Comment by kavalg
2 days ago
Currently the going annual salary for a senior developer in Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) is somewhere between EUR 50k - 75 EUR net, with 25-30 days of paid time off. The gross will be about 25% more (income tax is 10%, social security around 40%, but there is a cap on the salary base, so effectively it is less). For freelance senior developer, the (B2B) daily rate is in the range EUR 350 to EUR 550, depending on the technology and project complexity. Of course, there are rare examples outside of these ranges (e.g. top talent in ML, BigData etc). Leadership roles are usually at 10-20% premium.
Wow, income tax seems to be pretty low in Bulgaria compared to other European countries?
For 50k net per year, or ~4k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~80k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~57k EUR.
For 75k net per year, or ~6k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~130k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~85k EUR.
Go figure, these are really large differences and that very well might be the reason why we see a lot of big companies there. Tax is unusually low.
here a script to calculate these - net-vs-gross-vs-cost in Bulgaria, for 2025
prepend negative year for 2024 or 2023 (max cap of social-security rises YoY):
https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin/blob/master/misc/zap...
p.s. And no, i do not see a change here - all is still dead - am looking since september