What tech professionals in Spain ask to be paid

An ask is the minimum gross annual salary a candidate told us they wanted, before any negotiation. Most gave one number; where they gave a range we use the lower end.

• 73%of asks are a multiple of €5,000, and 40% a multiple of €10,000. One in ten candidates asks for exactly €50,000, the most common figure (347 people), followed by €45,000 (323) and €40,000 (312).
• 27%give a range rather than one number, and the ranges are narrow: the median is €5,000 wide, about 12% of the lower figure.
• €30–70Kcovers 80% of asks (10th to 90th percentile). The median is €46,000; only 2% ask for €100,000 or more.

• +25%is the step from mid-level (€40,000) to senior (€50,000), bigger than from junior (€35,000) to mid (+14%). Executives ask €65,000, and the top 10% of them €100,000 or more.

Years since the first job on the candidate's CV, for the 1,958 candidates whose CV has dates. Seniority labels are broad: the median "senior" has been working for about 12 years.

• €40Kfor the first five years, then €45,000 at 6–10 years, €50,000 at 11–15 and €55,000 at 16–20.
• +€1Kis all that ten more years add after that: candidates with 26 or more years ask €56,000. The jump to €60,000+ comes from role and skills, not tenure.

Role family comes from the most recent job title on the CV, or the role we were recruiting for when the CV has none.

• €57Kis the median for data science, ML and AI seniors, the highest of any family; DevOps and cloud, and product and project management, follow at €55,000.
• €42Kfor frontend seniors, 26% below AI seniors. Senior software developers (backend and full-stack) ask €46,000, below cybersecurity, data engineering and SAP (€50,000).
• €50Kis what mid-level DevOps and cloud engineers ask, as much as senior security or data engineers. Mid-level software developers ask €37,000.

Seniors only, by skill listed on the CV (1,226 seniors with a skills list; skills with at least 40 people). The senior median is €50,000. A skill on a CV says nothing about depth, and skills travel with roles: Kubernetes mostly appears on DevOps CVs.

• €60Kfor seniors listing Kubernetes, Databricks or Go, 20% above the senior median. Terraform (€59,000), LLMs and generative AI (€58,500) and Kafka (€58,000) follow.
• €55Kfor any of the three clouds: AWS, Azure and GCP, and Docker and Spark.
• €50Kfor the common stack: Java, JavaScript, React, SQL, SAP, PHP and Power BI sit exactly at the senior median. Angular (€48,000), HTML/CSS (€47,500) and Active Directory (€45,000) sit below it.

• €50Kin Madrid, Barcelona and the Valencia region alike. Salary guides put pay in Madrid and Barcelona about 15% above Valencia; at senior level the asks don't show that gap.
• −10%outside Madrid and Barcelona (€45,000). Seville is lowest at €40K (−20%), Málaga in between at €45K.
• −17%for juniors outside the two big cities: €30K against €36K in Madrid. Executives in Madrid ask €70K.

• +20%Seniors with fluent, C2 or native English ask €54,000, against €45,000 for intermediate (B1–B2). At mid level the gap is the same: €44,500 against €37,000.
• −10%Seniors who are out of work ask €45,000, against €50,000 for those in a job. For juniors the gap is wider: €28,000 against €35,000. 16% of candidates were out of work when they gave their figure.

• €40Kfor mid-level candidates in every half-year from January 2025 to September 2026. Seniors moved between €49,000 and €52,000 and ended where they started, at €50,000.
• +28%Only juniors' asks rose, from €30,000 to €38,500, though the latest half-year has just 47 juniors.

• 15 daysis the median notice period, the usual figure in Spanish contracts and collective agreements outside management roles. Only 2% need more than a month; one to three months is common in the UK and Germany.
• 18%can start immediately: 14% of those in a job and 41% of those out of work.

The median senior ask next to the senior midpoint in our salary calculator (built from the 2026 Hays, Michael Page and Robert Walters guides) for Madrid, where most of these candidates live.

• 8/11role families ask for closer to the consultancy figure than to the large-company one. The median senior ask is 2–21% below what a large company in Madrid pays at the midpoint.
• 11/11An offer at the large-company midpoint beats the median senior ask in every family, but it reaches the 75th percentile in only 3. To clear three in four asks you usually need to pay above it.

• ·Budget for the ask, then the market. The median senior asks €50,000; a quarter ask €60,000 or more, and a tenth €75,000 or more. Those numbers tell you what it takes to get a yes.
• ·Mind the round numbers. Candidates anchor on €40,000, €45,000 and €50,000. A range that tops out at €48,000 loses everyone who had 50 in mind.
• ·Price cloud-native and data-platform skills separately. Seniors with Kubernetes, Databricks, Go or GenAI ask about €60,000, 20% above the rest.
• ·Don't expect a big discount outside Madrid and Barcelona. Seniors in the Valencia region ask the same €50,000; elsewhere about 10% less, 20% less in Seville.
• ·Only require fluent English if the job needs it. It adds about €9,000 to a senior's ask.
• ·Plan for a 15-day start. Three in four candidates can join within two weeks, so a slow interview process, not notice periods, is what delays a hire.

• ·Source. Hiron, ON3 Works' recruiting platform. Of 6,280 candidates in our CRM, 4,199 gave a salary figure when we talked to them about a role between 13 January 2025 and 1 October 2026.
• ·What we kept. Figures that read as an annual gross amount between €12,000 and €300,000 (83 monthly, daily or hourly figures were dropped), from people living in Spain (674 abroad were dropped), in tech roles (53 hospitality and other non-tech profiles were dropped). That leaves 3,389.
• ·Definitions. The ask is the minimum the candidate said they wanted; for a range, the lower end. Seniority is the level recorded in our system at screening. Role family comes from the latest job title on the CV, or the role we contacted them about. Experience is years since the first job on the CV. English level and skills are as written on the CV. Percentiles are interpolated.
• ·Who is in it. People we approached for our clients' roles, mostly at IT services and consulting firms in Madrid and Barcelona, who replied and gave a figure. That mix leans to consultancy work and away from start-ups and big tech, and asks are not pay. Read the numbers as what this market asks, not as what everyone earns.
• ·Privacy. Every figure was aggregated inside the database; no name, contact detail or individual record was exported. Groups with fewer than 30 people are not published. Clients' budgets are not used.