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From game development to website building, C# is one of Germany’s most widely used programming languages. Our upcoming State of the European Software Developer Nation Reports shows that it is the country’s fifth-most used programming language. In this article, we look at average C# developer salaries by experience in Germany, and how they compare to those for Python and Java developers.
Average junior C# developer salary trends
Junior C# developers with 2-4 years of experience can expect an average annual income of €39 159. At this level, that puts them 16.8% (€7 887) behind Python developers, and 10.5% (€4 574) behind Java developers.
C# programmers see healthy salary growth from here, particularly in the first decade of their careers. With 4-6 years on the job, they should receive a 21.6% (€8 456) raise to earn €47 615. Python and Java developers see more generous increases in this bracket, however, meaning they earn 20% (€11 915) and 12.3% (€6 656) more respectively.
Junior developers tend to move jobs with greater frequency, giving them more opportunities to negotiate for fresh salary increases that tend to outpace those of annual inflationary raises.
Average C# Developer Salaries by Experience
Average Salary by Years Experience, showing 25th and 75th percentiles
Years of Experience | 25th Percentile | Average | 75th Percentile |
---|---|---|---|
2-4 | €29,100 | €39,159 | €51,981 |
4-6 | €38,700 | €47,615 | €60,075 |
6-10 | €44,700 | €59,415 | €71,250 |
10-15 | €55,100 | €66,099 | €78,600 |
Average senior C# developer salary trends
Wage growth doesn’t slow down for C# developers once they become more experienced. With 6-10 years under their belts, they’re in for the largest increase of their careers: 24.8% (€11 800) to a salary of €59 415. That closes Python’s lead somewhat to 15.1% (€10 569), and that of Java to just 2.1% (€1 248).
Unfortunately, things do slow down a little once C# developers reach higher career levels. With 10-15 years of experience, their salary increases more than halves to 11.25% (€6 684), taking them to an annual income of €66 099. Similarly experienced Python developers should earn 15.9% (€12 460) more, while Java devs see a larger increase that puts them 8.7% (€6 322) ahead.
On top of typically working longer stints at companies with fewer opportunities for new wage negotiations, highly experienced C# developers are likely already considered a high company cost, which might explain why their salary growth slows down somewhat.
Keep in mind
The data in this article is taken from StackOverflow’s 2022 Developer Survey’s open data. In this article, ‘salary’ refers to the gross annual salary (before tax) provided by 379 survey respondents from Germany who identified as C# developers.
We only included salary insights for experience levels with enough data points to ensure that the amounts represent C# developers in the country. That’s why we’ve omitted developers with fewer than two and more than fifteen years of experience from the article.
We also ran an outlier analysis to identify data points skewing the distribution of salaries. These points were removed from the final dataset to ensure that the amounts are representative of C# developers in Germany. We’ve also included the 25th and 75th percentiles to give you further information about the distribution of salary data.
Average salaries are single data points and only one part of a bigger story. Many respondents may earn significantly more or significantly less than these averages. However, we hope to show underlying trends by mapping the average salaries for different experience levels.
These averages should not be used to estimate what your actual salary will or should be. Salaries depend on the company size, industry, individual, perks and nature of the work. These factors all influence the salary a company will offer to a prospective hire. In addition, most developers are “fluent” in several languages and work across multiple roles, which will also affect the final figures.
It’s also important to remember that every individual’s context is different. Salary is a personal conversation that should take place between employee and employer.
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