managers in Germany earn 21% more, and managers in the Netherlands earn 15% more.
Most in-demand technologies
Companies want Javascript, Java and Docker.
It’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what lands someone an interview invite. However, we can analyze the exact technologies of the developers who are getting invited. That’s how we found that developers with Javascript were most likely to receive an interview invite, though this is not necessarily the tech stack associated with the job.
Average offered salary by city
Of the three countries our study covered, we found that Austria had the lowest salaries on average. However, considering the cost of living, these salaries can still be very competitive, especially compared to cities like Amsterdam.
Average offered salary by language and location
Skill trumps nationality and language
For most developers in Austria, location and language won’t play a huge role in the salary offered. In fact, it seems that these two factors make very little difference to hiring businesses.
Average offered salary by gender
Female developers earn 6% less
We found that women are consistently offered lower salaries than their male counterparts. On average, male developers in Austria earn €55k and female developers earn €52k. This is rather on par with Germany and the Netherlands overall. However Frankfurt was found to have the largest gender salary gap (15%) while Amdsterdam has the lowest (4%).
Average offered salary by company size
Bigger companies = bigger paychecks
Tiny startups offer lots of perks but big salaries are not one of them. In fact we found that particularly small companies (1-10 employees) offer the lowest salary on average. On the other hand, companies with 201-1,000 employees tend to offer the highest.
It’s worth noting that very small companies may also compensate by offering equity in the company, which is not included here. Index Ventures suggests an early stage senior engineer could receive as much as 1% of the company.
Methodology
We used salaries specified by hiring companies during the interview process on the Honeypot platform as our key data source.
We removed interview invites sent with missing information (like position title or company location) in order to ensure that the data can be compared consistently. We also removed salaries that were unusually low or high to get rid of any extreme outliers. An external library was used to determine gender based on the individual’s first name.
