One working day of software development costs a Bulgarian employer €174 and an Irish employer €561. The European Commission, paying for a day of exactly this kind of professional work under its own grant rules, pays €361 in Bulgaria and €699 in Ireland. And the revenue a Bulgarian software firm actually books per employee-day is €337, against €1,116 for a Belgian one.
Three official European sources, three answers, and they disagree about something basic: how large the gap between the cheapest and most expensive member state actually is. Depending on which one you use, the gap is 1.9×, 3.2× or 3.9×.
We went looking for a straight answer to a question buyers ask constantly — what is a fair day rate for software development in country X — and there isn't one. No European institution publishes a software development day rate. What exists is three official numbers that each measure something next to it, and an industry publishing rate cards with no method attached. So we built the comparison from the three official sources, for all twenty-seven member states, and then checked the result against what the market actually charges.
1. Three official numbers, and what each one actually measures
The first is cost. Eurostat's labour cost series gives the hourly cost to an employer of one hour of work in NACE section J, information and communication, for every member state. Multiply by eight. That is what a day of somebody's time costs the firm that employs them, wages plus employer social contributions, and it is the most solid figure in this article.
The second is revenue. Eurostat's structural business statistics report net turnover and employment for NACE division 62 — computer programming, consultancy and related activities — separately for each country. Across the EU that division covers 962,168 firms and 4.5 million people. Divide turnover by people and by working days and you get what the sector earns per employee-day. That is closer to a price than to a cost, though it is not the number on an invoice, and section 8 explains why.
The third is what the EU pays. Under Horizon Europe and every other EU funding programme, when an SME owner or a self-employed person works on a funded project, their time is reimbursed at a fixed daily unit cost rather than at actual cost. For calls opening from 16 December 2025 that rate is EUR 9,271 divided by 18 days, which is €515.06, multiplied by a country correction coefficient. It is the only figure of the three that is literally a euro-per-day price, set per country, in force right now.
2. How to read the chart
Each bar is one member state, sorted low to high by what the sector earns per employee-day. The dark base is the employer's labour cost for the same day; the gap above it is everything else the revenue covers — non-billable staff, offices, software, tax, profit. The orange line is the day rate the European Commission applies there, so a line sitting low in the bar means the EU pays below what the local market earns. The four hatched bars are dealt with in section 7.
The orange lines are much flatter than the bars. That is the finding this article is about: the EU's own day rate compresses a real 3.9× revenue spread into 1.9×.
3. What a day costs
In 2024, an hour of work in the information and communication sector cost an employer €21.70 in Bulgaria and €70.10 in Ireland. Over an eight-hour day that is €174 against €561, a spread of 3.2×. Denmark (€492), Luxembourg (€488), Austria (€472) and Belgium (€470) cluster just below Ireland; Hungary (€180), Romania (€190) and Greece (€193) cluster just above Bulgaria.
What makes up that cost differs more than the cost itself. Non-wage costs — employer social contributions and payroll taxes — are 34.5% of the total in Sweden and 32.1% in France, against 4.1% in Romania and 6.5% in Lithuania. That is not because Romanian and Lithuanian employers are lightly taxed. Both countries moved almost the entire social contribution from the employer onto the employee, with gross salaries rising to compensate. Romania did it on 1 January 2018, cutting employer contributions from 22.75% to 2.25% and raising employee contributions from 16.5% to 35%. The Commission's own analysis models private-sector employers lifting gross wages 19.9% to keep net pay whole. Lithuania did it a year later, cutting the employer rate from 31.2% to 1.77% and, unlike Romania, multiplying every gross salary by 1.289 by law. The money is still collected. It just no longer appears on the employer's side of the statistic.
This matters if you are comparing a bid from a Lithuanian supplier with one from a Swedish supplier by reasoning backwards from salary to cost. The multiplier from gross salary to employer cost is about 1.07 in Lithuania and about 1.53 in Sweden. Use one country's rule of thumb on another country's numbers and you will be wrong by nearly half.
4. Software is a far more expensive job in the east than in the west
Set the sector against the whole business economy, same country, same year. In Bulgaria, an hour in information and communication costs an employer €21.70 against €10.50 for the business economy as a whole — a premium of 107%. Cyprus is +97%, Romania +94%, Lithuania +86%, Estonia +84%. At the other end, Luxembourg is +12%, Denmark +18%, Belgium +22%, Italy +23%. The median across the EU is +39%.
A software job in Sofia costs roughly twice what an average job there costs. A software job in Copenhagen costs about a fifth more than an average one. Relative to their own economies, developers in Central and Eastern Europe are paid far better than developers in the west.
The consequence shows up directly in the numbers a buyer sees. Across the whole business economy, hourly labour cost in the EU spans 5.2× from Bulgaria to Luxembourg. In software it spans only 3.2×. The east-west discount that exists in most sectors is meaningfully smaller in this one, because the eastern software labour market has already priced itself away from its local baseline and towards the European one.
5. The markup barely moves
Here is the result we did not expect. Take each country's revenue per employee-day and divide it by that same country's labour cost per employee-day, both from the same Eurostat dataset and the same year. The answer should vary a lot — different competitive conditions, different mixes of product and services, different margins.
It doesn't. The median is 1.88×, and twenty of the twenty-three usable countries fall between 1.63× and 2.28×. Latvia is 1.63, Poland 1.83, Germany 1.76, France 1.96, Denmark 2.17, Sweden 2.28. Only three sit outside that band: Austria at 1.29, Belgium at 2.49 and Estonia at 2.82.
The east-west day rate gap in European software is a wage gap. It is not a margin gap, and it is not a value gap. Firms across the EU convert labour cost into revenue at roughly the same rate.
The usual explanation for cheaper eastern European suppliers is that they run leaner or accept thinner margins. The data says neither. They pay less because labour costs less, and mark it up by about the same factor as everybody else.
6. The EU has its own day rate, and it is a cost-of-living index
The Commission's unit cost is a real price, applied to real invoices, across every EU funding programme. It is worth understanding how the per-country number is produced, because the method is not what a buyer would guess.
The base is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship living allowance, increased by 46% because "most SME owners working for their own companies occupy managerial positions" and Eurostat data showed managers earning about 46% more than professionals and technicians. That produces a monthly figure of €9,271, which the decision divides by 18 days to reach €515.06. The Commission's decision states plainly that it "considers that this amount is a reliable reference for the value of work carried out by an SME owner under any funding programme."
The per-country number then comes from multiplying by the country correction coefficient published in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie work programme. Those coefficients run from 70.0% for Bulgaria to 135.8% for Ireland.
And that is the problem. The correction coefficient exists to equalise the purchasing power of a researcher's living allowance. It is a cost-of-living index. It was never designed to price professional work, and it does not track what professional work costs.
Compare the EU's rate in each country against that country's actual employer cost per day. In Malta the EU pays 2.44× local cost, in Greece 2.34×, in Portugal 2.29×, in Hungary 2.25×. In Luxembourg it pays 1.06×, in Belgium 1.10×, in Germany 1.14×, in Austria 1.19×. The coefficient table also has a floor of 70%, and Bulgaria — the lowest-cost member state — sits exactly on it.
The EU's own per-country day rates span a factor of 1.9 from lowest to highest. Actual employer costs span a factor of 3.2. Anyone using the Commission's coefficients as a procurement benchmark is systematically overpaying in low-cost member states and underpaying in high-cost ones.
To be fair to the Commission, this rate is not sold as a market price and it applies to a narrow case — owners and self-employed people who take no salary, capped at 215 day-equivalents per person per year. But it is widely reached for as the nearest thing to an official European day rate, and it is not one.
7. Four countries where the statistics break
Ireland's software sector reports revenue of €6,882 per employee-day. Cyprus reports €1,992 and Malta €1,961, both roughly double Belgium's, on employer costs of €305 and €194 respectively. Malta's implied markup is 8.8× and Ireland's is 14.2×.
Those are not software businesses outperforming everyone else. They are the EU's corporate domiciliation hubs, and much of that revenue is booked by entities classified under computer programming that do very little of it in the country. Ireland also runs 21.9% of its sector turnover as purchases for resale. Luxembourg is a fourth case: Eurostat publishes no J62 cell for it at all in the current series, presumably for confidentiality, so our figure comes from the legacy 2019 series and carries the same distortion. It is the one number here that is neither current nor on the same basis as the rest.
The honest reading is that for these four, the official statistics cannot tell you what software work costs or sells for. Their labour cost figures are still sound; the revenue figures are not.
8. Why this is not the rate on your invoice
Revenue per employee-day is revenue divided by all employees, including the salespeople, managers and administrators nobody bills to a client. A quoted rate has to be higher, by roughly the inverse of the billable share. We have no EU-wide source for that share, so treat this as arithmetic rather than a finding: at 70% billable, Bulgaria's €337 implies a quoted rate near €480, Poland's €385 near €550, and Germany's €721 about €1,030. Those are the numbers European agencies actually quote, which suggests the derivation is not badly wrong.
The length of a working year is the other trap. Hours worked per full-time-equivalent employee run from 1,601 in Germany to 2,095 in Slovenia, so a Slovenian logs about 31% more hours a year than a German. Buying "a day" in the two countries does not buy the same quantity of work.
9. What the market actually charges, and why it does not match
Everything above is derived from official statistics. We then went looking for what clients actually pay, country by country, and kept only figures that survived an independent check. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven have a published source we could retrieve and check. Three do not, and their cells stay blank rather than filled with something plausible. Ireland is one: its only national contractor study reports an average across every sector with no ICT breakdown, the recruiter guides sit behind registration forms, and the one platform figure available is lower than what an Irish employer pays for an hour of work, so it cannot be what a client pays. Sweden is the second, and it is the surprising one: for a market this large, the rates in circulation come from consultancy pricing guides rather than from a survey or a register, they disagree with each other by a factor of two, and the one barometer that states a method puts the average well below what the guides quote. We could not stand behind a number. Cyprus is the third, and it is the most frustrating case, because the rates exist.
Two of the twenty-four are unusual, because the numbers come from the governments themselves. Czechia and Slovakia both publish reference price lists built from rates actually agreed in signed IT contracts in their national contract registers, so for those two countries we can see what the state pays. Slovakia's published median for a programmer is €550 a day, with a quartile range of €419–640, drawn from 141 observations across 291 contracts. Czechia's most recent edition, covering the first half of 2026, puts a developer's median at €442 a day and the quartile range at €349–496. Both are published per man-day, which is why they are the only two market figures in the table that needed no conversion.
Now compare, in euro per day throughout. Wherever the national source is narrow and properly sampled, the official statistic sits above it, and usually by a lot. Belgium's official figure says €1,116 a day against a contractor band of €576–704. The Netherlands €935 against €752, Finland €791 against €688, France €777 against €400–600, Estonia €756 against €480–640, Czechia €557 against €349–496, Spain €479 against €248–352, Lithuania €388 against €160–320, Poland €385 against €192–280, Latvia €331 against €144–304. Germany is the single country where the two effectively land on the same number, €721 against €720.
The pattern is not random. The official number is a company's revenue divided by its people, so it carries the agency's margin, the staff nobody bills, and, decisively, the revenue of firms that sell software rather than time. It sits above the individual contractor's rate almost everywhere, and furthest above it where the sector is most product-heavy — Belgium, Finland and Estonia. Read together, the contractor rate is what one person charges and the statistic is what a firm earns per head; a client buying through a consultancy pays above the first and often below the second. Where the official figure appears to land inside the band instead — Austria, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Hungary — that is mostly an artefact of the source. For those countries the only thing published is a platform-wide range rather than a quartile, and a range that wide will swallow almost any number you hold against it.
One source did not survive, and it is worth saying why. We had been using a Danish brokerage's published rate data until the Danish company register showed the operating company was incorporated in March 2026 — five months before it claimed to be reporting proposals gathered across 2025 and 2026. The figures may still be right. The methodology as stated cannot be.
One more caveat, and it matters more than any single number: these twenty-four figures are not one kind of thing, which is why each one carries a source-strength mark in the table. Two are the real article — Czechia and Slovakia publish rates the state actually agreed, from national contract registers, and nothing else here is that solid. Nine come from national sources with genuine samples behind them: the Netherlands from a bank's survey of more than twenty thousand self-employed people, France from a barometer built on placements involving as many freelancers again, Poland from a survey of roughly five thousand developers, Spain from a marketplace's own rate barometer, Slovenia from a national services marketplace, Estonia from a poll of a hundred IT company heads, and Belgium from around nine hundred self-reported day rates. Germany and Finland are the other two, practitioner surveys that publish a median and no distribution at all, which is why those cells carry a single figure rather than a band, and Germany's covers the whole German-speaking region rather than Germany alone. The remaining thirteen are the weak ones. Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malta and Italy come from a freelancer platform publishing the range its own members charge: a real signal, but a wide one, and it leans towards people billing foreign clients rather than domestic ones. Latvia and Lithuania are classifieds directories with no stated method at all. Read those thirteen as an order of magnitude, not a price list.
The two sides agree on one thing, from opposite directions. Accelerance's 2026 vendor survey reports European rates fell 4.4% year on year, while Eurostat's labour cost index for the sector rose 4.3% in the first quarter of 2026. Costs up, prices down: margins are compressing.
10. Method, and what this does not measure
Every figure is from a named public dataset and can be reproduced. Labour cost is Eurostat lc_lci_lev, NACE section J, total labour cost per hour in euro, 2024, times eight; section J is the finest breakdown that series publishes and it is broader than software alone. Revenue per employee-day is Eurostat sbs_ovw_act, NACE division J62, 2023: net turnover minus purchases for resale, divided by persons employed, divided by 215. Subtracting resale matters — it is 29.8% of turnover in Austria and 25.0% in Germany. The 215 is not our assumption but the Commission's own cap on day-equivalents declarable per person per year.
The market rate is not an official statistic at all. It is the twenty-four per-country sources listed in note 8, converted to a day at eight hours — except Czechia and Slovakia, which publish per man-day already. The markup discussed in section 5 divides revenue by labour cost within the 2023 data, which is a different vintage from the 2024 labour cost printed in the table, so it is quoted in the text rather than given a column of its own.
What this does not measure is seniority, or public sector contract rates. Every figure is a sector average across juniors, seniors, architects and support staff, so a named senior developer costs more than the average everywhere, and the ratio between countries at senior level need not match the ratio at the average. On contract rates, we looked for published framework rate cards across the member states and there is no comparable set.
11. The EU-27 reference table
| Country | Employer paysper day | Market chargesper day | EU paysper day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | €464 | €752 •• | €576 |
| Germany | €459 | €720 •• | €523 |
| Finland | €389 | €688 •• | €600 |
| Belgium | €470 | €576–704 •• | €515 |
| Austria | €472 | €512–976 • | €563 |
| Estonia | €288 | €480–640 •• | €490 |
| Luxembourg | €488 | €456–1000 • | €515 |
| Slovakia | €230 | €419–640 ••• | €427 |
| France | €458 | €400–600 •• | €601 |
| Czechia | €255 | €349–496 ••• | €502 |
| Slovenia | €287 | €344–624 •• | €453 |
| Malta | €194 | €296–800 • | €473 |
| Denmark | €492 | €280–1000 • | €676 |
| Spain | €266 | €248–352 •• | €485 |
| Greece | €193 | €240–720 • | €452 |
| Croatia | €218 | €240–680 • | €423 |
| Hungary | €180 | €240–680 • | €405 |
| Romania | €190 | €240–640 • | €374 |
| Bulgaria | €174 | €200–720 • | €361 |
| Poland | €210 | €192–280 •• | €399 |
| Portugal | €213 | €176–640 • | €487 |
| Italy | €299 | €160–720 • | €483 |
| Lithuania | €241 | €160–320 • | €463 |
| Latvia | €210 | €144–304 • | €441 |
| No market source we could verify | |||
| Ireland | €561 | — | €699 |
| Sweden | €466 | — | €614 |
| Cyprus | €305 | — | €418 |
Every figure is euro per working day. Employer pays: Eurostat lc_lci_lev, NACE J, 2024, as published hourly and ×8. Market charges: the twenty-four sources in note 8, ×8 where the source publishes an hourly rate; Czechia and Slovakia publish per man-day. EU pays: €515.06 × the country correction coefficient, Horizon Europe, in force from 16 December 2025. Rows are sorted by the low end of the market rate. Revenue per employee-day is deliberately not a column here — it measures a firm's earnings rather than a price, and it is plotted in the chart above and discussed in sections 5, 7 and 8.
12. If you are the one buying
One thing here is directly actionable: a rate that looks impossibly low probably is. Labour cost is a hard floor and it is public. If a bid implies a day rate below the employer cost of a day in the supplier's own country, either the work is happening somewhere else, or the seniority is lower than advertised, or the number will not survive contact with delivery.
This is the kind of check that gets skipped, because it means opening a rate card, matching each profile against what the tender asked for, and holding the result against an external reference. We built Tendergate to do that reading — our agents go through the tender documents and the bids together, pull out what was required and what was offered, and flag where the two do not line up, with a citation back to the page it came from. The judgment about whether a rate is acceptable stays with the buyer. Finding the mismatch is the part that takes eleven hours and gets skipped.
None of this tells you what a fair price is for your project. It tells you what the floor looks like, how much room sits above it, and how far the one official European day rate has drifted from both.
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Sources
- Eurostat, Labour cost levels by NACE Rev. 2 activity (lc_lci_lev). Hourly labour cost, 2024. Source for every employer cost figure, the non-wage cost shares, and the €21.70 / €70.10 range (NACE section J), and for the sector premium in section 4 (NACE J against the business economy, B-N).
- Eurostat, Structural business statistics by detailed NACE activity (sbs_ovw_act). NACE J62, 2023. Source for net turnover, purchases for resale, persons employed, enterprises, labour cost per full-time equivalent, and hours worked per FTE.
- European Commission, Additional information on unit costs and contributions (Annex 2a). States the formula EUR 9 271 / 18 days = 515,06 for calls opening from 16 December 2025, and the two earlier values of 282,22 and 485,85.
- Commission Decision C(2020) 7115, unit cost for SME owners and natural persons, as amended. Source for the 46% managerial uplift, the reasoning behind it, the "reliable reference for the value of work" wording, and the 215 day-equivalent annual cap.
- Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Commission Decision C(2025) 8493 of 11 December 2025). Table 1 gives the country correction coefficient for every member state.
- Eurostat, EU hourly labour costs ranged from €12 to €57 in 2025 (31 March 2026). Whole-economy context and the non-wage cost shares, including the lowest shares in Romania, Lithuania and Malta.
- Accelerance, 2026 outsourcing rate trends. Vendor survey of 60 partner firms. Source for the 4.4% year-on-year decline in European rates. Read as marketing, not statistics.
- Market rates in section 9, grouped by how good the source is. Government contract registers. Czechia Ministry of the Interior / Ernst & Young, Přehled obvyklých cen ICT prací, edition 01/2026–06/2026 published 3 July 2026: Developer 8 450 / 10 700 / 12 000 CZK per man-day excluding VAT, from 885 contracts and 1 292 prices. Slovakia MIRRI, Sadzby v IT — aktualizácia 2025: Programátor 419 / 550 / 640 euro per man-day excluding VAT, 141 observations across 291 contracts worth a billion euros. National surveys and marketplaces. Netherlands Knab, Zzp Uurtarievenboekje 2026: €94 per hour excluding VAT, from research among more than 20 000 self-employed people. France Silkhom, Baromètre des TJM: confirmé and senior developer day rates of roughly €400–600 across roles and regions, divided by eight, from placements involving over 20 000 freelancers; corroborated by Free-Work, which puts a fullstack developer at €411 a day direct and €433 through an intermediary, HT. Poland Bulldogjob, Badanie Społeczności IT 2025: median monthly B2B invoice of 17 000 PLN for a mid and 25 000 PLN for a senior backend developer, divided by 168 hours and converted at 4.299 PLN to the euro — the hourly figure is ours, not the source’s. Spain Malt, Barómetro de tarifas: backend developer averages of €246 a day at 3–7 years and €352 for experts, divided by eight. Slovenia Omisli.si: "Na uro 42,5—78,4 €/h" for custom programming, 600+ providers. Germany freelancermap, Freelancer-Kompass 2026: median €90 for Software- und Webentwicklung, 356 respondents, covering the whole German-speaking region. Finland Koodiklinikka palkkakysely 2025: median €86 and mean €87 at 0% VAT, 92 freelancers, no distribution published so no band is derivable. Estonia Äritehnoloogia, 101 IT firm heads, August 2025, paywalled, and the question asked was what rates firms expect rather than what they charge. Belgium dailyrate.be: around 900 self-reported day rates excluding VAT, most anonymous, some collected from Reddit. Classifieds directories, the weakest cells here. Lithuania Paslaugos.lt, 84 providers at nuo 20-40 € (vid. 30 €); Latvia GetaPro.lv, which publishes 18–38 €/stunda for Programmēšana and whose 150 priced profiles give a median of €25 at the low end and €40 at the high. Neither states a method, a sample or a seniority split, and both change daily. Platform ranges. Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malta and Italy come from freelancermap’s per-country directory, filtered to web and software development: the published range and the number of freelancers behind it are Austria €64–122 (n=3 931), Denmark €35–125 (n=170), Luxembourg €57–125 (n=92), Portugal €22–80 (n=644), Greece €30–90 (n=172), Hungary €30–85 (n=399), Romania €30–80 (n=1 195), Bulgaria €25–90 (n=331), Croatia €30–85 (n=249), Malta €37–100 (n=49) and Italy €20–90 (n=681). freelancermap is a German company, so these lean towards residents billing foreign clients; the same series independently reproduces the Czech, Slovak, Belgian and German figures above, which is why we trust it as a fallback but not as a first choice.
- Eurostat, Labour cost index by NACE Rev. 2 activity, quarterly (lc_lci_r2_q). NACE J, EU-27, calendar adjusted, percentage change on the same quarter of the previous year. Source for the 4.3% rise in 2026-Q1.
- European Commission, Labour Taxation in Romania: Revised, but not changed (Economic Brief 050). Source for Romania's 2018 transfer of social contributions from employer to employee.
- European Commission, Labour Tax and Child Benefits Reform in Lithuania (Economic Brief 059). Source for Lithuania's 2019 equivalent and the 1.289 gross-salary factor.
- European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates. Used for the two non-euro sources in section 9, at 24.21 CZK and 4.299 PLN to the euro, the reference rates for 6 August 2026.
- On the three countries left blank. Sweden is the one we expected to be easy and was not. There is no shortage of published Swedish rates, but every one we could retrieve is a consultancy's own pricing guide rather than a survey or a register, and they do not agree: Cool Company's Lönebarometer puts software and system developers at an average of 556 SEK an hour, roughly €51, while Workamo's IT consultant guide quotes 750–950 SEK for a junior fullstack developer and 1 300–1 700 SEK for a senior, roughly €69–156. A factor of two between two undocumented guides is not a market rate, so the cell stays empty. Cyprus runs a Digital Services Factory framework agreement whose suppliers, in the government’s own words, bid "for the roles included in their Framework contract with the minimum and maximum day rates stated" — but the financial annex is not published. We read both public framework artefacts, Annex V on roles and capabilities and the Lot 1 service-team matrix, and neither contains a single monetary figure; the mini-competition register lists authorities, winners and dates but no values. The one platform figure available for Cyprus, €42–120, comes from profiles that are overwhelmingly German-speaking expatriates on the coast billing clients in Germany, so it measures German rates rather than Cypriot ones and we left it out. Ireland’s national study, Ireland’s Project Economy from Trinity Business School with Contracting PLUS, gives an average day rate of €556 and a median of €500 for 2026 across all contracting sectors with no ICT breakdown; the Hays Irish contractor guide is behind a registration form; and the platform range for Ireland averages €40 an hour, below the €70 an hour an Irish employer pays for the same work, which means it is not measuring what Irish clients pay.