Minimum salaries requested by developers in France

We launched Circular 3 years ago for companies hiring tech talent in Madrid, Barcelona and for Remote positions with the aim of changing the way tech talent is recruited. Since our launch, we have grown our community to over 6000 in-house recruiters and opened two new markets: UK and France.

It has been an interesting 3 years, especially at Circular, and more so especially when it comes to seeing the Salaries tech professionals are asking for when looking for a change.

We wanted to create a series of articles looking at how developers report salary expectations when looking for a new position by looking at the data Circular has accrued over the last years across different positions and levels of seniority.

Today we bring you the report for our Newest Market: France.

The Data:

The data we will be sharing comes from the Circular database and has certain peculiarities we would like to touch on before diving into the nitty gritty.

The salary ranges we are reporting are not the salaries publicly shared by companies but the minimum salary privately collected from thousands of developers in France.

⚠️
We are reporting proprietary data on the salary expectations that developers are asking for when looking for a change of job.

Average Developer’s Salary Expectations over the last 2 years in France

Overall we can see there has been a slight increase in salaries between 2021 and 2022, with Backend Ruby roles (+14K) and the tech Lead roles (+8K) having seen the largest increases, maintaining consistency as the highest self-reported salaries year on year.

However, we can still see a decrease in salary expectations for a few jobs, such as the IOS Android (-10K€) and the DevOps (-5K€), while Data scientist and Mobile Android roles continue to report the lowest salaries.

Overall Paris
Infogram

Salary ranges by seniority:

The story becomes more interesting when we look at the data from a seniority standpoint.

At Circular we measure seniority based on a metric of self-reported years of experience from the developers that are part of the Circular community.

For this study we used four seniority brackets:

6+ years experience

3-5 years experience

1-2 years experience

0-1 years experience

6+ years experience

Backend Roles continue to have the highest salaries, curiously we have seen some reductions in salary expectations in Back end roles, like the Backend.Net role lowering from 80K to 56K, and the Backend Python (from 80K to 60K).

Data Science roles have seen reported salaries double, while data engineer jobs have seen a 2K€ drop in salaries from 2021 to 2022.

Head
Infogram

3-5 years experience

Most salaries have remained the same across the board with the surprising and radical fall of the IOS Android Role in 2022, going from 83K€ to 33K€.

Lead
Infogram

1-2 years experience

Salaries have remained fairly stable with the notable exceptions in the Backend Ruby and QA engineer roles seeing drastic drops, especially for Backend Ruby Roles, seeing a 22K€ decrease in salary expectations and an 11K€ decrease in QA Engineer roles.

Senior
Infogram

0-1 years experience

The most curious variation we have seen is that there has been an increase in reported salaries in half of the positions while the other half have seen a decrease.

Out of the Backend roles, only Backend C# and Backend PHP has increased, the first very slightly, while the second has doubled.

Data Roles have seen an increase overall, but in particular in data engineering positions.

Junior
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Positions covered in this sample:

Backend C#

Backend Java

Backend Node

Backend PHP

iOS Android

Backend Net

Data Engineer

Data Scientist

Mobile Android

Backend Python

Backend Ruby

DevOps

Front end

Full Stack

Lead

QA Engineer