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Ask HN: Average Salary for PHP Dev in London?

33 points by payamb ↗ HN
I'm a PHP Developer with above average ( I think ? ) experience ( 3 years commercial experience in Manchester )

I've quite comfortable with OOP, Design Patterns, Symfony, Laravel , Custom build solutions etc ...

In the past few months i was busy building search solutions using Elastic Search, Caching solutions using Redis and Geo coding.

Also i manage bunch of ec2 instances , a few google cloud servers and quite confident in managing and maintaining our production servers.

Git / Average javascript knowledge / Ansible / HTML & CSS as usual.

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 ?

55 comments

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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.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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 [1] 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.

odonnellryan
From my personal experience, and my experience with results from surveys/polls (such as the one Stack Exchange did) I've seen PHP being around 85% of what the average developer makes from other categories (Python, C#, so on).

I'm seeing numbers from $50,000 - $60,000 for developer salaries in London. Obviously a lot of things come into play, but that should give you some idea:

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/programmer.do

and

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/london-programmer-salary-...

Recruiting firms in general do not have your best interest at heart...but that doesn't mean you can't get a mutually beneficial agreement down.

There is also always room for negotiation.

jacknews
London is great when you're loaded, but doesn't have much a vibe when you're broke, in my experience.
thorin
Agreed,but in the late 90s living in the east end with a graduate job paying 18k I felt rich. 10 mins on the tube to the city and lots of free beer and champagne and posh meals on the company. I went out whenever I felt like it. I've been back quite a bit and while it is more expensive is not ridiculous. If you're sensible you can have a great time as long as you manage those housing costs.

If you can get 40k in Manchester then yes 50-55k should be achievable or contracting for more but that will make it harder to buy or set up a rental agreement if you don't have guaranteed income?

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
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.

ilghiro
Sounds about right for 3 years commercial experience w/ PHP
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.
kspaans
At a RoR/JS/Go shop in London I was making about that much with ~4 years experience, yeah.
johnnyfaehell
Also you need to realise that the wage in the Uk is lower than elsewhere. They have lower employment tax, etc. The average wage in the UK is £24k. This is take home more money than people who get paid €45k in Germany.
UK-AL
But that's pretty low salary for london. Bankers/Accountants/Professional services, 45k is first job level for london.

It's just programming in general in UK, isn't that highly paid.

zeemonkee3
> It's just programming in general in UK, isn't that highly paid.

Why is that? Lack of demand/anaemic tech industry, lack of respect for developers, or too many developers?

petercooper
British companies aren't very tech focused and there's an oversupply of "good enough" developers for those sorts of companies.
zeemonkee3
Sounds like the best bet for a British developer (if possible) is move to the US or work remotely for a US company.
wastedhours
Whilst not quite at the 45k level, I'm on more in marketing in London than I would be doing RoR work at a similar experience level. Probably better career progression and increases on the developer side though.

Think it's partly because there are very few specific dev shops, and most of the roles are in-house where development is a support activity rather than the meat.

johnnyfaehell
I think this Could be an eu thing. I've moved to Berlin and while wages here are cheaper than the rest of Germany I still see a lot of companies looking for senior guys who think paying 55k is asking a lot. They really start going what when I'm asking for 65k€. All while paying other departments ok. Like one company I seen them paying 40-50k for their devs while paying 40k to a finance assistant (literally the person they loan out to other department to do ask people to sign forms and stuff.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

viperscape
35k is not nearly as much as I expected, with those living costs
kspaans
Or just ride a bike to work to save on transport costs! London has good enough weather that you can bike year round (with a waterproof jacket :P).
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).

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 ..

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.
ninjaroar
I've only ever heard of salaries being quoted before taxes in the UK - same as the US.
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)
tobltobs
For a PHP developer with 3 years commercial experience?
jokr004
$125k for a PHP dev with 3 years experience? Where do I apply for that job?
giaour
The Bay Area, Seattle, or New York.
busterarm
PHP devs in the US generally get paid a lot less. 45-75k on the junior end and 80-105k on the senior end. I took a job in PHP/Wordpress/Salesforce because I liked the company and the people and I'm paid like half of what you said. In New York.

I can manage but yeah, I'm asking for more money soon. 125k as a baseline, especially in PHP, seems absurd to me. Sure, I could switch to any of the stacks that I'm more familiar with and make way more, but with a lot more hours and stress added.

I get my work done in ~30-33 hours, am not on call, have a lot of influence over our products and like absolutely everyone at the job. From my perspective, more pay seems like golden handcuffs. Here I am free to live my life.

glebedel
That's actually 88K GBP which I guess might be doable as PHP dev in London if you are working for a major US company and are very senior.
llamataboot
$125k?!?! That seems...pretty damn high for an intermediate level dev.
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

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.

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 :)

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.