Over the past year, software developer salaries in Switzerland had a small growth. Despite the uncertainty in the tech world, salaries grew by 2%, a small increase, but one that confirms the upward trend that the country has been seeing in the past few years.
How does the country perform against the rest of the countries in Europe? Is Switzerland still the best-paying country for tech jobs?
In 2023, software developers were offered €103,300 per year. According to our data, this is the highest salary offered in all markets investigated by our yearly salary report.
In 2023, like in 2022, we can see that developer expectations in Switzerland are again too low. Far too low, developers expect 22% less than what they’re being offered.
Here’s how average software developer salaries in Switzerland look over time.
Salary breakdown in Switzerland
In this report, we examine the roles of backend, frontend, and fullstack developer.
When we look at the wages for specific roles we notice some interesting trends.
Backend developers seem to earn the heaviest paychecks in 2023, followed by frontend and fullstack developers. This makes sense in Switzerland where the role of backend developer has the highest demand.
Fullstack developers receive the lowest salary, but have the highest salary expectations. This could be attributed to the fact that fullstack developers need to have extensive knowledge of both the front and back end development. It takes more years to become a fully-fledged fullstack developer, so developers are more experienced with usually more years of experience.
Download the FULL 2023 Developer Salary Report and get insights from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Salary by years of experience and role
We looked at salaries offered vs. salaries expected based on the most in-demand developer roles and years of experience.
We specify 0 to 2 years of experience as a junior level, 3 to 6 years of experience as a mid-level, while with 7+ years of experience, you’re considered a senior developer for most companies.
In this chart, green indicates that the salary offer is higher than the expectation, while red that it’s lower.
The best-paying role and the role with the highest salary growth is the role of backend developer. However, we notice that for junior backend roles, the offer is disproportionally higher than the expectation. This could be the result of extremely high outliers that affect the average offer.
Expectations are low during the first professional years, but mid-level to senior roles developers expect more. However, expectations are almost always much lower than the offered salary.
Download the FULL 2023 Salary Report and get insights from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Most interview invites in Switzerland by role
The demand for tech roles in Switzerland looks a bit different than the demand in Austria but similar to Germany.
In 2023, the most in-demand specialty in Switzerland is the role of a backend developer. To come up with this data, we specified demand by the number of interview invites extended for each role.
Backend is in first place with 55% of all interview invites. Fullstack follows with 31%, while frontend developers occupy ‘last place’ with 14%.
Big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have offices in Switzerland. These companies require extensive backend support in order to run their platforms. This could explain the huge difference in demand and salaries for backend developers.
The Gender Pay Gap in Switzerland
Swiss companies might be offering high paychecks, but even there, gender plays a role in salary offers.
In 2023, based on data from both 2022 and 2023, the gender pay gap ranges from 6.2 to 7.2%.
Salary by language & location
Language and location play a small role in determining salary offers in Switzerland.
Software developers coming from inside the EU have a bigger chance to receive higher salaries.
Developers who speak the local language have a bigger chance to receive the highest salary offer.
Yes, you can get the FULL 2023 salary report HERE!
Most in-demand tech stacks
Based on contact requests to developers specialized in different tech stacks, we were able to discover which technologies are most in demand in Switzerland for 2023.
According to Honeypot’s data, Swiss companies are looking for software developers that specialize in Javascript, Java, Docker, and Typescript.
Methodology and Conclusions
We used salaries specified by hiring companies during the interview process on the Honeypot platform as our key data source.
Our 2023 data is averaged from 2022 + 2023 (28.5k data points) to ensure more accurate responses. The expected salary data is determined from developer profiles on the Honeypot platform, while offered salary data is based on a company’s initial offer during the interview process. It doesn’t reflect the final negotiated and contracted amount. Unusually low or high salaries were removed to avoid extreme outliers, as well as interview invites that don’t include significant information. We use an external library to determine gender based on the individual’s first name.
We hope you have a better idea of what software developer salaries look like in the Netherlands. Don’t miss out on our other reports — we’re exploring dev salaries in different parts of Europe including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain.
