
Ask HN: Average Salary for PHP Dev in London? - payamb
I&#x27;m a PHP Developer with above average ( I think ? ) experience ( 3 years commercial experience in Manchester )<p>I&#x27;ve quite comfortable with OOP, Design Patterns, Symfony, Laravel , Custom build solutions etc ...<p>In the past few months i was busy building search solutions using Elastic Search, Caching solutions using Redis and Geo coding.<p>Also i manage bunch of ec2 instances , a few google cloud servers and quite confident in managing and maintaining our production servers.<p>Git &#x2F; Average javascript knowledge &#x2F; Ansible &#x2F; HTML &amp; CSS as usual.<p>I have 40k job offer in Manchester but i want to relocate to London, Now i see the average salary in London is about 45k ? is that right ? Please could you give me an idea how much should i be looking for in London ?
======
ownagefool
The UK is all about the contracting market. PHP isn't the best paid gig in the
world but you'll do £350 to £450 a day if you're resonably good and if you can
do a bit of AWS you're a lot more hireable. So that's about £88k a year.

Word of warning though, the contracting market doesn't suffer fools gladly,
and at 3 years commerical experience you're a baby. Thus, unless you're
actually really quite good, you're doing well at £40k.

Edit: I can recommend you a company in a town 40 minutes outside London. PM me
if you're interested.

------
jnardiello
PHP Dev here with similar experience as yours. I used to work/live in London
and stayed there for a bit less than ~2yrs. My salary was 50k in a well
respected big US-based corp. Mine was the highest salary in the team, other
members were between 35 and 45k.

Honestly, be well-aware that the value of your salary is going to remarkably
decrease if you relocate to London. Mainly because of rent. I used to pay 1.5k
to live in Bethnal green (which is ~20/25 min by feet from the silicon
roundabout - very likely where you'll end up working). You can save some money
commuting but you'll end up paying for transports, so, expect end of the month
to spend about the same. If you are alone and will be happy with a single
room, it will be 600-800 in a decent shared flat.

I'm 100% confident saying that those 5/10k of salary increase are not enough
to justify you to move. 40k in manchester are a lot more than 50k in London.

In terms of salary increase, as a lead PHP dev you can expect to go around
65-70k but that will require time.

Completely different story if you decide to start contracting as in London you
can easily ask for 400/500GBP a day.

I hope it helps :)

~~~
payamb
Thanks for sharing your experience, Well my main issue is life got boring for
me in Manchester, I moved to UK 3 years ago and honestly its only the vibe of
London that makes me to relocate there.

With 40k life is so easy in Manchester but then I'm not sure i'm happy to live
here still.

------
taylorwc
Angellist has an awesome tool for this sort of research[0]. You can set
geographic filters and skill filters, etc. It's usually got tiny sample size
when you have multiple specified filters, but might give you a good idea.

[0][https://angel.co/salaries](https://angel.co/salaries)

------
throw923498
I hired many developers including PHP developers in London.

I would call 3 years commercial experience below average to average. Depending
on ability it would be high-level junior developer to low-level mid developer.
£40-45k would definitely be the high end of what you could expect, and it
would rely on you interviewing very well to get it.

PHP is not a technology stack that's hard to find people in, and therefore
salaries tend to be lower. Other tech stacks that are more specialised tend to
attract higher salaries, but there are less positions available.

~~~
ownagefool
Whilst I largely agree with you, I hope you don't simply judge candidates on
years of experience.

I used to PHP contract and the amount of 20 years experience devs in senior
positions who were crap was extremely frustrating.

Occasionally the kid with a couple of years experience actually knows more
than them.

------
emeraldd
Can't speak to London particularly but my experience has been that the secret
to better salaries is to be a dev that knows <Language/Tool> not a
<Language/Tool> dev. It helps alot to have solid fundamentals that you can
work with in several different languages/platforms and be able to demonstrate
that you understand "systems" more than isolated applications. (i.e. the world
of enterprise development ;)

~~~
UK-AL
I'd say you'd probably need to understand a lot more about distributed
systems, SOA, micro-services in enterprise development than normal
development.

~~~
emeraldd
It depends on where you're working. There are alot of companies that have
"enterprisy" size systems that haven't moved into that style of development
yet. Of course, that usually means working with alot of legacy code as well.

------
swalsh
These salaries are terrible, how is it possible to get away paying such low
salaries in London? In the US (not even San Francisco) I'd expect nothing less
than 125k USD (105GDP)

~~~
teekert
It's a different world. It is important to known if this is before or after
taxes and healthcare is free (or rather: paid for by taxation) in the UK.

~~~
petercooper
Fun bit of trivia: the UK government spends less tax money on _everyone 's_
health per capita than the US government does (before you even add on health
insurance)

------
jaymzcampbell
I'm doing Python but PHP friends I have in London at a senior level hit around
£50-60k+. To be honest with the commute times, train prices, rent (£1400 a
month for a 2bed in zone 3) - I am increasingly looking to get out of here and
head towards Manchester and would take a £25k cut for it and probably be
better off overall!

Hope it works out, I'd bump your 45k target up to around 50 as a baseline -
you might get a few k more or few k less but £50k seems average enough to me
(outside of contracting - contract rates are a lot higher, friends regularly
getting £400/pd contracts for "just" front end).

------
johnnyfaehell
If you're getting offered 40k in Manchester the same price range in London is
50-55k. 40k is the high end for Manchester so you should be looking at the
high end for London. Unless you're doing Magento.

------
crjHome
London is a really expensive place to live. I bet your rent would be double
compared to Manchester, so even though your salary is less you will have
probably have more money in the long run.

~~~
payamb
That's ture, But on the other side you get to enjoy the vibe of London i
suppose.

I'm already decided to move to London , But i don't know if the recruiter i'm
working with is not good, Or the average PHP dev salary is low.

~~~
onion2k
_But on the other side you get to enjoy the vibe of London i suppose_

There isn't much of a vibe if you can't afford to go out.

~~~
throw923498
If you are getting paid £45k in London, this would not be something you have
to worry about. Sure you'd have less disposable income than Manchester, but
the idea that you couldn't afford to go out is ludicrous.

~~~
UK-AL
Depends what part of london you live i guess.

~~~
throw923498
No, not really. I seriously doubt there is any part of London where you
couldn't rent acceptable accommodation and have plenty of money left over on
£45k.

In zones 1-2 (or 3) that'll probably have to be a houseshare - but you'd still
easily get a nice private room for that. The takehome of £45k is £2,797.27
/month after tax[0]. Even if you spend 50% of that on rent (inadvisable but
common in London), that's still £1400 a month to play with. Which is still
more than the total takehome of someone earning the London living wage[1].

I mean, you'll have to have a commute if you want a private, 1 bed flat or
larger and you're working in Zone 1, but that's not exactly much of a
hardship. My point is that with even the most basic level of sane budgeting,
£45k is easily enough to live/work pretty much anywhere in London.

[0]
[http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php](http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php)
[1] [http://www.livingwage.org.uk/what-living-
wage](http://www.livingwage.org.uk/what-living-wage)

~~~
wastedhours
Yep, houseshare in Zone 1, en suite, ~£900pcm here. It's not somewhere to live
if you want to settle/make substantial saves for deposits or cars, but you'd
still have enough to enjoy yourself.

That being said, whilst London has a nice vibe, if you don't know people here
it can be isolating. Been here a few months and not really found "my people"
yet.

------
kayoone
Even as a European this sounds strangely low to me. I make 60k EUR (~48k gpb)
in Berlin, which is MUCH cheaper than London in every way. I do mostly PHP,
have more experience but still know a lot of people that earn around the same
mark with 5-10 years experience.

------
sghi
That sounds about right - I used to (don't hate me) work in recruitment and
£40-50k was about the top end of the range for PHP devs in London before
people started moving into contracting. YMMV and I'm sure there's exceptions
but it doesn't sound like you're too far off the mark

------
RossM
£40-45k with that experience sounds about right in my experience (startups,
not sure about large companies).

~~~
imdsm
Is that all? In London? Nevermind, below poster stated supply/demand lowers
the cost of PHP developers.

~~~
RossM
Pretty much - I've recently been through the hiring circus - the best I saw
advertised was £60k (for a team lead + full stack dev (literally full-stack -
devops requirements and more)). Even for positions where I was relatively
overqualified, the offers were in that range.

As others have said - the big bucks here are in contracting, but personally
I'm not up for that level of risk yet. In career terms I see the later-game
positions as those in management or those in consulting.

~~~
bshimmin
It seems intuitive to think of contracting as being at some level risky
(particularly the "leap into the unknown" aspect of it), but I can't really
say I know anyone who's tried their hand at in London and actually failed in
any meaningful way. Most of the contractors I've worked with would scoff at
the idea of struggling to land a new contract - though, as with anything, you
do need to keep your skills relatively up-to-date, make sure you have a decent
CV or equivalent, and I guess reasonable interpersonal skills do help.

------
Sarkie
40k in Manchester is good, people are moving from London to Manchester as the
rents is so high.

BUT

I love London, I am so glad to live here, it's so much fun, Manchester got
boring quite quickly for me and the dev community is great.

I'd say 55k for London is average amongst my dev friends.

~~~
payamb
Yeah my main reason to move to London is because London is live city, I'm
bored with Manchester now too.

I would aim for 50k then ..

------
mogelbumm
Compared to the expenses, salaries in London seem to be pretty low. I was
wondering, isn't London kind of a hotspot for high salaries in Europe?

~~~
kspaans
For banking and fintech maybe.

------
ArtDev
I can't believe how low these salaries are. Its not like it is a cheap place
to live either.

I guess if you want to live in Europe, just telecommute to the US :)

------
ilghiro
Sounds about right for 3 years commercial experience w/ PHP

