
UX Designer Salaries Around the World - ohjeez
http://uxdesignersalaries.com/
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sirtastic
Pretty much useless. Pay varies so widely depending on state/city for example
avg developer pay in San Francisco compared to Sacramento (100 miles away)
fluctuates 10-15k (if not more). It also begs to question how honest people
are when answering? Is this base salary or salary after benefits/bonus? As
others mentioned, cost of living? San Francisco's avg 1 bedroom price is
around $3120 while Sacramento is around $1000, that's $25,000/yr more in
housing costs.

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epicureanideal
That would be a nice 1 bedroom in Sacramento (pool, sauna, tennis courts) vs a
run-down place in SF.

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bargl
I'd be interested to see these numbers compared to the benefits offered by
companies in each country. I know that in a lot of European countries it is
normal to get more time off, the government offers more benefits, etc.

I say this because every time there is a thread saying, "X company just got
this awesome benefit" someone always says, in Europe this is the norm.

Edit:

I also bring this up because I've seen companies in the US offer more money
but 0 benefits in order to get you to pick them over another company where
you'd actually be making more if you factor in the benefits. How much does
that affect US vs Europe?

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Jacqued
I don't have a statistical run-down by country (which would be the way to do
this) but if you compare the US with, say, France, where salaries tend to be
40% of what they are in the US, here's what you have:

\- Free health care (for Engineering positions, usually with a company-
provided complement meaning you never have to pay for anything)

\- 5 weeks paid vacation/year + 5-10 paid off-days/year (may be more at large
companies, up to 9 weeks vacation + 10 days off)

\- A nominal pension (unlike the health care part, this is not something you
should be counting on, you need to save by yourself)

\- Unemployment insurance (typically 2 years with 60-80% of your former
salary, which is ideal to start a company)

\- Free schooling for your kids up to & including High School (there are
private institutions but they're typically worse than good public schools)

\- Generally cheap higher-ed. The top Eng., law, medicine schools & colleges
are publicly-run & free, while the top business schools will typically relieve
you of 10K/year

On the flipside, you pay significant taxes on the announced salary. For a 45K€
position (developer with 1year/exp typically) you'll effectively receive ~34K€
from your employer, while the rest goes to the state, and you'll have to pay
~3K€ income tax on that. (Of note is that to get you to that 45K number, your
employer already pays ~25K to the state on their side of things).

It varies between countries (I believe folks in the UK are less taxed but have
more costly education for their kids for example).

I think in general, you're better off in the US or UK as long as you're
single, or if you have a really senior position, and are better off in
France/Germany with a family & an entry-level/mid-level position.

I hope this gives you a better idea

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HaloZero
Is the unemployment insurance only if you're let go / fired? I believe in the
US you don't get it if you voluntarily quit your job.

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Jacqued
You don't get it if you just quit. However, there's a middle ground between
quitting & being fired, "contractual separation", which is when you & your
employer agree to end your employment. In that case, you get the unemployment
insurance, and many people use it as a substitute for quitting, because of
that fact.

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mrdrozdov
This reminds me of the salary spreadsheet that was secretly passed around at
google.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-
leadership/wp/2015/07...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-
leadership/wp/2015/07/21/breaking-the-taboo-of-sharing-salary-info-in-silicon-
valley/)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
There wasn't anything secret about it.

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mrdrozdov
I believe it was secret from people that do not work at Google? But I may be
mistaken.

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cmrdporcupine
Well yes, that would have been quite distasteful if said spreadsheet had made
its way out of Google.

But it was definitely not a secret internally.

~~~
mrdrozdov
I suppose I should have said the spreadsheet was passed around internally at
Google, although never released to the public. This was a great example of
ambiguity in language. Imagine being a computer trying to parse my original
sentence.

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snegu
The UXPA conducts a robust study of this every three years. Here's the report
from 2014:
[https://uxpa.org/system/files/public/UXPASalarySurvey2014_Fi...](https://uxpa.org/system/files/public/UXPASalarySurvey2014_Final.pdf)

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JesperRavn
I think there is a huge opportunity to move more software development to
developing countries. It could become the next version of sweatshops, which
have done an immense amount to improve the wellbeing of people in the third
world. The winners of using cheap labor from overseas are the companies that
hire them and the people they hire. The losers are the workers in the first
world who are outsourced. But it's crucial to understand that both nations as
a whole benefit, and the first world nations are more than capable of
redistributing wealth.

When you cut through all the self-interest and xenophobia surrounding
outsourcing, there still remain many quality and communications issues. But I
believe these will be reduced as more people learn English and recognize the
value of English as a market skill.

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tdylan
Very true. Many people insult Apple over their factories, but the fact
remains, those jobs some of the best in the area and are subsequently heavily
contested.

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pachydermic
Why can't we see median? That's also a really good metric to have... in fact
it arguably makes even more sense because salaries have a long tail on the
higher end which inflates the average by a large amount while moving the
median in an easy to understand way.

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gtirloni
Not very useful without data about cost of living in those places (that's why
you want to know about it in other places, right?).

For example, Brazil is in a deep depression right now and BRL is devaluing
fast, inflation is increasing, etc. What to make of the USD 18,966 figure?

Nice presentation but I don't see the real point. Are you going set your US-
located job's salary based on a global average? Choose the highest place as a
reference? Move there maybe? Would that salary maybe just be average in
Switzerland? Below average maybe?

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outworlder
> Not very useful without data about cost of living in those places

That data is freely available elsewhere. Salaries are harder to get.

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artur_makly
what's interesting to see in the US data is that Ageism seems to exist. the
most experienced person gets paid less.

Also it's interesting to note that every UX requirement these days asks for
substantial coding experience (on top of everything else non-code related) yet
the salaries are at par with a junior coder.

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ForHackernews
$90,000 is "at par with a junior coder"??? Maybe today, in San Francisco.

At my first dev job in LA, in the mid-2000s, I was making $57,000.

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domador
Very interesting, but I'd like to see more data for each country. (For
instance, an average salary of around $21,000 was posted for Nepal, but this
might be unduly influenced by one or two data points in the $70,000 range.)
Displaying a median, not just an average salary, would be helpful.

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mizzao
A lot of these numbers need to be weighted by the number of submissions; e.g.
fewer samples implies higher variance.

The fact that the 3 people who reported from Arizona have high salaries, for
example, doesn't mean that one should go to Arizona to find UX design work.

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socratees
If you ask me, it does not make justice to compare salaries across countries.
May be comparing salary within the industry, within a specific market might
make sense.

Just with the data / samples gleaned from this website, I _will not_ be able
to make any proper assumptions / statistic.

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octref
I'd be really interested in data from China and Japan.

China has one of the fastest growing tech industry in the world. As for Japan,
I really want to live there because of the high quality of life, but am
hesitant since the tech industry doesn't look promising.

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totalrobe
Florida seems very high but only has 21 responses- are outliers filtered out?

 _edit_ The 8 - 12 yrs exp range in FL has an average of 237,900 - this can't
be right.

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hellbanTHIS
Indeed.com says most Angular jobs in Florida advertise $60,000 to $80,000 and
a lot of those are actually back end jobs because the person who wrote the ad
doesn't know what they're talking about

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kdamken
Interesting site. Would be fun to see one like this for other categories of
jobs in the industry - front end, back end, full stack, web designer, etc.

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20years
Not enough submissions (data) for this to be accurate. CA for example only has
91 submissions. Are most of these from the Bay Area?

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wodenokoto
The most experienced guy in Denmark is also the least payed. Hope this
encourages some people to start job hunting!

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tajano
> _" The average salary ... being $125,667 in Arizona."_

This immediately struck me as preposterous, as I'm familiar with the local
Arizona economy.

Then I saw that number is based on a sample size of _3 survey respondents_.
When your sample size is so small that the results are statistically
meaningless, why even bother making such a claim?

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ForHackernews
Why does the US pay so much more than the UK? Are UK salaries just lower
across the board?

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threefour
I've been in UX for over 15 years, mostly in the U.S. and Germany, and I think
looking at salary on the country level is the wrong level of granularity.

For example, it's completely possible that salaries in London are higher than
in New York or San Francisco, given the high cost of living in London.

It could also be that there are more US-based UX people working in major US
cities so that the average US salary looks higher.

Or maybe the sample size wasn't high enough to control for these kinds of
regional differences.

So, while this data is directionally interesting I wouldn't apply it too much
to your particular situation.

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dreamfactory2
> For example, it's completely possible that salaries in London are higher
> than in New York or San Francisco

I believe this is the case in tech

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lonelycoder2
I find most shocking the difference between say 5 years and 15 years is quite
small.

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SimeVidas
Are those numbers net or gross?

