[hsuduebc2]

In the west part of the Europe, mostly around Benelux region you can safely land contractor job's with pay around 500€/700€ daily. In UK it's usually more. If I do the math for the higher end for lets say Netherlands, its numOfWorkingDays(255) * mdRate(700 = 178 500 € per year. Although I have no idea about their taxes.

Do not forget that the medical bills are for you as an American ridiculously low and you can live without car without any complications. Furthermore east are lower salaries but you cant land 70-80k contracting jobs with sometimes very little taxation.

[philsnow]

The commonly-thrown-around figure for comparing contracting work to salaried work in the US involves multiplying the salary by about 3x to reach parity, since you have to pay your own employment taxes and health insurance, and to account for sometimes not having a full queue of work.

I guess that in the EU (and maybe .ch / .uk?), you wouldn't need to pay for health insurance as such, and I don't know whether they have this (barbaric, imho) notion of employment taxes, so maybe the number is closer to 1.5x, which would make 180k€ into 120k€ equivalent, which sounds quite good compared to OP saying that typical offers are around 1/3 of what they're making now.

[hsuduebc2]

Chatgpt o-3 mini search returned: "At a 30% effective tax rate, your taxes would be about 178,500 € × 0.30 = 53,550 €, leaving you with roughly 178,500 € – 53,550 € ≈ 124,950 € net. At a 35% effective rate, taxes would be about 62,475 €, resulting in net income of roughly 178,500 € – 62,475 € ≈ 116,025 €."

For a health care you pay roughly 150€ monthly fee and 7% from your income but there is a income ceiling of €66,956. So for a case I presented in my first comment it should be roughly 3,600€ per year.

So I guess 112,5€k is net income with 178,500 being gross one.

[tech_lizzard]

the calculator I ran gave a similar ballpark for Netherlands : https://thetax.nl/?startFrom=Year&selectedYear=2025&older=fa...