70% of Romanian IT professionals cluster in just three cities

Bucharest, Cluj, and Timiş gather 70% of Romania’s 142,000 IT professionals, who also enjoy some of the highest salaries in the industry. Corporations and companies located in these areas employ around 98,000 people in IT and pay them handsomely, according to Ziarul Financiar calculations based on data from the National Institute of Statistics (INS).

An IT professional in Bucharest earns upwards of RON 9,000 (EUR 1,820), and similar wages can be found in Cluj as well. In Timiş, meanwhile, salaries hover around RON 7,800 last year.

Sometimes, however, salaries for IT&C personnel are higher in Cluj and Timiş than in Bucharest. Sorina Faier, managing partner at recruitment company Searchers, says that this happens because a smaller number of candidates are present in the two cities than in Bucharest, while the demand from employers remains high.

Salaries in IT in Romania are low relative to the wages of professionals in the same industry in different EU countries. An average IT consultant in Germany can earn_Consultant/Salary) around EUR 2,800 per month, while some salaries go much higher.

Nevertheless, despite the comparatively lower wages, a Romanian IT professional can benefit from the country’s low cost of living. A 2022 Codecool study compared the annual wages of junior, middle, and senior programmers in 29 European countries and adjusted them to the cost of living in each country.

The study found that a Romanian junior programmer earns around EUR 11,300 per year, a middle one EUR 21,800, and a senior programmer earns approximately EUR 35,500. Adjusted for living costs, this means that the salary of an IT novice in Romania is 25% more than that of one in Poland or Croatia, placing the country at 16th in the ranking of adjusted income, and ahead of all other Eastern European countries.

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