AI salaries in Europe in 2026: what each role pays

AI salaries in Europe depend heavily on the city and on who collected the number. On Levels.fyi, where people self-report total pay including equity, the median machine learning engineer earned about CHF 153k in Zurich, £112k in London, €95k in Munich, €92k in Berlin, €82k in Paris and €62k in Spain as of October 2026. Frontier labs sit far above that: Anthropic advertised a base of £225k–£255k for an Applied AI Engineer in London in October 2026.

Most salary pages blend sources into one average. Here, every figure carries its source, date and type: self-reported total pay (base plus bonus and equity), base salary (recruiter guides) or job-ad ranges. Where sources disagree, we show both, alongside real ranges from the AI job ads Tokn tracks.

In short

• Typical ML engineer pay (Levels.fyi, self-reported total pay, October 2026): about CHF 153k in Zurich, £112k in London, €92k–€95k in Berlin and Munich, €82k in Paris, €62k in Spain.
• Sources disagree: for a London ML engineer they range from £52.5k to £112k. Check whether a figure is base or total pay, and how many salaries sit behind it.
• Labs advertised London base ranges of £170k–£630k for research roles in October 2026, before equity.
• Tokn could read a salary in about 1 in 8 AI job ads. Some employers publish ranges for some offices only.
• The EU Pay Transparency Directive gives candidates a right to the pay range before the interview, but as of late September 2026 France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands had not yet turned it into national law.

AI salaries in Europe by city: the short answer

Zurich pays the most in typical cases, London has the highest ceiling, and Munich and Berlin come next, ahead of Paris and Spain. The table compares the median machine learning engineer on Levels.fyi with recruiter base-salary guides for the same city.

Levels.fyi figures include equity and move daily; recruiter figures are base only, so they sit lower everywhere. Converted at the ECB reference rate of 12 October 2026, Zurich's median is about €164k and London's about €132k, before tax and living costs.

We left Amsterdam out: its Levels.fyi median for ML engineers swung by more than €30k within days in October 2026, a sign the sample is too small. No national statistics office (ONS, INSEE, Destatis) publishes pay for "ML engineer" as an occupation, so private sources are all there is.

Why AI salary sources disagree, and which one to trust

Sources disagree because they measure different things: total pay or base, big tech or consultancies, real offers or advertised ranges. London ML engineers show the spread best.

Levels.fyi sits about 49% above Glassdoor because its users skew towards big tech and include equity, while Glassdoor counts more consultancies and smaller firms. IT Jobs Watch is lowest because the best-paid employers often don't put a salary in the ad, and 22 salaries is too few to mean much.

Which to trust? We think it depends on the question. To benchmark a base salary, use a recruiter guide. For a big tech or lab offer, use Levels.fyi, the only one that captures equity. Ignore job-ad medians built on a few dozen ads.

What each AI role pays

Pay rises from data science to ML engineering to research, and job titles matter. Job-ad ranges below are annual gross base, advertised in October 2026, read by Tokn or on the employer's careers page.

Machine learning engineer salary

A machine learning engineer in Europe typically earns €60k–€95k in the eurozone hubs and about £100k–£112k in London on recruiter and Levels.fyi figures (Glassdoor's London average is £75k). Job ads show the spread by seniority and employer.

In France, Tokn had 12 technical job ads with a salary, from 8 companies, as of 12 October 2026. The median advertised minimum was about €70k and the median maximum about €97k. That is directional only (12 jobs), but it lands close to the Paris figures from Levels.fyi and Michael Page. Browse current machine learning engineer jobs to compare.

AI engineer and LLM engineer salary

The "AI Engineer" title pays less than "Machine Learning Engineer" on Levels.fyi. In London, the self-reported median for AI engineers is about £85k (October 2026), against £112k for ML engineers. The same gap shows in Berlin (about €72k) and Paris (about €54k). It is a broad title used by consultancies and integrators.

The well-paid LLM jobs carry other titles: Applied AI Engineer, Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer. Anthropic advertised £225k–£255k for an Applied AI Engineer in London in October 2026, base only. Pigment advertised €80k–€140k for a Senior GenAI Engineer working remotely in France, and £80k–£150k for the same title in London.

Across the UK market, job ads mentioning LLMs quoted a median of £85,000 according to IT Jobs Watch (805 salaries, 6 months to 12 Oct 2026), and £92,500 in London. See the LLM and GenAI engineering jobs on Tokn.

Data scientist salary

Data scientists earn less than ML engineers in the same city on Levels.fyi. The self-reported median total pay was about £92k in London (326 submissions) and about €62k in Paris (150 submissions) in October 2026, against £112k and €82k for ML engineers.

The consultancy Artefact advertised €60k–€70k for a Senior Data Scientist in Paris and €75k–€85k for a Data Scientist Manager. Open roles are on our data science jobs page.

Research scientist and research engineer salary

Research pays the most, and lab job ads show how far the ceiling goes. On Levels.fyi, the median research scientist in London reported about £132k in total pay in October 2026, with the top 10% above £267k.

Lab ads go much higher, on base alone:

France looks very different. Silkhom's AI salary barometer, which we only have second-hand as reported by Blog du Modérateur (July 2026), puts the average fixed salary of an AI researcher at €86.8k, excluding bonuses and equity. Mistral AI, the company with the most open roles on Tokn, published no salary on any ad. See all AI research jobs.

MLOps and ML infrastructure salary

MLOps pays close to ML engineering. UK job ads mentioning MLOps quoted a median of £80,500 according to IT Jobs Watch (230 salaries, 6 months to 12 Oct 2026), and £83,500 in London. In France, the same second-hand Silkhom figures give an average fixed salary of €75.3k for MLOps engineers and €85.4k for LLMOps.

Advertised ranges in October 2026: Algolia listed €69.8k–€96.9k for a (Senior) SRE, AI Platform in Paris; n8n listed €91.4k–€171.7k for an Agentic Engineering Platform Engineer working remotely (Berlin office); OpenAI listed £194k–£280k for a Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure in London. Current openings: MLOps and ML infrastructure jobs.

AI product manager salary

AI product manager data is thin. The one solid benchmark is Robert Half's 2027 guide: a median base of £102,750 for an AI product manager in London. No credible public dataset isolates AI PMs in Paris, Berlin or Zurich. In job ads, Dust advertised €80k–€120k for a Founding Product Manager in Paris, and n8n advertised €89.7k–€152.3k for a remote Senior Product Manager in October 2026.

Same job, different city: what job ads reveal

Employers price the same role differently by location, even when it is remote. Two made this visible in October 2026.

Anthropic advertised its Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise role at €220k–€235k in Paris and £225k–£255k in London. At the ECB rate of 12 October 2026, London's range is about €266k–€302k, so the London ceiling was roughly 28% higher.

Elastic posted the same remote roles with a different range per country:

For the principal role, the Ireland ceiling was about 43% above Greece's. So remote AI jobs often pay less if you live in a lower-cost country, though n8n published a single band for "remote, Berlin office". Ask early whether a range depends on where you live, and check the remote AI jobs open to Europe on Tokn.

How many AI job ads show a salary?

Few, but more than our parser sees. Tokn could read a salary in about 1 in 8 of its roughly 770 AI job ads as of 12 October 2026. The real share is higher: in October 2026 Anthropic showed a pound range on almost every London ad, and our parser missed that format.

Practices on Tokn in October 2026 varied by employer and even by office:

• Publish on most ads: Black Forest Labs, Algolia, Dust, Elastic, n8n, Granola.
• Publish on none: Mistral AI (80+ ads), Celonis, ElevenLabs, Legora, Synthesia, Scale AI, Doctolib.
• Publish for some offices only: OpenAI showed pound ranges on London-only ads but nothing on its Paris, Munich, Dublin, Zurich or Madrid ads. Anthropic showed ranges in London, Paris and Dublin, not in Munich or Zurich.

We left out every US-dollar range: on postings that list London alongside San Francisco or New York, the dollar figure is the US pay band, not London pay. In Germany, the only published ranges we found came from two employers, n8n and Black Forest Labs. For who is hiring most, see the AI companies hiring the most in Europe.

Base salary vs total pay: equity and the US gap

At labs and big tech, base salary is only part of the package. Anthropic's October 2026 ads stated an annual salary and added that equity comes on top, and Levels.fyi counts stock, which is one reason it beats recruiter guides. What that equity is worth is another matter. In the US, Levels.fyi data analysed by Let's Data Science (August 2026, US only) puts median engineer total pay at about $635k at OpenAI and $665k at xAI, "much of this is equity at private valuations". Private-company equity can't be sold freely, so treat it as a bet, not cash.

The same US analysis found the AI premium has stopped growing: at entry level (L3), ML and AI engineers earned about 1.29 times their non-AI peers in mid-2026, down from 1.34 in late 2024. We found no source comparing European and US AI pay like for like, so we don't put a ratio on the gap.

Will job ads have to show salaries? The EU Pay Transparency Directive

Not necessarily, and not yet in most countries. The EU Pay Transparency Directive gives job applicants a right to know the starting pay or its range before employment, and stops employers asking about your pay history. The range can come in the ad, before the interview or another way: the ad is one option, not an EU-wide rule.

Member states had until 7 June 2026 to write it into national law. Most missed the deadline. Status as of late September 2026, from Lockton's implementation tracker:

Slovakia, Lithuania and Malta have also transposed it, and Greece's main provisions apply from 1 November 2026, according to Trusaic's August 2026 update. Trackers disagree on some details, so check again before relying on one country's status.

France's bill goes further: according to Previssima's summary, employers would have to give the salary or range in the ad, or before the interview when there is no ad. It still has to pass parliament. Until then, ask for the range at the first call. For who is hiring and where, see our October 2026 AI job market report.

Find AI jobs that publish their pay

Tokn lists AI jobs from company career pages across Europe and shows the salary whenever we can read one. Use the role pages above, or create a job alert for your role and city to see new ranges as employers publish them.

FAQ

How much does a machine learning engineer earn in Europe in 2026?

On Levels.fyi (self-reported total pay, October 2026), medians were about CHF 153k in Zurich, £112k in London, €92k–€95k in Berlin and Munich, €82k in Paris and €62k in Spain. Recruiter guides, which count base pay only, give less: about £105k in London, €72k for Germany.

Which European city pays AI engineers the most?

Zurich has the highest typical pay: about CHF 153k median total pay for ML engineers on Levels.fyi, roughly €164k. London has the highest ceiling, because frontier labs advertise base ranges of £225k and above there. Amsterdam data was too unstable in October 2026 to rank it.

Do AI engineers earn more than data scientists?

Usually, yes. On Levels.fyi in October 2026, London ML engineers reported a median of about £112k against £92k for data scientists, and Paris showed €82k against €62k. But the "AI Engineer" title on its own pays less than "ML Engineer" in London, Berlin and Paris, because consultancies use it widely.

Do remote AI jobs pay less?

Often, if you live in a lower-cost country. Elastic advertised the same remote Principal AI Engineer role at up to €115.9k in Greece and up to €165.7k in Ireland in October 2026. Others, like n8n, publish one band whatever your location, so ask how the range is set.

Why don't most AI job ads show a salary, and will that change?

Many employers choose not to, and some publish ranges for certain offices only. The EU Pay Transparency Directive gives you a right to the pay range before the interview, but as of late September 2026 only a few countries, including Italy, had transposed it, and it does not require the range to appear in the ad itself. The UK and Switzerland are not covered.