Looking at salaries after tax is completely meaningless, what is even this article trying to infer.
You have to take in to account the cost of living and also quality of services you get for it.
France & Sweden is close in the numbers but France is notably cheaper to eat out and Healthcare quality can't even be compared (to French favor). But if you're wealthy you'd probably prefer Sweden still because of the low taxes around wealth.
I recently compared (by actually going there) Switzerland vs Sweden when I passed a FAANG tech interview in Zurich, but even with 4-5x Salary of what I have now, I would probably end up living poorer if I had kids (if more than 2, it's for certain) in Zurich.
In addition (I'm European), I object to the use of per-hour wages instead of monthly salaries. It's less informative in Europe. Most jobs are full-time, salaries are typically advertised and talked about in monthly terms, and the length of the work week varies as well. Per month is just more useful as a comparison point.
Oh and Sweden is slightly ahead of France on the latest EHCI. Sweden scores near the bottom on accessibility (as is tradition, same thing 10 and 15 years ago even) but ranks highly overall and especially on outcomes, so I take issue with the assertion that French healthcare is much better.
I am interested in learning more about EHCI?
I found this link from 2018. It gave high scores to Switzerland and Northern Europe. France and Germany were the middle of the pack?
I live in a country from the bottom of this ranking and can confirm from personal experience. Nothing works, people die, and still it's very expensive.
Taxes in Switzerland are generally quite a bit lower than in other European countries. However mandatory health insurance is not included as a tax in Switzerland and is one of the highest expenditures for regular folks and yes, cost of living is also generally very high. Specifically in urban areas (Geneva, Zürich etc.) but also in tax haven cantons (Zug, Schwyz etc.), because you pay a premium for housing/rent there.
Child tax credits are varied as well and generally too low (IMO), maternity/paternity leave and especially child support are much weaker than in Nordic countries.
From my perspective the strongest case for Switzerland is the decentralized and half-direct democratic process, political stability due to consensus. But you only get that as a citizen, which is not easy to achieve (takes a decade and you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops). But the Swiss are very happy with their governmental structure in comparison and cherish direct democracy especially.
I don’t think it’s completely meaningless if you’re trying to save / invest. A smaller percentage of a larger salary is often more optimal than the reverse.
This is why for example working in a high COL city with a high salary is ultimately better; your 10% going to savings will be higher. It might not matter if you never leave the high COL city, but ceteris paribus I’d rather have a larger number in the bank account.
>I don’t think it’s completely meaningless if you’re trying to save / invest
It's largely meaningless, because some of what people are saving for in one country can be included in tax and social security contributions in another country - e.g. pensions and university tuition.
Depends on what it is you really want to know. For macro economic comparisons you would probably want to use some metric that has "disposable income" in its name. And then you'd have to ask what this income includes. Does it include cash transfers? Transfers in kind (e.g. for health and education)? Does it use PPP or market exchange rates?
Here's a dataset that Eurostat publishes. It includes cash transfers and transfers in kind, compared using PPP (PPS) exchange rates:
Adjusted gross disposable income of households per capita in PPS
There are no special privilieges for the rich, as everyone has the same rules. It's actually better for the poorer in a sense as everyone is exempt to pay tax on profits on stock and dividends below a certain amount, 300000 SEK.
In Sweden you can invest your money in a special investment account which charges a certain fixed percentage each year on the amount you have in this account (cash and stocks). The percentage is based on the central bank interest rates (a special formula based on that) so it changes each year. In the past 10 years it has been around between 0.5-1% of the total amount you have in this account. Then all the profits you make are tax free as well as no tax on dividends and interest. You can't deduct losses though.
In Sweden there is no wealth tax and no inheritance tax.
EDIT: And for completeness, if you invest outside of the above mentioned type of account you have to pay 30% on profits and 30% on dividends and interests.
So a path to wealth for a normal person is being invested in capital markets but only through a "special" account and assuming that real estate rental or purchase will not eat every leftover from highly taxed monthly salary. This "special" account gives access to all major capital markets?
I'm not sure what you are after with you comment, but this account, of which the rules are decided by the authorities, is not that special as every bank and internet trader offers it and it is free and provides low cost Internet trading. And contrary to special pension accounts which exist in many countries, you can take out your money (and add) anytime you want. You just have to pay the tax percentage which is due. So you cannot really add and remove money too often as then you trigger this tax, but once a year is fine.
It's pretty universal in the developed world to have some type of long term savings tax-scheme.
In us it's 401k/roth. In canada it's tfsa. in uk it's isa.
isa/401k/roth has pretty low caps. tfsa and isk has no cap.
But yea, considering I pay close to 50% tax it's remarkable at the same time I can speculate in the market, make 500% and pay 1% tax on it. Or that people with actual money pay so little.
But 1% is on the total held, not on the capital gains, right?
If that's the case, it affects earnings quite a bit. Say your investments beat inflation by 3 percentage points, you're effectively down to 2 percentage points after tax, so a 33% reduction in income.
Yea it was better in the years of extremely low rates. 2020-2022 it was 0.375% of total. Now it's up to 0.888% last year. There's some cases where it might be benefitial to use the "normal" account but for average Joe, not having to track every transaction has generally been very benefitial. And as a result 80-90% of adults own some type of stock either directly or through funds/retirement accounts vs the free market utopia us of 62%.
The ISK rules and taxes are relevant for a middle class I think. This was a question about the really rich.. then we need to look at taxes on capital gains, dividends, corporate tax et.c.
"everyone has the same rules" and "no special privileges" seems disingenuous to say. In both directions! Progressive tax codes are "the same" for "everyone", but obviously will mean the rich pay more. Now you can argue that's unfair or that it's extremely fair, but it's at least different!
But there is no progressive tax in this account. It is a percentage of what you have in the account. Same percentage for everyone. It's just that starting in 2026 they decided to make it tax free for the first 300000 SEK (about 30000 USD) you have in this account.
We have no wealth tax, no inheritance tax. If most of your income is a salary, the tax burden is high, but if you're living off investments, properties or generational funds, it's quite advantageous.
In Sweden, you can choose to have your investments in an ISK or KF, which effectively allows you to choose whether you want CGT or wealth tax, for public investments.
The current ISK tax is about 3x that of a low tax canton.
That always helps. Another thing that helps is the free child care/school/university/health care/elderly care/parenting support/living support that the high taxes provides. The lowest standard is very high, the middle is comfy life but keep less dollars than if you lived in the states, the rich not-surprising gets away here too.
In countries lower in the ranking of wealth inequality, less so. I mean they are next to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. No, not everywhere it's the same.
Vacation is also never mentioned in those discussions or comparisons. 10 days in the US vs. 20-30 (+ 8-14 public holidays, depending on the state) in Germany is much more important for _me_ than the net income.
Can't you take days off without pay in the US? The numbers that usually come up are twice the income compared to France. Taking 20 more days off without pay means losing a month of salary, which doesn't come close to making up the difference.
Isn't this article just plain wrong? These are nowhere near the after tax salaries, an average working Dutch person (even when excluding unemployed) is not grossing 9-10k a month with 6k euros net as this suggests. I think the article is confusing employer-side hourly labour costs with net earnings.
If you click the link to Eurostat in the article, you can see the numbers are "Wages and salaries (total)". So yes, that's the cost to the employer, which is much higher than the employees net income.
I don't know the exact situation in the Netherlands, but if it's anything like in Belgium the employer pays taxes on top of the employee's gross income. The total cost to the employer is therefore significantly higher than what the employee gets, even gross.
Employers pay taxes, but this calculator puts it as roughly 14k€ of costs for a 100k€ gross salary for the employee (Compared to 44k€ of costs in Belgium, which is why I left)
It does not matter. I'd rather live in a country I like to live in, based on culture, food, society, etc. than earn slightly more.
Or phrased differently: what are you going to buy with the extra money that is gonna offset you living in a country you dislike?
Choosing a country in Europe is not like choosing a state in the US. The systems, culture, people, food and so on differ much more wildely. Choosing that over a minor tax difference thst could change with the next government is downright unhinged.
The choice of countries seems arbitrary. I thought the list was limited to EU nations, but Iceland and Norway are there. Then I thought it was EFTA countries, but Switzerland is missing. Then noted Belgium is also missing... I give up!
The article is based on recent Eurostat publications. Eurostat is no longer receiving data from the UK Office of National Statistics.
But as sibling comments noted, the whole article is a giant slop, confusing employee costs for employers (this is what the linked Eurostat chart is about) and net salaries.
I don't know whether this is AI slop or what. The first chart definitely doesn't show average salary AFTER tax, maybe it's a total cost to employer on hourly basis before any taxes or SSC.
And the second chart titled "Where do taxes weigh the most on employers and employees?" doesn't actually show what it purports to show.
It only shows a small slice of the social security contributions that employers pay. It shows: 100% * (Employer SSC / Total cost to employer), but:
Total tax = Tax + Employer SSC + Employee SSC.
Total cost to employer = Gross salary + Employer SSC + "benefits/costs" (vary by country)
Paid out to employee = Gross salary - Tax - Employee SSC + "benefits/costs"
See Table 3.1 on page 71 for a summarized overview of "total tax wedge vs total employer cost" in various living situations (single, with children, low/average/high wage).
Note that this still doesn't tell the full story because it ignores some benefits and entitlements that depend on your living situation ("Non-standard tax relief").
The numbers for Norway aren't plausible at all. Full time 45€ after tax would be a yearly net income of 95000 euros. At a ~50% marginal tax rate that's be a yearly income of over 2 million kroner. No way that's the average.
According to Statistics Norway the monthly average salary in Norway was 62070kr in 2025, so 744840kr per year.
These numbers can get wonky fast. E.g. devs salaries in Ukraine are pegged to the dollar, so they get free raises as the exchange rates plummet. At the same time the cost of living in Ukraine was low before the war and only got lower. Oh and taxes are pretty low in Ukraine.
So I'm pretty sure Ukranian devs will end up with one of the top salary rates in all of Ukraine, but the externalities of that are large.
I was wondering the same thing. The data comes from Eurostat, and Eurostat does generally cover Switzerland. There's even a row in the original table[1] but for some reason it's blank.
Ah yes you choose Switzerland. The country that is famously so affordable to live in.
Last time I have been there food has costed literally double than in my home country which is also in the Alps, also has that standard of living, etc.
But hey, you moderately save on taxes if you finally manage to settle there, which csn be a bit of a challenge since switzerland isn't the most easy country to get permanent residence in.
As a European who has traveled to nearly all European countries and lived in 6 different ones, the idea to only look at the taxrate when chosing your future home country sounds so ridiculously simplistic and money-focused that it could only have come from an American author.
The point of having more money is to lead a happy live. In some countries you need more money to do that than in others. And depending on your character, hobbies and goals in life some countries will make it much more expensive than others.
For example if you like enjoying a beer in the sun and you start living in Island because of the tax rate, your first winter depression will make you question how smart that really was. Or you will just travel to southern Europe on a regular basis, but then why not live there in the first place.
If your country is Italy that might be the case, but groceries are at most 30% more expensive than France, and some are nearly the same price (vegetables). Meat and fish do cost an arm and a leg (100% tax on border crossing).
Meanwhile, median net salary in CH is 5'000-5'500 per month, double to triple its neighbors. So food is actually very affordable.
The food that costs more is the one someone cooked for you, which is logical considering the cook is likely paid more than your engineer (assuming that's your case) salary. But then again, minimum wage Italians are not eating out at the restaurant with any frequency. If you were an engineer in Switzerland instead, you could afford eating out there. The restaurants and terraces are never empty, anyways.
Now, if you want to enjoy a beer in the sun, you can get a 2CHF can at the supermarket and go fire up a barbecue at the lake of Zurich, I see people doing that all the time.
The first chart is labeled "Hourly wage after taxes (€)" and links to a specific table in official Eurostat[0]. This Eurostat table is "Labour cost levels by NACE Rev. 2 activity" - afaict Eurostat defines[1] "labour cost" as:
core expenditure borne by employers for the purpose of employing staff. They include employee compensation, with wages and salaries in cash and in kind, employers' social security contributions and employment taxes regarded as labour costs minus any subsidies received, but not vocational training costs or other expenditure such as recruitment costs and spending on working clothes
In other words, this doesn't whatsoever represent "hourly wage after taxes" and this article is complete slop.
Even from a pure financial perspective, given one benefit of these countries is you generally actually get useful benefits out of your tax dollars unlike the USA, wouldn't a better way of looking at this be some sort of weighted metric?
Imagine there's country A where i get a net salary of X and Y units of value out of my tax money. And country B where my net Salary is (X-M) and I get (Y+N) out of my tax money. Depending on the values of M & N, country B could be a clear winner at the end of the day.
You'd have to break this down into "archetypes" because like 90% of what you pay for is specific:
- retirement
- healthcare: negligible expense for most young people (for instance, about 80% goes to the 65+ in France)
- unemployment (a little more universal, with some large variations still)
Then there's everything to do with children (from direct subsidies to public schools or kindergarten slots), education (not everyone goes to university, for instance), and other subsidies that are income-dependent (two common ones in France are rent subsidy and a salary top-up for low-but-not-too-low incomes).
Plus, ultimately, 100% of what comes in goes out (modulo administrative costs) at the global scale, so you can't just average this or everywhere looks the same.
As someone that moved a bit through the EU, that's actually a pretty complex calculation, that's hard to distill into a single number.
My second biggest recurring expense is childcare. Having a child is something you are in control of, so the weight you might give to childcare benefits is something that wildly depends on your life plans.
Same with unemployment benefits. Would you rather a strong safety net and 8% unemployment (Like France), or a weaker net and 4% unemployment, like the Netherlands?
I think that depends on one's definition of disposable income. I think technically it's more or less what I was calling "net". But many people use it to mean "after I pay my mortgage, and my utilities, and my other thing". The further we go in that second direction the more it captures what I'm getting at.
As an example, if I have kids who need daycare and one country provides free daycare and another does not, then we need to account for the cost of daycare in our equation. And that may or may not fall under one's definition of disposable income.
The further you go in that direction, the more you have to include personal circumstances and values and the less useful it is for general comparison. Of course, the whole premise of looking at just average net income is a bit odd, so looking at expected quality of life makes more sense anyways.
100%. To use my daycare example, if someone didn't have kids, they're not realizing any value out of that.
So sure, there's an even more nebulous "value to society" concept, but since TFA is trying to get to dollars and cents I was trying to focus it on overall personal value. But even then one needs to not treat tax dollars equally.
My thought as well. If you have a kid and one country offers free daycare and the other does not, you ought to also do the math on how much you would have to pay for that for example. Or lets say one country has dirt roads and no public wster system and the other has top noch public infrastructure. One is going to be cheaper for the state.
The truth is that the tax rste alone is utterly meaningless.
Because you know where you don't have to pay taxes? If you live as a hermit in a desert cave. But that also means you won't benefit from the society around you. If you ignoring culture and which countries style of living you prefer (a werod idea, but ok), wouldn't it be wise to consider both the tax rate and what kind of society and surrounding it offers you in return?
you posted this twice, probably accidentally in context of some connectivity issues or accidental navigation (at least that way it happened to me before)
France & Sweden is close in the numbers but France is notably cheaper to eat out and Healthcare quality can't even be compared (to French favor). But if you're wealthy you'd probably prefer Sweden still because of the low taxes around wealth.
I recently compared (by actually going there) Switzerland vs Sweden when I passed a FAANG tech interview in Zurich, but even with 4-5x Salary of what I have now, I would probably end up living poorer if I had kids (if more than 2, it's for certain) in Zurich.
So like, who is this article for.