Machine learning engineer salary in London, Paris and Berlin (2026)

A machine learning engineer salary in London, Paris or Berlin depends on which number you read. As of 14 October 2026, the median self-reported total pay on Levels.fyi was about £111k in London, €92k in Berlin, €95k in Munich and €82k in Paris. Recruiter guides, which count base salary only, put the middle of the market at £104,750 in London, €73,440 in Berlin and €65,000 in Paris.

Frontier labs sit far above: Anthropic's London Applied AI Engineer postings advertised £225k–£255k base in October 2026. Below, every source is labelled, pay is split by level and employer, and take-home pay is worked out per city. For other roles, see AI salaries in Europe, role by role.

In short

• Median total pay on Levels.fyi (self-reported, small samples): about £111k London, €92k Berlin, €95k Munich, €82k Paris.
• Base salary medians in recruiter guides are lower: £104,750 London, €73,440 Berlin, €65,000 Paris.
• At big tech, stock is a third or more of senior pay. At European scale-ups, base salary is 85% to 100% of the package.
• After tax (estimates): £100k in London leaves about £68.6k, €90k in Berlin about €53.2k, €75k in Paris about €49.3k.
• Of 50 ML engineer job ads on Tokn, only 2 showed a range in a European currency, both at Anthropic.

Machine learning engineer salary by city: the short answer

London pays the most, then Munich and Berlin, then Paris. Each column measures something different, so compare down a column. Figures are gross and annual unless stated, read on 14 October 2026.

Levels.fyi counts base, bonus and stock, leans towards big tech and moves daily. Recruiter guides give base pay only. Glassdoor mixes self-reported and modelled pay and hides its sample size from logged-out visitors. No statistics office publishes "ML engineer" as an occupation, so the official column is a floor for broader software and data jobs. The ONS figure dates from April 2025 (the 2026 edition is due on 22 October 2026), and we read the APEC figure second-hand, in Le Monde Informatique.

For scale, a typical Berlin ML engineer earns close to the €100,719 that marked Germany's top 10% of full-time earners in 2025 (Destatis).

Base salary vs total compensation

Outside big tech and frontier labs, base salary is most of your pay: Glassdoor's average additional pay is £13k in London and €5k in Paris and Berlin. The split shows at senior level, on the software engineer ladder ML engineers share at these companies (Levels.fyi, first-year pay):

OpenAI, Granola, Cognition, Inato and n8n flagged "Offers Equity" on their postings in October 2026. Anthropic's postings gave an "Annual Salary" range and mentioned only "optional equity donation matching", so don't assume stock on top of an Anthropic range.

The instrument matters. UK EMI options carry no income tax or National Insurance on exercise if the exercise price is at least the market value at grant. French BSPCE tax rules changed in 2025 and again in 2026, so check the current rules. German startups often grant virtual shares, which typically pay out only on an exit.

ML engineer salary by level in each city

From entry level to staff, pay more than doubles at a scale-up and roughly triples at big tech. Hiring skews senior: of the 91 ML and AI engineer jobs Tokn tracked in the four cities on 14 October 2026, 39 were tagged senior or lead and only 5 junior. Starting out? Read how to become a machine learning engineer.

Recruiter figures are base salary, company ladders are Levels.fyi total pay, and job ads are advertised base ranges from October 2026.

London

Granola's AI Engineer posting advertised £100k–£130k, level not stated. Browse machine learning jobs in London.

Paris

See machine learning jobs in Paris.

Berlin and Munich

Tokn tracked only 5 ML and AI engineer jobs in Berlin and 4 in Munich on 14 October 2026, none with a published range. See machine learning jobs in Berlin.

Who pays ML engineers the most?

Frontier labs, then big tech; consultancies and research institutes pay least. Glassdoor's employer medians (self-reported total pay) show the gap:

• London: Kubrick Group £34k, Faculty £70k, Deliveroo £98k, Meta £140k, Snap £183k.
• Paris: Quantmetry €44k, Hugging Face €71k, Criteo €73k.
• Berlin: Fraunhofer €60k, ML6 €65k, Amazon €95k.

On Tokn, 21 of the 42 ML and AI engineer jobs in London were at frontier or model labs on 14 October 2026, and 16 of the 40 in Paris. Anthropic's London postings advertised £225k–£255k base for Applied AI Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer roles and £325k–£390k for staff engineers. Its research engineer postings went to £260k–£630k, a frontier-lab outlier, not a market rate. In Paris, Mistral AI had 12 of the 40 jobs and published no pay.

Take-home pay after tax in London, Paris and Berlin

At these salaries, you keep the largest share of gross in London and the smallest in Berlin. These are estimates for a single person with no children, under 2026 rules, with no pension contributions or student loan. Not tax advice.

How we worked them out:

• London: England 2026/27 rates and thresholds from HMRC. The personal allowance shrinks by £1 for every £2 above £100,000, so going from £100k to £110k adds only £3,800: an effective marginal rate of about 62% up to £125,140.
• Berlin: tax class I, no church tax, statutory health insurance (2.9% average additional contribution). Wage tax from the official BMF calculator, social contributions at 2026 rates. Above €77,400 you can choose private health insurance, which changes the result.
• Paris: cadre, permanent contract, one tax share. Net pay from the URSSAF simulator, income tax from the service-public barème for 2025 income as a proxy. The employer's total cost is about €108,293.

At the ECB rate of 14 October 2026, London's £68.6k is about €81.2k. Rent is the counterweight: London's average private rent was £2,332 a month in August 2026 (ONS).

What ML engineer job ads show about pay

Very little. Of the 50 jobs titled machine learning engineer that Tokn tracked across Europe on 14 October 2026, only 2 showed a range in a European currency: Anthropic's London research engineer postings (£260k–£630k and £370k–£630k). Wayve, Spotify, Perplexity, Doctolib, Doctrine, Figma, Photoroom and Mistral AI published nothing on theirs.

"AI engineer" postings are more open: about one in five of the 102 we checked showed a range, some of them in US or Canadian dollars. European examples include Agicap, Inato, Pigment, ClickHouse and Granola above, and Aircall's €80k–€120k for a Staff AI Software Engineer in Madrid. We left out US-dollar and Canadian-dollar bands throughout: on postings that list London alongside US cities, they are the US pay band.

Location sets the price. Anthropic's Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise role was advertised at €220k–€235k in Paris and £225k–£255k in London (about €267k–€302k at the ECB rate of 14 October). Elastic advertised a remote Principal AI Engineer at €73.3k–€115.9k in Greece and €104.8k–€165.7k in Ireland.

Which salary source to trust for what

We think each source answers one question well, and none answers all.

Small samples mislead. IT Jobs Watch gave a London median of £52,500 from 22 advertised salaries in the six months to 14 October 2026, against £90,000 from 10 a year earlier. That is two tiny samples, not a 42% pay cut.

ML engineer vs AI engineer salary

On Levels.fyi, the "AI Engineer" title pays less than "ML Engineer" in all three cities. Median self-reported total pay on 14 October 2026 was £84,264 in London (n=32), €53,430 in Paris (n=57) and €72,119 in Berlin (n=33): 24%, 35% and 22% below ML engineers.

The exception is lab titles such as Applied AI Engineer (£225k–£255k in London) or Research Engineer, where the best-paid LLM work sits. See what an LLM engineer does.

How to negotiate an ML engineer salary with these numbers

Compare like with like, ask for the range early, and value equity at zero until you can sell it.

1. Match the benchmark to the offer. Compare a base offer with Robert Half or Michael Page, a big tech package with Levels.fyi. Never set a base against a total-pay median.
2. Anchor on experience. With rare skills or long experience, the recruiter P75 (£132,250 London, €88,740 Berlin) is a fair anchor.
3. Ask for the range at the first call. The EU Pay Transparency Directive gives you that right, but as of late September 2026 France had only a bill and Germany no draft, according to Lockton's tracker. The UK is not covered.
4. Ask how the range is set. If it depends on where you live, as at Elastic, location is part of the negotiation.
5. Question the equity. Ask for the instrument (EMI, BSPCE, virtual shares), the vesting and the exercise window.
6. Use the tax rules. In London between £100k and £125,140, pension contributions or equity can beat cash. In France, the employer pays far more than your gross salary.

Before the offer comes the interview: prepare with our machine learning interview questions.

Find ML engineer jobs that publish their pay

Tokn lists AI jobs from company career pages across Europe, with the salary whenever the employer publishes one. Browse machine learning engineer jobs, or create a job alert for your city.

FAQ

How much does a machine learning engineer earn in London?

About £111k median total pay on Levels.fyi (n=92, self-reported, 14 October 2026) and a £104,750 median base in Robert Half's 2027 guide. Glassdoor's self-reported average base is lower, £63k plus £13k additional pay, as it counts more consultancies.

How much does an ML engineer earn in Paris?

About €82k median total pay on Levels.fyi (n=31, 14 October 2026). Michael Page's 2027 guide puts average fixed pay at €65,000, from €45,000 to €90,000 by experience. Big tech pays more: Google's senior level (L5) averaged €179k total pay.

What is a machine learning engineer's salary in Germany?

In Berlin, the Levels.fyi median was about €92k total pay (n=29) and Robert Half's 2027 base median €73,440. Munich pays a little more: about €95k (n=18) and €81,360.

What does a junior ML engineer earn?

Robert Half's 2027 entry-level base (P25) is £83,750 in London and €52,020 in Berlin; Michael Page's low end in Paris is €45,000. Google's entry level (L3) averaged £128k total pay in London on Levels.fyi. Junior openings are rare: 5 of the 91 ML and AI engineer jobs Tokn tracked in the four cities.