Spain tech job market July–September 2026
19,526 unique tech jobs posted in Spain between July and September 2026. What they pay by role, who posts them, and what they ask for.
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A senior tech job ad in Spain publishes a median of €78,000 if it is written in English, and €45,000 if it is written in Spanish. The gap holds in software companies, in other sectors and in IT services firms.
This is our first quarterly report. We combined the tech job ads posted in Spain that we collected from July to September 2026, and we counted each job once, even when it was reposted across several months. That gives 19,526 jobs, three times the sample of a monthly edition. They are not all the job ads in the market; percentages are over this sample. With this sample we can give salaries by role with enough cases, and compare Spain with other countries.
If you hire, the report shows what other companies publish and which roles have the most competition for candidates. If you are looking for a job, it shows which roles get fewer applications and what job ads ask for.
What tech jobs pay in Spain, by role
The median salary published in a tech job ad is €44,000 gross per year. The middle half runs from €35,000 to €56,000.
Software engineer: €58,000 median. Programmer / developer: €34,000
How the published gross annual salary is spread in each role, in thousands of €. The vertical line is the role's median, with its figure next to it. Dashed lines mark roles with fewer than 30 salaries: their shape is not reliable. 1,031 jobs with a readable figure, July–September 2026.
Hover over a curve, or tap it, to see what share of the job ads falls in each €10,000 band.
A software engineer job ad publishes a median of €58,000. A programmer or developer ad for one specific technology (COBOL, Drupal, ServiceNow…) publishes €34,000. We keep them apart because they are different markets. IT services firms post most of the second group.
The software engineer salary has two peaks, one near €40,000 and one between €85,000 and €105,000. The median, €58,000, falls between them. Programmer and QA salaries sit in a narrow band at the low end.
Team management (engineering manager, head, VP, CTO) publishes a median of €75,000, and 10% of those ads go above €111,000. Technical leadership (tech lead, solutions architect) publishes €53,000. Few leadership ads state the salary, and in startups the leadership bands go much higher, as shown below. Product (product managers and product owners) publishes €50,000, QA €38,000 and design €32,000.
Seniority moves salary as much as role does.
| Seniority | Median | Middle half | Jobs with salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior | €25,000 | €20,000–30,000 | 32 |
| Mid or not stated | €40,000 | €34,000–50,000 | 615 |
| Senior or lead | €54,000 | €43,000–73,000 | 384 |
These bands come only from the job ads that state a salary, and those are few, as shown below.
Job ads in English publish higher salaries
51% of the tech job ads posted in Spain are written in English.
At the same seniority, the job ad in English publishes a higher salary than the one in Spanish. For a mid-level job, the published salary has a median of €55,000 in English and €38,000 in Spanish.
Where does the gap come from? We see three causes, and they add up:
- Who posts the ad. Of the English ads that state a salary, 52% come from software companies. Of the Spanish ones, 27%. 64% of software company ads are in English, against 35% of IT services firm ads.
- Seniority. 54% of the English ads with a salary are senior. In Spanish, 30%.
- Who states the salary. Spanish ads state it twice as often (7.5% against 3.1%). In English, it is mostly the top end that states it.
Even so, at the same company type and seniority, the English ad publishes about €20,000 more than the Spanish one.
Senior at a software company: €87,000 in English, €45,000 in Spanish
Published salary by job ad language and seniority, in thousands of €, in three types of company.
A senior ad in English publishes €87,000 at a software company, €70,000 in other sectors and €61,000 at an IT services firm. The senior ad in Spanish publishes a median of €45,000 in all three company types.
Part of the gap can come from which roles are posted in English. “Senior” includes managers and technical leadership, which pay more, and 66% of leadership ads are in English.
Why do they publish more? This data cannot prove it. One hypothesis is that an English ad competes for candidates from all of Europe. Another is that a company headquartered abroad posts it, with a different pay scale. The source does not say where each company has its headquarters, so we cannot separate the two.
The share of English changes by city. In Barcelona, 66% of tech job ads are in English. In Madrid, 43%. English ads also offer stock options almost five times as often (8.1% of them, against 1.7% of the ads written in Spanish).
Only 11% of tech job ads state the salary
Everything above comes from a minority. 89% of tech job ads give no salary figure, exact or as a band. Only 5.3% give an annual figure in euros that can be read.
11% of tech job ads state the salary. In the United States, 52%
% of job ads that publish a salary figure or band. “All”: job ads from all sectors, from Indeed Hiring Lab, August 2026 (Spain: figure published in May 2026). “Tech only”: our sample, July–September 2026.
In the United States, half of job ads publish the salary, and in the United Kingdom, 60%. Spain, across all sectors, is close to Germany. Our figure for tech (11%) is below the 17% that Indeed measures for all of Spain, with a different source and method.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive had to be transposed by 7 June 2026, and Spain did not make it in time. The directive also does not require the salary in the job ad, only before the interview, and the Spanish draft from August does not include that part. Today no legal requirement will move this figure.
Job ads with a salary close more often. Within 30 days, 70% of the ads that state it close, and 60% of the ads that do not. They are also reposted less often (22% and 33%). This is correlation, not cause, because the companies that publish the salary can be a different kind of company.
Salaries at startups and scale-ups
Startups, scale-ups and other innovative companies are a segment of their own. With AI it is growing, and more candidates are interested in it every year. Few of their job ads state the salary, so we look at them separately: what the startups and scale-ups that hire in Spain publish when they do state it. We then compare that with the bands in our own searches with this kind of company.
Startups offer €13,000 to €25,000 more per role
Median published gross annual salary, by role, in thousands of €: all tech job ads in Spain versus those from startups and scale-ups. For startups, one figure per company and role. In AI, only AI engineer. July–September 2026.
In their job ads, startups pay more in every role. A software engineer publishes a median of €75,000, €17,000 more than the same role across all job ads (€58,000). DevOps and platform publishes €72,000, against €47,000. Data is last, at €56,000, and is still €13,000 above the market median. Some of these companies hire remotely across Europe and publish a European band, which raises the top end.
The bands in our searches with startups give figures of the same order. A software engineer has a typical band of €57,500 to €80,000, and the highest bands reach €130,000. Product engineers and FDEs almost never publish a salary in job ads. In our searches they sit in the same range as the software engineer, with midpoints of €65,000 and €70,000, and reach up to €120,000. Leading an engineering team raises the midpoint to €80,000, and the highest band reaches €180,000.
In their job ads, startups put the AI engineer above every other role: a median of €80,000, €25,000 more than across all job ads (€55,000). Across all job ads, the AI engineer publishes €65,000 at software companies and €45,000 at IT services firms. In our searches with startups the band is lower: from €50,000 to €72,500, with a midpoint of €57,500, below the software engineer (€68,750). Levels.fyi gives €54,000 of total compensation for ML and AI software engineers in Spain (130 self-reported salaries, October 2026). The ML engineer is not in the chart: across the market it publishes a median of €40,000, and in startups it does not reach the minimum number of companies we use.
The accepted offers we know of in this segment have a median of €60,000. The band is what the company wants to pay, and the offer is what gets signed.
Junior job ads get three times the applications
There are few junior job ads. Only 3.5% of tech jobs are junior, and each one gets many more applications than a senior one.
Junior: 156 applications per job. Senior: 53
Applications per job, median. 19,526 jobs, July–September 2026.
In software, LinkedIn tags 4.5% of job ads as “Entry level”. In the United States, Indeed also estimates 4.5%, with a different method (first quarter of 2026).
The job ads that LinkedIn tags as entry level ask for years of experience.
61% of “Entry level” job ads ask for 3 or more years of experience
Minimum years of experience the job ad asks for, among ads marked “Entry level” on LinkedIn that give a number (362 of 813).
Of the “Entry level” tech job ads that state how many years they require, 61% ask for three or more and 84% ask for two or more. The ads with “junior” in the title ask for a median of one year.
The entry salary has a median of €25,000, less than half of a senior salary.
More job ads build AI than use it to work
Back to the full sample of tech job ads in Spain. In the startups we work with, coding with AI and with agents is already the norm. Across all job ads, adoption moves more slowly.
33% of tech job ads have a relation to AI. 19% build it (models, generative AI systems, agents) and 14% use it as a work tool, for coding or other tasks.
19% of tech job ads build AI; 14% use it as a tool
How the job relates to AI, read from the full description. 19,488 jobs, July–September 2026.
Of the ads that build AI, 65% work on generative AI or agents. Classic machine learning is a minority.
In our searches, AI-assisted coding is taken for granted. In job ads it appears much less often. 15% of software job ads ask for AI-assisted coding, and 7% of all tech job ads.
At software companies, 10.8% ask for AI-assisted coding. Across all job ads, 6.8%
% of the tech job ads in each group that ask for AI as a coding assistant, read from the description.
At software companies the figure rises to 10.8%, and in ads that offer stock options, the closest to a startup, to 9.7%. At IT services firms and in other sectors it stays near 5.5%. There are two explanations, and probably both are true. One: it is assumed, so nobody writes it. Two: the job ad lags behind what the team already does. A company that requires it can write it in the job ad; today 7% do.
Job ads that ask for AI publish higher salaries. A senior ad that asks for AI use publishes a median of €70,000, one that builds AI €65,000, and one that does not mention it €48,000. The cause may not be AI. English ads relate to AI more often than ads written in Spanish (40% and 25%), and English pays more. The groups are also small, between 67 and 229 cases.
Roles that mix engineering and client work
Some new roles are not purely technical. One is the Forward Deployed Engineer, an engineer who works inside the client to deploy the product. In the United States, job ads for the role grew more than tenfold between January and August 2026, compared with the same period of 2025, according to Lightcast.
In Spain it is still a small role. Job counts are from our sample.
| Role | Jobs | Describe direct client work | Applications per job | Offer stock options | Published salary (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forward Deployed Engineer | 75 | 61% | 64 | 23% | — |
| Product Engineer | 147 | 13% | 62 | 7% | €67,000 |
| AI Engineer | 537 | 8% | 88 | 4.5% | €55,000 |
| Whole tech sample | 19,526 | 6% | 62 | 4.9% | €44,000 |
Client work defines the FDE, and the job ads say so: 61% state explicitly that the job works with clients (“client-facing”, “work directly with clients”, “embedded in their environments”), ten times the tech average (6%). Almost all the others use the word client, without saying that the job works with one. 23% of FDE ads offer stock options, almost five times the average, and it is the clearest startup signal we measure. Only 5 state the salary, and we do not publish medians with fewer than 8.
The Product Engineer, an engineer who also decides what gets built, is posted mostly by product companies; only 14% of its job ads come from IT services firms. Its published salary has a median of €67,000, above the average, though from only 14 salaries.
The AI Engineer has the most competition: 88 applications per job, 40% more than the average (62). Its published salary, a median of €55,000 from 41 salaries, is above the average but below the Product Engineer.
“AI Engineer” appears almost three times as often as “ML Engineer” in the sample (537 jobs and 196). IT services firms post 46% of AI Engineer jobs and 31% of ML Engineer jobs.
Data and DevOps are 28% of jobs; frontend and mobile, under 4%
The chart crosses each role’s share of the market with the applications each job gets.
DevOps: 14% of jobs and 38 applications per job. Frontend: 2.4% and 131
Each point is a role: its share of the market (horizontal axis) and the median number of applications per job (vertical axis). July–September 2026.
Tap a point to see its role and figures.
DevOps and platform, bottom right, has many jobs and the shortest queue. Frontend and design, top left, have few jobs and the longest queues (design, 125 applications per job). For a job seeker, the number of jobs in a role does not predict how much competition there is in it.
Spain advertises more remote or hybrid work than the US or Germany
In software, two in three job ads in Spain (67%) mention remote or hybrid work.
Remote or hybrid: 67% in Spain, 30% in the United States
% of software job ads whose text mentions remote or hybrid work. Spain: July–September 2026, our sample. Other countries: Indeed Hiring Lab, software development job ads, 30 September 2026.
In the United States the figure is 30%, and in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, between 39% and 46%. In all four countries it fell over the last year. Indeed does not publish this series for Spain, so we do not know if it is also falling here.
More than half of those job ads are hybrid. Remote jobs get more applications, a median of 71 per job. Hybrid jobs get 55 and on-site jobs 54.
17% of closed job ads come back within 30 days
These are job ads from the whole market, not from our searches. Of the July job ads whose outcome we know, 69% closed within 30 days. 37% were reposted with a new date within those 30 days, a sign that the job was still open.
After 30 days, 41 in 100 July job ads were still searching
What happened to each July job ad in the 30 days after it was posted. “Came back as a new ad”: the same company posted the same title within 30 days of closing. 3,321 job ads with a known outcome.
After 30 days, 41 in 100 July job ads were still searching. 28 were still open and had been reposted, and 12 closed and came back as a new ad. Only 56 in 100 closed and did not come back.
17% of the job ads that close come back within 30 days as a new ad, with the same company and the same title. It is not always the same vacancy. At an IT services firm, the same title can be a new vacancy for another client.
Breakdown by role, sector, technology and city
The full breakdown by role, over the 19,526 jobs in the sample.
Data, 14% of jobs; DevOps, 14%. Frontend and mobile together, 3.9%
Breakdown by category and sub-role, over 19,526 unique tech jobs in the sample. July–September 2026.
Tap a category to see its sub-roles.
IT services firms post 41% of the jobs that state a sector, and staffing firms 1.4%. Software companies post 24%, and other sectors (banking, industry, health, telecoms) 34%.
Four in ten jobs are posted by an IT services firm
Breakdown by the sector of the company that posts the job, over the jobs that state a sector.
Python appears in 32% of tech job ads
% of the 19,526 jobs in the sample that name the technology in their description · number of jobs.
Madrid and Barcelona account for 63.6% of jobs
% of jobs · number of jobs in the sample. Madrid and Barcelona include their metropolitan area.
Our reading
Development job ads split into two groups of similar size. One is generalist roles close to the product: software engineer, product engineer, FDE, AI engineer and full stack. They are 18% of the jobs in the sample. The other is roles tied to one technology: Java, .NET, PHP, or COBOL or ServiceNow programmer. They are 14%.
The two groups ask for different things. 42% of generalist ads build AI, against 7% of single-technology ads. 58% and 34% are written in English. IT services firms post 38% and 57%.
The highest salaries are in the generalist group, but the title explains little. A senior generalist ad publishes a median of €65,000, and a senior single-technology ad €45,000. If both are in Spanish, they publish almost the same: €41,000 and €44,000. At the same seniority, language and company type, the generalist role publishes between 7% and 14% more. An ad written in English publishes between 50% and 60% more. Of the job ads that publish €80,000 or more, 98% are in English.
Senior: the language of the job ad matters more than the type of role
Median published salary in senior development job ads, in thousands of €, by role group and job ad language. July–September 2026.
Job ad in Spanish Job ad in English
Generalistsoftware engineer, product engineer, FDE, AI engineer, full stack
28 salaries in Spanish · 44 in English
Specific technologyJava, .NET, PHP, COBOL, ServiceNow…
78 salaries in Spanish · 13 in English
When we compare job ads that are equal in everything else, language is still what moves the published salary most. Being senior adds less than half as much. Being generalist, building AI or being at a software company add little, and in the last two cases the effect cannot be told apart from zero.
English raises the published salary more than any other trait: +59%
How much more a job ad with each trait publishes than one that is the same in everything else. Development job ads with a salary: 465 job ads from 185 companies, July–September 2026.
effect 95% confidence interval in grey, effects not distinguishable from zero
For job seekers, those salaries are at product companies that hire in English and build with AI. Changing title is not enough: a senior full stack job publishes a median of €40,000, even though it is a generalist role.
For anyone hiring one of those profiles, the reference is not the median of job ads in Spain, but what senior English-language job ads publish: more than €70,000.
All of this comes from the job ads that state a salary, and they are few. With this data we cannot tell whether those companies pay more because they hire in English or because they are headquartered abroad.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average software engineer salary in Spain?
In job ads posted in Spain from July to September 2026, the median published salary for a software engineer was €58,000 gross per year. Across all tech roles, the median was €44,000, with the middle half between €35,000 and €56,000. At startups and scale-ups, the software engineer median was €75,000.
Do English-speaking tech jobs in Spain pay more?
Yes, in published salaries. 51% of tech job ads in Spain are written in English. A senior ad in English publishes a median of €78,000, against €45,000 for a senior ad in Spanish. At the same company type and seniority, the gap is about €20,000.
How is the tech job market in Spain in 2026?
We counted 19,526 unique tech jobs between July and September 2026. Data and DevOps are 28% of jobs; frontend and mobile, under 4%. IT services firms post 41% of the jobs that state a sector. 89% of job ads do not state a salary, and junior jobs are 3.5% of the total, with three times the applications of a senior job.
Methodology: how we measured it · 15 notes
The sample
19,526 unique tech jobs collected in Spain between 1 July and 30 September 2026, from 25,386 job ads. Each job counts once in the quarter, in the month it was first posted. It is the largest sample of tech job ads in Spain that we know of, collected from job platforms with three or four sweeps a month, but it is not a census: some job ads are not collected. Totals are a floor and percentages are over what was collected. A job is the same company with the same title, even if it is posted several times or in several months; 10% of the quarter's jobs appear in more than one month. August was collected in four sweeps and July and September in three, so August weighs slightly more. For this reason we do not publish month-to-month trends within the quarter.
Changes from the monthly editions
There are two. First: no job is left without a role. We classified the 4,881 titles that were previously left out, and 68% were not tech jobs (industrial engineering, operations, sales). For this reason, and because a job posted in two months counts once (2,295 repeats), the total is lower than the sum of the July, August and September editions. Second: the three months are measured with the same rules, including the removal of jobs defined by an ERP or CRM platform (SAP, Dynamics, Salesforce, Odoo, Pega), also when the job is a development job.
What a tech job is
We classify each title into a role. From this edition, no title is left unclassified: we assigned the 4,881 titles that were previously left out with a model, and checked a sample by hand. Data titles that do not name a specific role (consulting, management, general internships) go into “Data: management and consulting”. Tech leads and project managers for a technology count in Engineering leadership and in Project management, not in Backend. 68% were not technology. We exclude engineering that is not software and jobs defined by an ERP or CRM platform (SAP, Dynamics, Salesforce, Odoo, Pega…), including development jobs. Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Engineer, AI Engineer and ML Engineer are counted by the exact title of the job ad.
Programmer / Developer and Engineering leadership
“Programmer / Developer” is a role of its own from this edition: job ads titled “programador”, “desarrollador” or “analista programador” (Spanish for programmer, developer and analyst programmer) with a specific technology (COBOL, Drupal, ServiceNow, Power Apps…), without “software engineer” in the title. They are typical of IT services firms and are paid differently; Michael Page and Tecnoempleo also treat them separately. Engineering leadership is split into engineering management (engineering manager, head, VP, CTO) and technical leadership (tech lead, solutions or enterprise architect). Software architect stays in Software engineer.
Salaries
We read the salary field of the job ad and the figure written in the text, which is where IT services firms put it. Gross annual, in euros; for a band we take the midpoint. 1,031 jobs give a readable figure (5.3%). These are salaries from the job ads that state one, not from the whole market. We only publish groups with 8 salaries or more. The curve for each role goes through the number of salaries in each €10,000 band and is zero in bands with no job ads: what you see and the % shown on hover come from the same count. Curves with fewer than 30 salaries are dashed: their shape is not reliable. Emerging roles (FDE, founding engineer) just reach 8, but they mix different titles, so we leave them out. Salaries per role: Backend 175, Data 128, DevOps / Platform 108, Full Stack 83, AI / ML 81, Product 75, Programmer / Developer 66, Security 61, Software engineer 57, QA 49, Frontend 40, Design 27, Technical leadership 23, Mobile 18, Project management 17, Engineering management 15. English versus Spanish is compared within each type of company (software, other sectors and IT services firms), because software companies post more in English and pay differently. Staffing is left out of that comparison: it posts for third parties, and its mid-level English group (9 salaries, median €100,000) does not look like the rest. The monthly editions only read the field, so their medians came out higher and are not comparable with these.
Two development groups (our reading)
Within development roles, “generalist” is generalist software engineer, full stack, product engineer, AI engineer, agents / LLM, FDE and founding engineer; “specific technology” is backend Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Node, Go or Rust, frontend with a framework, native mobile and programmer / developer. We also tested a second definition, by title (if it names a technology, it goes into the second group): the weights change (11% and 16%), the conclusions do not. The effect of the group, the language and the company type comes from a regression on the log of the published salary, with seniority, language, company type, relation to AI and remote as controls, and errors clustered by company. High salaries are concentrated: of the 101 job ads that publish €80,000 or more, 28 come from a single company. Without it, the median of a senior job ad in English drops from €78,000 to €72,000, and the regression does not change.
Startups and scale-ups
Two sources. The chart comes from job ads: salaries published from July to September by 47 startups and scale-ups hiring in Spain. We chose them one by one and checked that they have their own product, were founded around 2010 or later and grow with investment; we exclude those bought by a large group, listed companies, IT services firms and staffing. One figure per company and role, the mean of its jobs, so that a company with many job ads does not weigh more. Only roles with 7 companies or more. The second source is the salary bands of nothiring hiring processes, aggregated and without names. No corporates or large IT services firms, and no roles that are not tech. One band per company and role group. Minimum and maximum are the median of the minimums and of the maximums; typical is the median of the midpoints. The cap is the highest maximum of the group's bands. A band with only a maximum counts for the maximum and the cap. Data engineer includes data engineering and infrastructure. Leadership includes only team management. The accepted offers have a median of €60,000.
Applications
The source counts them, and it stops counting at 200. The medians stay below that cap, but 42.4% of junior job ads and 11.6% of senior ones reach it.
Roles that mix engineering and clients
The roles in the table are found by title, not by the category in the breakdown. “Describe direct work with clients” counts job ads whose description says the job works with clients (“client-facing”, “working directly with clients”, “embedded” with the client); the generic mention of “our clients”, which any IT services firm writes, does not count. Stock options are read from the full description. The salary is only published with 8 salaries or more.
AI
The relation to AI comes from reading the full description. “With stock options” is the best proxy we have for a startup, because the source does not give company size. “Asks for AI-assisted coding” is a minimum: a job ad that builds AI and also asks for a coding assistant counts as “builds it”.
Sector
The company itself declares its sector, and it can declare several. When an IT services firm also declares “banking”, it counts as an IT services firm. In the cuts by company type we use three groups: software companies (software, internet, cybersecurity, digital media), other sectors (banking, industry, health, retail…) and IT services firms. Staffing goes with IT services firms in the breakdown, and separately in salaries.
Comparisons with other countries
The figures for other countries are from Indeed Hiring Lab: another source and another method, so they serve as an order of magnitude. For published salary, Indeed counts all sectors and we count only technology. For remote, both sources count the job ads whose text mentions remote or hybrid work, and those that mention nothing count as not remote. Indeed measures all software job ads on its site in each country; we measure those in our sample in Spain. For this reason the comparison gives an order of magnitude and not an exact difference: with stricter or broader criteria, Spain falls between 60% and 72%. The split between remote and hybrid is approximate: a hybrid job ad that says “teletrabajo” (remote work) can count as remote. Indeed does not publish this series for Spain.
Language
We detect the language of the job ad from the most frequent words in its text and check it by hand on a sample. We count the language of the job ad, not whether the job asks for English.
Closures and reposts
We follow each job ad for 30 days from when it was posted. July cohort: 3,311 jobs with a known outcome; another 2,807 left the source's window with no closure signal and do not count. August gives almost the same: 68% closed and 37% reposted. Closure is inferred from the job ad no longer appearing; we estimate 1–2% false closures per week. A job ad that comes back does not prove it is a ghost job: at an IT services firm, the same title can be another vacancy. In the flow diagram each job ad goes into one box only: a job ad that was reposted and then closed counts with the closed ones. For this reason the “Reposted” box (28%) is smaller than the 37% that was reposted. The diagram counts the row of each unique job in the quarter (3,321 jobs), and the monthly calculation, 3,311.
What we read with a model
The relation to AI, years of experience, culture and whether the salary is stated come from reading the full description with a language model: 99.9% of jobs.