Levels.fyi tells you the offer. It doesn't tell you what you keep after moving to Europe.

By Skyler Bissell · July 13, 2026 · 5 min read

If you work in tech, you already trust Levels.fyi for one thing: real, crowd-verified total comp. It is the best map of what companies pay, by level and by city, and you should start your offer research there. Here is where it stops. Levels.fyi reports the gross offer. It does not tell you what lands in your account after tax, or what you stop paying for once you move abroad. When you are weighing a US job against a European one, those two things decide the whole question.

What Levels.fyi is best at

Levels.fyi is a crowd-sourced database of tech compensation, broken out by company, level, and city, built from real submissions. For the question "what does this role actually pay," nothing else comes close. If you are benchmarking a title, calibrating a counteroffer, or checking whether a recruiter's range is honest, that is the tool. None of what follows is a knock on it.

The point is narrower. A gross number is where the comparison starts, and it is only the first half.

Where the gross number stops

A gross figure answers "what will they pay me." It says nothing about "what will I keep." Three things sit in that gap, and all three swing hard when you move to Europe.

• Taxes. A European offer and a US offer with a bigger sticker price can land much closer than the raw numbers suggest, because effective rates, brackets, and social contributions differ a lot by country.
• The safety net. Capped childcare, low-cost healthcare, and weeks of paid leave are money you do not have to earn in much of Europe. A gross salary skips all of it. cityparity prices it in.
• Equity. A big slice of US comp is RSUs, and most of it does not follow you to a new employer.

The RSU trap that makes the gap look huge

This is the one that trips people up. You take your current total comp, stock included, and set it against a European base salary. Of course Europe reads like a pay cut. But those RSUs were granted by your current employer for staying in your current seat. Move to a role in Amsterdam and that stock does not teleport with you. The new grant, if there is one, is a fresh and usually smaller number. So comparing today's loaded US total comp against tomorrow's European base overstates the gap, sometimes by a wide margin. We break down exactly what happens in what happens to RSUs when you move abroad.

The two-tool workflow

Use both tools together, in this order:

1. Source the offer on Levels.fyi. Get the honest gross range for the role, level, and city.
2. Strip out what stays behind. Drop the RSUs that will not carry to the new employer, so you are comparing pay you will actually receive.
3. Drop both sides into cityparity. It runs the taxes, the childcare and healthcare costs, and the leave, then returns the equivalent salary: the local number that leaves you with the same net cash and the same safety net.

Two worked examples, straight from cityparity's engine and matching the published comparison pages. At $225k of US software-engineer total comp, the net-cash break-even is about €201,648 for a move from San Francisco to Amsterdam, and about £155,458 for New York to London. See the full line-by-line at San Francisco vs Amsterdam for software engineers and NYC vs London for software engineers. Those pages show where every dollar goes: tax, rent, childcare, and the rest.

Want the broader case? We work through whether engineers actually come out ahead in Europe once all of this is netted out.

Use both

Levels.fyi and cityparity are not competitors. One tells you the offer. The other tells you what the offer is worth after taxes, benefits, and a plane ticket. Get your gross numbers from the people who track them best, then find out what you would actually keep. Drop both offers into the calculator and see the break-even for your own city and salary.

FAQ

Does Levels.fyi show European take-home pay?

It shows gross total comp, which is what you want when you are sourcing an offer. Take-home is a separate calculation that depends on the country's tax brackets, social contributions, and what you stop paying for (childcare, healthcare) after you move. For the net figure you need a tool that runs that math, which is the gap cityparity fills.

How do I compare a US tech offer to a European one?

Pull the gross numbers from Levels.fyi, then solve for net cash on both sides. One catch: do not stack your full US total comp against a European base salary, because most US RSUs do not follow you to a new employer. Line up base against base, then add the safety-net costs that change when you cross a border.

Is Levels.fyi accurate for Europe?

For gross total comp by level and city, it is the strongest crowd-sourced source there is, and that holds in Europe too. What it does not do, in Europe or anywhere else, is turn that gross figure into what actually lands in your account after tax. The offer data is solid. The take-home conversion is just not what the tool was built for.

Does Levels.fyi include taxes?

No, and it does not need to for its job. It reports pre-tax pay, so the number you see comes before income tax, social contributions, and any local payroll or wealth levies. To get the after-tax figure for a specific country, run that gross number through a take-home model like cityparity's.

Figures here come from cityparity's per-city engine and were current at publication; currency rates, subsidy caps, and tax rules move, so treat any single number as a strong estimate and run your own inputs. See the methodology.