26k before taxes.

I can live without be thinking about money. I pay £700 for my flat and £170 for transport (zone 4) and I can save about £250.

I work as junior software engineer in central London and my salary is £26.000 before taxes. I think I am underpaid but there are a lot of benefits (gym, breakfast, friday lunch, office in Soho), so I can't complain.

How? This always confused me. That's approaching the poverty line here in the U.S.

For example: a standard McDonald's employee makes roughly $24,000 per year. This requires no education and just about anyone can do the work. It's also considered one of the lowest level jobs a person can get. I'm not degrading those people I'm just speaking on the status quo.

Now take a look at a manager at McDonalds. They're approaching almost $40,000 per year. You're telling me that you make less than a McDonalds manager? A job which requires no education, and arguably no real skill beyond what's taught at work?

This is absolutely insane to me that the pay is so low. How do you afford to eat? How do you afford health insurance or a car or rent? I know when I was working for $15 an hour ($28,800 per year) I had a hard time just paying the bills. The rent was always late and I had to drop my health insurance for a couple years. Do you not have student loans?

I dont think you've accounted for the exchange rate. £26,000 is approx. $40,000.

It depends on cost of living. What is a McDonald's (or similar) manager paid in London?

Not quite (£39473.20). But I get what you mean. Still 40k a year for a software developer? Even double that is considered low here in the U.S.

"Not quite"?? Did you really just write that when I wrote approx $40K?? Which it clearly is. Wow, someones afraid to be wrong.

£26k is low for London but should be fine outside London - I would assume that it would increase to £35k after a year or two if he was staying in London.

Most people in the UK don't have health insurance because it's not needed because we have the NHS.

Student loans will most likely only be with the government's SLC agency which only takes 9% of your salary above £21k.

Many people who live in Lomdon don't have cars because there is little point, however travel cards still cost a lot anyway.

That is low. It is hard to know what people mean by "junior" but you should expect to get a decent pay increase every year or more often really from that level.

In a similar situation to you, what is included in your role as a 'junior' if you don't mind me asking?

Well, let me clarify this. When I started I was just graduated and I came in London without actually speaking english. So, though I had some cool side projects, they couldn't offer me more.

Now, things are completely different. I improved my language and most of all I improved my skill. In my role as a 'junior' I do the same job of my colleagues, the only difference is that they don't let me to lead a project, mainly because I am not yet able to properly speak with clients.

A year after I graduated I got my first role in London at £27000 for a dev role (one above junior). This was an enterprise java role and in the first year I worked in a team of 3 building a custom CMS (it was a telecoms publishing house) and then a BI platform. My pay moved up fairly quickly over the years but I don't think I know even a CTO here who earns more than £90000. The SF salaries do sound crazy high.

CTOs do get paid more than £90k here.

Enterprise Java has fairly high supply of candidates, and often the companies do not value people much, so it is probably a low pay area.