Work remotely for a US company from Europe: what $150,000 keeps in fourteen cities

By Skyler Bissell · August 29, 2026 · 12 min read

A $150,000 US salary leaves a single professional $104,973 a year in Sofia and $27,549 in New York. Same salary, same employer, same job, and close to four times the difference between the best city on that list and the worst. That spread is the reason people want this arrangement, and the reason their employers keep saying no.

The plan is simple to describe: keep the American number, live somewhere the American number goes further. Almost everything that makes it hard sits in two questions. Which of four employment arrangements you are on, because they are not interchangeable and only some of them are open to you. And once a European country taxes that salary and a European city charges you rent, what is left. This page answers the second question with figures and the first one with the rules that decide it.

What the salary keeps, city by city

One person, no children, renting two bedrooms, on $150,000 or its local-currency equivalent. Net cash is what is left after income tax, social contributions, rent, healthcare paid out of pocket, transit, food, everyday spending and one flight home. The last column converts that to dollars so the fourteen cities can be read against each other.

cityparity engine figures, 2026, ranked by net cash in dollars. One person, no children, renting two bedrooms at each city's median asking rent, 6% into a retirement account within each country's own sourced deduction ceiling, one trip home a year. No inbound tax regime is applied anywhere, which is deliberate and which understates one row: a remote worker who holds Spain's international teleworking visa is named in Spanish law as eligible for the special regime that taxes at 24% up to €600,000, so a qualifying reader would keep more in Madrid than the table shows. Eligibility is conditional and personal, so every row here is the ordinary schedule, which is the cautious direction. Countries carrying an open item in our tax accuracy review are excluded, so Vienna, Brussels, Zurich, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Athens and Vilnius do not appear. US federal figures rest on the IRS inflation adjustments for tax year 2026; German figures on the tariff in § 32a EStG and the ceilings published by the Bundesregierung.

The first thing to notice is where the American cities land. Austin sits third, ahead of eight of the ten European cities, and New York sits last, behind all ten. If the argument for moving is that Europe is cheaper, it does not survive the table. Sofia leaves $104,973 against New York's $27,549, while Amsterdam leaves $35,315 against Austin's $77,068. The country decides more than the continent does.

The second is how much of the spread is rent rather than tax. Berlin charges 40.6% on this salary and Amsterdam 38.1%, so the Dutch payroll is the lighter of the two, and yet Berlin finishes $55,794 against Amsterdam's $35,315. The two-bedroom rent is €20,856 in Berlin and €38,100 in Amsterdam, and that one line reverses the ranking the tax rates imply.

The third is Lisbon, which is the destination this plan is most often built around and which finishes eleventh. Portugal charges 45.6% on a salary of this size, and a Lisbon two-bedroom runs €23,244 a year, more than Berlin's. Lisbon is cheap relative to a Portuguese salary. It stops being cheap the moment you bring an American one and pay Portuguese tax on it.

Sofia shows euros for a recent reason: Bulgaria joined the euro area on 1 January 2026, at a fixed 1.95583 lev to the euro. Its position at the top of the table comes from a 10% flat income tax and a social insurance ceiling that stops well below this salary, which together leave 12.1% on a gross of €129,000. Read what you still owe at home before booking a flight, because an American passport does something specific to a number that low.

Four routes, and only some of them are yours to pick

Every version of this arrangement is one of four things. They differ in who employs you, who withholds your tax, what protections you get and what it costs the company, and the choice is usually the employer's rather than yours.

The route determines what a country charges you and what you are owed in return. The city table above prices you as a local employee, which is what the first two routes make you. A contractor is assessed on a self-employed schedule that our engine does not model, and the difference is rarely in the contractor's favour once unpaid leave and self-funded contributions are counted.

That last column is the one people skip. On the employer of record route in Berlin, the contract carries the German statutory floor of paid leave, worth €9,923 of gross at this salary, and Germany's parental leave package sits behind it. In Madrid the statutory floor is 22 days worth €10,915. As a contractor you get none of it, because there is no employer to owe it to you. Vacation days by country lists the statutory floor everywhere the engine reaches, and the hidden paycheck puts dollar values on the rest of it.

Where you live is where you are taxed

The rule that governs all of this is short. Tax residence follows your body, not your employer's address. Spend enough of the year in a European country, usually more than half of it, and that country treats you as resident and taxes your worldwide employment income, whoever is paying it and whichever bank account it lands in. Your US employer's payroll system has no opinion on the matter and no standing to overrule it.

This is where the 183-day number gets misused. People treat it as permission to spend just under six months somewhere with no consequences, and the treaty text says something narrower. Article 14 of the United States Model Income Tax Convention, which is the template American treaties are negotiated from, keeps the taxing right at home only if three things are true together: the recipient is present in the other country "for a period or periods not exceeding in the aggregate 183 days for all twelve-month periods commencing or ending in the taxable year concerned", the pay is "paid by, or on behalf of, an employer who is not a resident of the other Contracting State", and the pay "is not borne by a permanent establishment that the employer has in the other Contracting State". The word joining the second condition to the third is "and". Article 15 of the OECD Model reads the same way.

Two practical consequences follow. Splitting the year to stay under the count buys nothing if either of the other two conditions breaks, and the third one is precisely what a long stay puts at risk. And an American has no automatic right to live and work in an EU country in the first place, which is an immigration question rather than a treaty one and gets settled first. Right to work by country maps which passports carry that right where, and an American passport carries it in very few places. Whether expats pay tax in both countries works through the double-taxation side in more detail.

Permanent establishment, and why the answer is often no

When a company refuses to let you work from Lisbon, the reason is usually not that they mistrust you. It is that an employee working from a country can create a taxable presence for the employer there. Treaties call it a permanent establishment, and the US Model Convention defines it as "a fixed place of business through which the business of an enterprise is wholly or partly carried on", with a separate limb for a person who "has and habitually exercises" authority to conclude contracts binding on the company. Where one exists, that country can tax the profits attributable to it and can require the company to register, file and often run local payroll.

Whether a spare bedroom counts used to be argued from first principles. It is now addressed directly. The 2025 update to the OECD Model Tax Convention, adopted in November 2025, adds commentary on "cross-border working from a home or other relevant place" and sets a working threshold: a home would generally not be a place of business of the enterprise where the individual worked from it "for less than 50 per cent of their total working time for that enterprise over the course of any twelve-month period". Above that line the commentary turns to facts, and the leading question becomes whether the company has a commercial reason for the arrangement.

Two sentences in that commentary are worth reading twice before you draft your request, because they describe most requests. Working from home does not meet the commercial-reason test "where an enterprise enables an individual to work from home or another relevant place solely to obtain or retain the services of that individual", nor where an enterprise permits it "solely to reduce costs". Wanting to keep you, and saving on desks, are both named as insufficient. An engineer writing code from a flat in Porto is still a weaker case than a salesperson closing deals from one, and every real answer is fact-specific. But the company carries the exposure, it is open-ended in a way your salary is not, and that is why an informal request so often gets a polite no while a formal one gets an employer of record.

What the company pays on top of you

Whichever compliant route the company takes, someone has to fund the employer's statutory contributions in the destination country, and they vary more than the employee's side does. On a salary held at the same level in each country, the employer's charge is 33.8% of gross in Tallinn, 27.9% in Prague, 25.0% in Lisbon, 15.7% in Madrid, 15.5% in Berlin, 13.0% in Budapest, 11.3% in Dublin, 10.1% in Amsterdam and 2.3% in Bucharest, against 7.8% for a Texas employer.

Read that list against the employee column in the table and the two ends explain each other. Estonia charges the employee 22.4%, under Austin's 22.7%, and charges the employer 33.8%, the most on the list. That is by design: the Estonian Tax and Customs Board puts the 33% social tax on the employer, so it never reaches an Estonian payslip, and the employee side is income tax at 22% plus 1.6% of unemployment insurance.

Romania sits at the other end for the mirror-image reason. Its Fiscal Code puts 25% of pension contribution and 10% of health contribution on the employee, at articles 138 and 156, and leaves the employer a single 2.25% labour insurance contribution for normal working conditions. That split dates from the reallocation made by emergency ordinance 79/2017, published in the Monitorul Oficial in November of that year. So Bucharest reads 41.5% from the employee and 2.3% from the employer, and neither figure on its own tells you what Romanian labour costs. What an employee costs an employer works the full wedge, and employer cost by country charts it.

Those employer percentages come from a separate household whose gross is fixed in local currency at the level each contribution schedule's caps were sourced at, so they sit a fraction above the city table's gross. The percentages are stable across that difference; the underlying amounts are not, which is why none is quoted here.

Social security, and the certificate that stops you paying twice

Social contributions run on a separate system from income tax and follow separate rules. The United States holds bilateral agreements, called totalization agreements, that exist in the IRS's words "for the purpose of avoiding double taxation of income with respect to social security taxes". There are thirty of them, the oldest with Italy from 1978 and the newest with Iceland from 2019, per the Social Security Administration's own overview. Where one applies, the proof is a certificate of coverage, and SSA is blunt that it is not a menu: "A general misconception about U.S. agreements is that they allow dually covered workers or their employers to elect the system to which they will contribute. This is not the case."

The exception people rely on is the detached-worker rule, and its wording matters. SSA describes it as covering "a person who is temporarily transferred to work for the same employer in another country", who then "remains covered only by the country from which he or she has been sent", generally for assignments "expected to last 5 years or less". Read that clause slowly. It is written for an employer who sends you. Someone who asked to move, and whose employer agreed, is not obviously the person that sentence describes, and SSA's own pages do not address that case. Anyone planning around a five-year exemption should get the position confirmed rather than assumed.

By route: a genuinely transferred employee usually stays in the US system and carries a certificate. Someone hired locally through an employer of record is in the local system from day one, which is the point of the arrangement. A contractor is generally in the local self-employed system and funds both halves of it. Totalization agreements covers which countries have one and what happens when yours does not.

You still file with the IRS, and low-tax countries are where that bites

American citizenship comes with a filing obligation that a change of address does not end. The IRS states it plainly: a US citizen abroad is "subject to tax on worldwide income from all sources and must report all taxable income and pay taxes according to the Internal Revenue Code," and the rules for filing are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad.

Two mechanisms keep you from paying twice. The foreign earned income exclusion lifts a capped amount of foreign salary out of the US calculation, and the 2026 ceiling is $132,900, so a $150,000 salary sits above it with a slice left exposed. The foreign tax credit instead offsets what you paid abroad against what you would have owed at home. In a country charging 40.6% that credit generally swallows the US bill whole. In Bulgaria, where the same salary is charged 12.1%, it does not, and the shortfall is real money that never appears in a spreadsheet built on local take-home alone.

That is the sentence to carry away from the table. The cheapest rows on it are cheapest partly because their tax take is small, and a US passport means a small foreign tax take does not fully convert into a small total tax take. The foreign earned income exclusion covers the ceiling and the residency tests, and the exclusion against the credit covers which one to elect. If you are leaving California, California state tax when you move abroad is a third bill to plan around.

The visas written for exactly this

Several European countries now issue a permit designed for someone employed abroad and living locally, which solves the immigration half without asking your employer to open an office. Two are worth naming because their own governments publish the conditions.

Portugal. The country runs two routes, a temporary-stay visa and a residence visa, both officially described as being for "atividade profissional prestada de forma remota". The residence version carries the qualifier inside its own name: for work performed remotely for outside the national territory. The income test sits in Decreto Regulamentar n.º 4/2022, published in the Diário da República, which asks for average monthly income over the previous three months of at least four times the guaranteed monthly minimum wage. AIMA, the Portuguese migration agency, additionally requires a sworn declaration from a person or company domiciled outside Portugal, and issues the permit for two years, renewable in three-year periods. The label "D8" that circulates online appears nowhere in the Portuguese government's own material.

Spain. The teleworking route was created by the chapter on international teleworkers inserted into Ley 14/2013, and the detail most summaries get wrong is worth having right. An employee holding it "solo podrá trabajar para empresas radicadas fuera del territorio nacional", meaning no Spanish employer at all. The widely quoted 20% allowance applies only to the self-employed version of the permit, and it is a share of professional activity rather than of income. The same law also names holders of this visa as eligible for Spain's special inbound tax regime, which charges 24% up to €600,000 for the year of the move and five years after, on condition that the holder does not generate income attributable to a permanent establishment in Spain. That last condition ties the visa straight back to the section above. The Beckham law covers the regime in full, including who qualifies and what it excludes.

A permit answers where you may live. It does not answer who employs you, and the four routes above still apply on top of it. Our Portugal money guide and Spain money guide run the tax, childcare and healthcare side of each country for an American arriving.

The number your employer is comparing you to

One more figure belongs in this decision, and it is the one that decides whether the arrangement survives a reorganisation. Our Berlin data carries a stored distribution of software engineer total compensation for the Berlin metropolitan region, with a median of EUR 91,048 and a 75th percentile of EUR 115,000. A converted US salary of €129,000 sits above both.

So a company paying you the American number in Berlin is paying above the local market for the role, knows it, and will notice at some point. That is the mechanism behind location-based pay adjustments, and it is worth doing the arithmetic before the conversation rather than during it. Why European salaries are so low explains where that local median comes from, and negotiating a relocation salary covers how to argue the floor.

So, before you ask

Three things are worth settling before the conversation with your manager. Whether you have the right to live in the country at all, since immigration is the gate everything else stands behind and an American passport opens very few European doors on its own. Which of the four routes the company will support, because the answer to that determines your statutory leave, your pension and your protection from dismissal. And what the salary is worth once the destination has taxed it and charged you rent, which is the table at the top of this page and which is the part most people assume they already know.

If the answer to the third question is Sofia at $104,973 against New York at $27,549, that is a large prize and it is worth every hour of the paperwork. If it is Amsterdam at $35,315 against Austin at $77,068, you are paying for the city rather than being paid by it, which is a fine reason to go and a bad reason to expect a raise out of it. Denver against Lisbon and New York against Berlin run the two most common versions of this corridor for three household shapes each.

FAQ

Can I just keep my US payroll and move to Europe quietly?

People do it and it is the route with the sharpest downside. Once you are tax resident somewhere in Europe, that country expects income tax and social contributions on your worldwide employment income, and your employer may have acquired a filing footprint there without knowing. The bill arrives late, with interest, and it lands on both of you. Every other route on this page exists because companies decided that risk was not worth carrying.

Will my employer cut my salary because I moved somewhere cheaper?

Many will, and location-based pay bands are the usual mechanism. It is worth knowing what the cut would have to be before the conversation starts, because the honest comparison is against what the local market pays rather than against your old number. In Berlin the stored median total compensation for software engineers is EUR 91,048 against a converted €129,000, which is exactly why the company is asking.

Do I still pay US tax if I live in Europe?

You still file. The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live, and the two mechanisms that stop you being taxed twice are the foreign earned income exclusion and the foreign tax credit. In a high-tax country the credit usually wipes out the US bill. In a low-tax one it does not, which is the part the cheap-country plan tends to miss.

Does an employer of record change what I take home?

It changes who pays what rather than what you keep. An employer of record makes you a local employee, so you get local statutory leave, local social insurance and local protections, and the company pays the local employer contributions plus a fee for the service. Your net cash is the local employee figure either way. The negotiation is over whether the company funds all that on top of your existing salary or out of it.

Run your own salary and your own shortlist through the calculator before you raise it with anyone. If you are weighing a European offer against the American one instead of trying to keep it, should I take a lower salary in Europe prices that pair line by line, converting a salary from USD to euros covers why the exchange rate is the wrong instrument for it, and equivalent salary abroad is the method underneath all of it.

Sources. Permanent establishment and the 183-day conditions: US Department of the Treasury, United States Model Income Tax Convention, articles 5 and 14. Home-office commentary: OECD, the 2025 update to the Model Tax Convention. Totalization agreements, the count and the detached-worker rule: Social Security Administration, international agreements, with the certificate of coverage also described by the IRS. Portuguese remote-work visa: Decreto Regulamentar n.º 4/2022, Diário da República and AIMA. Spanish teleworking visa and its tax regime: Ley 14/2013, consolidated in the BOE. Estonian employee and employer rates: Maksu- ja Tolliamet. Romanian contribution split: Ministerul Finanțelor, Codul fiscal, articles 138, 156 and 220³. Bulgaria's euro changeover: European Central Bank. US filing obligation and the automatic extension: IRS, US citizens and resident aliens abroad. Foreign earned income exclusion ceiling: IRS, tax inflation adjustments for tax year 2026. German income tax tariff: § 32a EStG; 2026 contribution ceilings: Bundesregierung. Employer contribution schedules are held in data/_employer_contributions.json with a source per country. Every other tax and benefit value carries its own source and last-updated date in data/_meta.json; housing, food and everyday spending are the crowdsourced part of our data and are marked as such in the methodology. Nothing here is tax or immigration advice, and the permanent establishment question in particular is decided on facts a general page cannot see.

Figures are what a local employee on this salary keeps, computed from official sources with a per-value audit trail. Where this page quotes an equivalent salary elsewhere on the site, that figure is the bar an offer has to clear in the destination city rather than a job offer anyone is obliged to make. See the methodology.