The past few weeks have seen initiatives multiply across Europe to tempt disgruntled researchers in the US into making a move across the Atlantic as President Donald Trump clamps down on the country’s research and higher education institutes.
This month European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a €500m funding package as part of a new initiative dubbed “Choose Europe for Science” to attract foreign talent to the EU. It followed a similar programme called “Choose France for Science”, launched in April, and the announcement of a new fund for foreign scientists in the Netherlands. In the UK, a £50m (€59m) scheme is being implemented to attract researchers from abroad.
These attempts have been met with scepticism from European scientists, with many pointing out that the region’s lower salaries and heavier bureaucracy would be enough to put off talent relocating from the US. Others argued that the financial equation could be balanced out.
“Sure, salaries in the US might be higher,” Andreas Schmidt, the cofounder of German business angel group Springboard Health Angels, tells Sifted. “But if you do the math of living in New York, Boston or San Francisco, accounting for tuition for your kids and cost of living, to have a similar quality of life compared to Germany or France, the equation all of a sudden is not so clear.”
The situation varies significantly from one country to the next, with vastly different compensation packages, government funding and costs of living depending on where you look.
Focusing on OECD countries in Europe, Sifted browsed through available data to figure out how different countries compare.
Where do researchers earn the most in Europe?
Compensation packages vary significantly across countries and industries, with researchers in the private sector generally earning higher salaries than in publicly-funded academic institutions and research centres.
Switzerland stands out as the region’s leader when it comes to salaries. “They have some of the best schools in the world and have a lot of resources,” Jaime Llodra, a visiting researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland, tells Sifted.
Post-doctoral fellows — early-stage scientists conducting research after having completed a PhD — can expect to earn CHF 92.5k (€98.6k) annually from their first year at public university ETH Zurich, according to the institute’s website. Across the University of Geneva, the University of Basel and ETH Zurich, the average wage for an entry-level assistant professor is CHF 139k (€148k). Salaries go up to CHF 263k (€280k) for highly experienced researchers.
Swiss salaries, however, aren’t exactly reflective of compensation packages across the rest of Europe.
Across Belgium’s Ghent University, KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp, postdoctoral fellows have a starting salary of €61.7k annually, while on the higher end, senior research directors can expect on average €140k per year. In the Netherlands, the salary grades for the University of Leiden indicate similar compensation levels: postdoctoral fellows start at €40k, and salaries extend to nearly €150k per year for experienced professors and senior research directors.
In Germany, where a salary scale for academics is predefined by the state, postdoctoral fellows start at €54k per year on average, going up to nearly €100k for senior professors. This can vary from one federal state to the next.
In the UK, salary scales from the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge show that compensation for entry-level postdocs starts at £34k (€40k), while wages for experienced professors reach £80k (€95k).
France, on the other hand, seems to be lagging behind. At the prestigious CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), early-stage research associates can expect a salary of €28k per year; towards the end of their career, researchers are paid around €79k.
“The salaries of French researchers are not at all competitive in comparison to many other European countries,” Gael Varoquaux, research director of French national institute for science and technology Inria, tells Sifted.
Which countries spend the most on R&D?
Europe is generally far behind the US when it comes to overall spend on R&D, which includes all investments across the public and private sectors.
In 2022, the US spent 3.59% of GDP on R&D. Meanwhile, two decades ago the EU set the goal to spend 3% of GDP on R&D — a target it has consistently failed to reach but which von der Leyen has now pledged to achieve by 2030. The UK’s R&D spend, for its part, stood at 2.77% of GDP in 2022.
It’s not all bad news: some countries in Europe have already surpassed the 3% threshold, such as Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland.
Switzerland tops costs of living
The OECD’s Price Level Indices (PLI) reflect the average price of goods and services in one country compared to a baseline. The data shows that in 2022, prices in Switzerland were 37% higher than the OECD average — while US prices were 25% higher than the OECD average.
While the UK and Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark are on the higher end of living costs, cheaper prices can be found in Belgium, Germany and France.
The costs of housing and education also differ across Europe. German bank N26 recently carried out a study looking at the cost of studying in a number of countries; it found the price of one year at university ranges from €1.5k in Belgium to £9.5k (€11.4k) in England.
Similarly, a 2023 study carried out by the European Commission found that renting a one-bedroom flat in a “residential area of good quality” costs a monthly average of €2.2k in London (£1.9k) and Geneva (CHF 2.15k), but €1.25k in Berlin and €980 in Brussels.
