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How much do software developers earn in Ukraine in 2026?
The median Ukrainian software developer earned $3,500 a month after tax in June 2026. That is the headline number from the summer 2026 salary survey by DOU, the main Ukrainian developer community, based on 4,541 developers who live in Ukraine or plan to return. Seniors earn a median of $4,500, middle developers $2,500 and juniors $950.
This page goes further than the headline. DOU publishes its raw answers as an open dataset, so we recalculated the June 2026 and June 2025 waves ourselves to get numbers DOU does not show in its articles: every major role by seniority, year-on-year change by specialization, pay by English level, and stack by seniority. Our recalculation reproduces DOU's published medians, so you can use both side by side. We added hiring data from Djinni, the largest Ukrainian tech job board, as of 1 November 2026.
All amounts are US dollars per month, net of tax, which is how Ukrainian salaries are quoted. If you are looking for what a company pays per hour to hire a Ukrainian developer through an agency or as a freelancer, read our guide on Ukraine developer rates. This page is about what the engineers themselves take home.
Key findings
- Flat median. The median developer salary is $3,500, unchanged from June 2024 and up $50 from December 2025 (DOU). Year on year it moved from $3,400 to $3,500 by our calculation.
- Seniors are down, juniors are up. The senior median fell from $4,700 in June 2025 to $4,500 in June 2026, while junior and middle medians rose by 4 to 6%. The senior drop shows up in every large specialization: back-end, front-end, full-stack and mobile.
- Back-end and mobile pay the most. Median salary is $4,000 for mobile developers and $3,780 for back-end, against $3,000 for front-end and full-stack. Senior back-end developers earn $4,700, senior full-stack $4,100.
- QA grew fastest. Manual QA rose 11% to $2,000 and automation QA 11% to $3,663, while DevOps fell 6% to $3,750 and the data, ML and AI group fell 5% to $3,275.
- Stack still matters. Scala developers have the highest median at $6,400 (DOU). Senior Go developers earn $6,000, senior Python developers $5,000. JavaScript is the lowest-paid large language at $2,700.
- Better English, higher pay. Developers with upper-intermediate English earn a median of $4,000 and those with advanced English $4,518, against $3,000 for intermediate, by our calculation.
- The job market is tight for candidates. On Djinni, the number of developer vacancies receiving applications fell from 4,065 in November 2025 to 1,704 in October 2026, and the average number of applications per vacancy rose from 19.9 to 54.8.
Salaries by role and seniority
The table below covers the main roles in a software team. It is our calculation from the June 2026 DOU open dataset, using the same sample rule as DOU: respondents who live in Ukraine or plan to return. Cells with fewer than 20 answers are left empty. Where DOU published the same figure, our number matches it, for example automation QA $3,663, DevOps $3,750, design $2,475 and senior DevOps $5,100.
Median net monthly salary by role and level, June 2026:
| Role | Answers | Median | Middle 50% | Junior | Middle | Senior | Lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Back-end developer | 1,614 | $3,780 | $2,400 - $5,100 | $1,000 | $2,520 | $4,700 | $5,100 |
| Front-end developer | 958 | $3,000 | $1,800 - $4,400 | $970 | $2,150 | $4,300 | $4,450 |
| Full-stack developer | 846 | $3,000 | $1,900 - $4,500 | $895 | $2,400 | $4,100 | $5,000 |
| Mobile developer | 408 | $4,000 | $2,700 - $5,025 | $990 | $2,835 | $4,625 | $4,750 |
| Embedded developer | 90 | $3,250 | $2,000 - $4,500 | - | $2,500 | $4,400 | - |
| Automation QA | 327 | $3,663 | $2,300 - $4,550 | $1,090 | $2,375 | $4,000 | $5,000 |
| Manual QA | 1,074 | $2,000 | $1,300 - $2,700 | $800 | $1,750 | $2,800 | $3,300 |
| DevOps engineer | 387 | $3,750 | $2,250 - $5,500 | $1,000 | $2,900 | $5,100 | $5,950 |
| Data engineer | 149 | $3,780 | $2,150 - $5,680 | $950 | $3,150 | $5,200 | - |
| ML or AI engineer | 91 | $3,000 | $1,335 - $4,550 | - | $2,800 | $5,000 | - |
| Data scientist | 57 | $3,000 | $2,000 - $4,500 | - | $2,600 | - | - |
| Business analyst | 322 | $2,562 | $1,700 - $3,600 | $907 | $2,200 | $3,400 | $4,185 |
| Project manager | 487 | $2,200 | $1,446 - $3,125 | $904 | $2,000 | $3,400 | $3,300 |
| Product manager | 243 | $3,200 | $2,400 - $4,500 | - | $2,700 | $4,300 | $4,700 |
| UI/UX and product designer | 307 | $2,475 | $1,590 - $3,370 | $820 | $2,000 | $3,000 | $4,000 |
"Middle 50%" is the range between the lower and upper quartile. "Lead" combines team leads and tech leads. Developer rows use the respondent's main specialization; the other rows use the job title they chose.
What stands out:
- Seniority is the main driver. Within every role, a senior earns roughly three and a half to five times a junior. The gap between roles at the same level is much smaller: senior back-end, mobile, DevOps and data engineers all sit between $4,600 and $5,200.
- Front-end and full-stack sit below back-end at every level. A senior full-stack developer earns $600 less than a senior back-end developer, a middle front-end developer $370 less.
- Automation pays in QA. An automation QA engineer earns $1,663 more than a manual tester at the median, and a senior automation engineer $1,200 more than a senior manual one.
- Data, ML and AI roles spread widely. The middle 50% for ML and AI engineers runs from $1,335 to $4,550. DOU notes that the upper quartile for senior data science specialists is $7,075 and for senior ML engineers $6,500.
- Management pays less than engineering at the same level. Senior project managers earn $3,400, about 28% less than senior back-end developers. Product managers earn more than project managers at every level.
Salaries by seniority, 2025 vs 2026
Developer pay by level, our calculation from the June 2025 and June 2026 DOU datasets, with the figure DOU published for June 2026:
| Level | Answers 2026 | Median June 2025 | Median June 2026 | Change | Upper quartile 2026 | DOU published, June 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Junior | 445 | $932 | $990 | +6% | $1,392 | $950 |
| Middle | 1,485 | $2,400 | $2,500 | +4% | $3,100 | $2,500 |
| Senior | 1,873 | $4,700 | $4,500 | -4% | $5,600 | $4,500 |
| Team lead | 274 | $5,300 | $5,000 | -6% | $6,000 | - |
| Tech lead | 287 | $5,600 | $5,500 | -2% | $7,000 | $5,500 |
| Architect | 66 | $6,900 | $7,000 | +1% | $8,375 | $7,000 |
| All developers | 4,541 | $3,400 | $3,500 | +3% | $5,000 | $3,500 |
Our junior median differs from DOU's published $950 because DOU cleans part of the data before publishing; every other published figure in this table matches ours.
DOU also publishes three points we did not recalculate: staff engineers have the highest median among developer titles at $7,130, principal engineers $5,925, and interns gained $100 in six months.
How experience translates into pay
Pay grows quickly with years in the profession and then flattens. According to DOU, developers with eight years of experience had a median of $4,200 in June 2026 and those with nine years $5,000. After about nine years, more experience no longer brings a noticeable rise: $5,000 is also the most common median for developers with 11 to 12 and 14 to 20 years in the field. Newcomers with less than a year of experience earned $400 to $600 in the summer 2025 wave.
Djinni shows the same curve from the hiring side. Data for the development category as of 1 November 2026:
| Experience | Active candidates | Candidate expectations, middle 50% | Median salary range in new vacancies | Median salary of confirmed hires, last 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 591 | $500 - $700 | $400 - $700 | $500 |
| 1 - 2 years | 1,164 | $600 - $1,000 | $700 - $1,500 | $800 |
| 2 - 3 years | 1,035 | $1,000 - $1,700 | $1,500 - $2,700 | $1,400 |
| 3 - 5 years | 2,677 | $1,500 - $3,000 | $2,000 - $4,000 | $2,275 |
| 5+ years | 9,458 | $3,000 - $5,000 | $4,000 - $5,500 | $4,000 |
Two things are visible here. First, 63% of active developer candidates on Djinni have five or more years of experience, so the market is crowded at the top. Second, confirmed hires land inside the range candidates ask for and near or below the lower end of what vacancies advertise: at five or more years, candidates ask $3,000 to $5,000, vacancies advertise $4,000 to $5,500, and the median hire is $4,000.
Salaries by programming language and stack
The language a developer works in changes pay by up to a factor of two. Median net monthly salary by main programming language, June 2026. The "All levels" column matches DOU's published medians; the middle and senior columns are our calculation from the same dataset.
| Main language | Answers | All levels | Middle | Senior |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TypeScript | 1,173 | $3,300 | $2,500 | $4,500 |
| C# / .NET | 610 | $3,700 | $2,500 | $4,450 |
| Java | 500 | $4,000 | $2,500 | $4,800 |
| JavaScript | 430 | $2,700 | $2,000 | $4,000 |
| PHP | 415 | $3,300 | $2,300 | $4,000 |
| Python | 344 | $3,800 | $2,600 | $5,000 |
| C++ | 183 | $3,760 | $2,800 | $4,500 |
| Kotlin | 176 | $4,200 | $2,800 | $4,650 |
| Swift | 158 | $4,250 | $3,000 | $4,800 |
| Go | 131 | $4,000 | $2,875 | $6,000 |
| Dart (Flutter) | 71 | $3,300 | $2,800 | $4,500 |
| Ruby | 53 | $4,500 | - | $5,000 |
According to DOU, Scala developers have the highest median of any language at $6,400 and senior Scala developers $6,300, from a small group of answers. Salesforce Apex, Go, Java and Rust developers all sit between $4,000 and $4,050.
Notable stack trends:
- TypeScript is the most common language (26% of developers, DOU) and pays exactly the market median for seniors, $4,500. DOU notes that the senior TypeScript median has fallen from $5,000 in 2023.
- Python seniors are rising. The senior Python median grew from $4,640 in December 2025 to $5,000 in June 2026 (DOU), and Python had the largest growth in upper-quartile pay of any language, from $5,150 to $5,863.
- Go seniors jumped. The senior Go median rose by $1,000 in six months to $6,000 (DOU).
- PHP seniors are slipping. Their median fell by $325 compared with June 2025 (DOU), to $4,000 by our calculation.
- Frameworks. Ruby on Rails leads frameworks with a $4,500 median, followed by native Android and iOS SDKs, Jetpack Compose, SwiftUI, UIKit, Combine, Spring and Symfony at $4,000 to $4,200 (DOU).
Where demand is: candidates per vacancy
Salary is only half the picture for anyone hiring. Djinni shows how many active candidates there are for each open vacancy. Snapshot as of 1 November 2026:
| Djinni category | Active candidates | Vacancies online | Candidates per vacancy | Median salary of confirmed hires, last 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript / front-end | 3,113 | 36 | 86 | $1,500 |
| React | 949 | 13 | 73 | $2,500 |
| PHP | 1,346 | 44 | 31 | $2,000 |
| Manual QA | 2,583 | 88 | 29 | $1,500 |
| Fullstack | 3,000 | 139 | 22 | $2,500 |
| Python | 1,790 | 114 | 16 | $2,375 |
| Java | 1,224 | 78 | 16 | $5,500 |
| Automation QA | 1,086 | 101 | 11 | $2,500 |
| DevOps | 1,074 | 125 | 9 | $3,000 |
| Product manager | 908 | 166 | 5 | $3,500 |
| ML / AI | 610 | 120 | 5 | $4,500 |
| Data science | 834 | 177 | 5 | $2,500 |
| Data engineer | 386 | 100 | 4 | $2,500 |
Hire medians for a single month and a narrow category rest on few hires and jump from month to month, so read that column as an indication only. The candidates-per-vacancy ratio is the more stable signal: front-end and manual QA have many more candidates than openings, while data, ML, AI and product roles have only a handful of candidates per vacancy.
Across all categories on Djinni, the number of vacancies receiving applications fell from 14,731 in November 2025 to 10,677 in October 2026, and applications per vacancy nearly doubled from 13.5 to 25.6. In the development category the change was sharper: from 4,065 to 1,704 vacancies and from 19.9 to 54.8 applications per vacancy. The median salary of confirmed developer hires was $2,500 in both November 2025 and October 2026.
Salaries by city, work format and company type
City
According to DOU, the highest developer medians in June 2026 are in Kyiv, Ternopil and Cherkasy at $3,900, followed by Lviv at $3,800, Ivano-Frankivsk at $3,541 and Dnipro at $3,365. The lowest are in Poltava ($2,400), Kropyvnytskyi ($2,350), Sumy ($2,250), Zaporizhzhia ($2,160) and Mykolaiv ($2,100). Ternopil rose by $1,400 in six months, while Poltava and Sumy fell by $700 and $750. DOU suggests that better-paid engineers are moving to calmer regions such as Ternopil. Kyiv accounts for 37% of respondents, Lviv for 18% and Dnipro for 6%.
Remote, hybrid and office
72% of Ukrainian developers work fully remote, 24% hybrid and only 4% in the office only (DOU). Remote and hybrid developers earn almost the same, $3,572 and $3,500, while office-only developers earn $2,350. For data and ML specialists the picture is reversed: hybrid workers earn $3,523 against $3,200 for remote or office.
Company type
Senior developers earn the most in product companies ($4,800), followed by outstaffing companies ($4,650) and startups ($4,600), according to DOU. Startup pay for seniors fell by $400 in six months. Middle developers earn most in outstaffing ($2,700). Across all levels, our calculation gives a median of $4,000 in product companies, $3,900 in outstaffing and $3,200 in service (outsourcing) companies.
English level
By our calculation from the June 2026 dataset, developers' median salary rises steadily with English:
| English level | Answers | Median salary |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-intermediate | 392 | $2,500 |
| Intermediate | 1,333 | $3,000 |
| Upper-intermediate | 2,183 | $4,000 |
| Advanced | 546 | $4,518 |
Part of this gap reflects seniority, since senior engineers tend to have better English, but it also reflects access: most well-paid roles in Ukraine serve foreign clients.
Ukrainian developers abroad
Ukrainian developers living abroad earn more, net of local taxes: a senior median of $5,200 against $4,500 in Ukraine, $2,850 against $2,500 for middle developers and $6,500 against $5,500 for leads and above (DOU, 986 answers from abroad). The highest net medians are in Portugal, Spain and the UK.
Year-on-year change by role
Median net monthly salary by role, June 2025 vs June 2026, our calculation from the DOU datasets:
| Role | June 2025 | June 2026 | Change | Senior June 2025 | Senior June 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Back-end developer | $3,590 | $3,780 | +5% | $5,000 | $4,700 |
| Front-end developer | $2,825 | $3,000 | +6% | $4,500 | $4,300 |
| Full-stack developer | $3,000 | $3,000 | 0% | $4,500 | $4,100 |
| Mobile developer | $3,800 | $4,000 | +5% | $5,000 | $4,625 |
| Manual QA | $1,800 | $2,000 | +11% | $2,940 | $2,800 |
| Automation QA | $3,300 | $3,663 | +11% | $4,012 | $4,000 |
| DevOps engineer | $4,000 | $3,750 | -6% | $5,500 | $5,100 |
| Data, ML and AI (all titles) | $3,439 | $3,275 | -5% | $5,210 | $5,150 |
| UI/UX and product design | $2,350 | $2,475 | +5% | $3,000 | $3,000 |
| Project manager | $2,350 | $2,200 | -6% | $3,900 | $3,400 |
| Product manager | $3,000 | $3,200 | +7% | $4,200 | $4,300 |
The overall medians for back-end, front-end and mobile went up while their senior medians went down. That is a mix effect: by our calculation, seniors made up 37% of developer answers in June 2025 and 41% in June 2026, while juniors fell from 13% to 10%, which pushes the overall median up even when each level earns the same or less. For a realistic view of pay, compare level by level.
What an employer pays on top of the salary
Ukrainian salaries are quoted net of tax, and most engineers work as individual entrepreneurs or as gig specialists of companies in the Diia.City regime, where taxes are low and paid by the engineer. The surveys used here do not measure employer cost directly, so we do not add a percentage. Our guide on Ukraine developer rates explains the tax regimes and works through the cost of hiring a senior engineer directly, including equipment, recruitment and paid time off.
How salaries relate to agency rates
A salary is not a rate. A senior developer's median of $4,500 a month works out to roughly $28 per working hour at 160 hours, but nobody can hire that engineer for $28. A freelancer has to cover taxes, gaps between contracts and equipment; an agency also covers management, QA, code review, replacements and its margin. As typical 2026 market ranges, senior Ukrainian freelancers charge $35 to $50 per hour and agencies bill $30 to $50 for senior engineers and $40 to $65 for tech leads.
Two practical conclusions for buyers:
- Flat salaries mean stable rates. With senior pay flat or slightly down since 2023, Ukrainian agency rates have stayed broadly stable. A quote that is much higher than these ranges usually reflects overhead outside Ukraine, not engineer pay.
- Specialization matters more than country averages. A senior Go, Scala or data engineer costs noticeably more than a senior PHP or JavaScript developer, in salary and therefore in rate. Compare offers for the stack you actually need.
For the full comparison of salary, freelance and agency prices, read Ukraine developer rates. For time zones, war-time continuity, contracts and IP, read our guide on outsourcing software development to Ukraine. If you want a team rather than individual hires, see how our dedicated development team works, or learn more about us as a software development company in Ukraine.
Methodology
Sources.
- DOU salary survey, summer 2026. DOU, the main Ukrainian developer community, surveyed IT specialists in May and June 2026 and published a series of reports between 13 July and 20 August 2026: developers (4,541 answers), QA (1,975), managers (1,126), analysts and data, ML and AI specialists (750 and 350), design and non-technical roles (including 307 designers), and DevOps, SRE, security and system administration (489 DevOps and SRE). DOU publishes the raw answers as an open dataset; the June 2026 file holds 14,361 answers from all IT roles.
- DOU salary survey, summer 2025. The June 2025 open dataset, used for year-on-year comparisons, with 5,114 developers in DOU's published sample.
- DOU salary survey, winter 2026 (published 12 January 2026), for six-month changes quoted by DOU.
- Djinni salary statistics. Djinni's public salary page, calculated on 1 November 2026 and read on 2 November 2026: active candidates, candidates' salary expectations, salary ranges in new vacancies and the median salary of confirmed hires, plus twelve months of history from November 2025 to October 2026.
Our calculations. We recalculated medians and quartiles from the DOU open datasets with the same sample rule as DOU: respondents who live in Ukraine or plan to return, with a positive salary. Developer rows use the "Software Engineering & Architecture" category and the respondent's main specialization; other rows use the job title. We do not show medians for groups with fewer than 20 answers. Our recalculation matches DOU's published medians for all developers ($3,500), seniors ($4,500), middle developers ($2,500), tech leads ($5,500), architects ($7,000), automation QA ($3,663), manual QA ($2,000), DevOps ($3,750), data, ML and AI ($3,275), data engineers ($3,780), design ($2,475), and the published languages. Small differences, such as the junior median, come from DOU's own data cleaning.
What the numbers mean.
- All amounts are US dollars per month, net of tax.
- DOU includes people who are currently not working (about 7% of developers in June 2026) with their last IT salary.
- DOU is a voluntary survey with a self-selected sample, not a random sample of the market. Djinni reflects candidates and vacancies on one job board.
- Djinni figures are a live snapshot. Monthly hire medians in narrow categories rest on few hires and change month to month.
- Survey medians describe the whole market. A specific offer depends on the company, the domain, English and the individual.
This research is by Lytvynov Production, a Ukrainian software development agency. We used only data the sources publish openly.
