Best Countries for UX Designers in 2025: Salaries, Jobs, and Cost of Living
🎥 This post is also available as a YouTube video. Originally published on my Substack.
As a product designer, you might consider moving to another country for personal or professional reasons. Not everyone has the luxury of doing that. But if you do, how do you choose where to move to?
I tried to answer that question and analysed countries (and US cities) based on:
- Designers salaries
- Taxes
- Design jobs
- Cost of living
- Quality of life
You can find other important factors like healthcare, parental leave, visa options, citizenship paths, weather, and safety elsewhere, while I focused on the data that isn’t available anywhere else yet.
Data sources
- Pave provided me with a dataset of 23,589 designers working at 3,994 companies. This data is synced with real HR systems, making it more precise than self-reported data from Glassdoor or Levels.fyi.
- Numbeo was used for living costs and quality of life.
- TrueUp was used for job postings.
Disclaimer: Italy 🇮🇹 and Sweden 🇸🇪 were excluded due to unresolved data anomalies. Norway was removed due to a small sample.
Salaries
🌎 All Countries
About the data:
- The numbers are relative to the US. So for example, the same designer in Germany will earn 53.9% of what a designer in the same position makes in the US.
- The same levels of designers are compared (seniors to seniors, directors to directors, etc.)
- Equity is not included. I do not have data on equity compensation but I’d assume that it correlates with the salaries.
🇺🇸 USA
Taxes
However, salaries alone can be misleading. The same salary in two countries can result in different take-home pay after taxes.
For example, a designer might earn 20% more in Germany than in South Korea, but after taxes, their net income would be the same in both countries.
I calculated after-tax salaries for the top 20 countries with the highest gross salaries from the previous graph.
(BTW if you’re a freelancer or self-employed and considering moving to a country with lower taxes — or plan to travel for a few years — please reach out for advice, I’ve done a lot of research on that).
🌎 All Countries
Data for a mid/senior level designer, single, no kids, no write-offs, assuming other cases will correlate.
Caveat: “Taxes” includes all mandatory payments. However, the level and type of social benefits covered by these payments vary between countries.
🇺🇸 USA
Even within the same country, the difference between pre- and post-tax salaries can be significant. For example, in the US, a designer might earn $114k in Dallas and $130k in Portland but still take home around $88k after taxes in both cases.
Disclaimer: The NYC data may be inaccurate because the numbers include the surrounding areas and states (thanks, Bob Baxley for flagging it).
Jobs
I checked what countries have the most design jobs on TrueUp. They aggregate jobs from different sources so it’s more representative than using a single job board.
To keep the graph visually balanced, I removed from the chart two outliers:
- 🇺🇸 USA in the top right, with the highest salaries and highest number of jobs.
- 🇮🇳 India is in the left top corner with many jobs but low salaries.
Future jobs
We’ve seen where most job openings are now. But where are they likely to be in the future?
Companies open offices where hiring is easier, and hiring is easier in countries with large talent pools.
To find how big the talent pool is in each country I looked at the numbers of already employed designers in each country — what I call “talent density” and combined it with salaries.
🇺🇸 The US stands out as an outlier, with the highest salaries and talent density. To keep the graph visually balanced, I removed it from the chart.
Caveat — the data in the graph above and below is skewed towards US businesses. This means the dataset overrepresents designers employed by US companies.
Zooming in
Now let’s zoom in and look at the talent pool in 20 countries with the highest salaries (after tax):
Cost of living
🌎 All Countries
You can view a high-resolution version of this graph.
The graph shows salaries pre-tax. Singapore and Switzerland are both low-tax countries so they will likely stop being outliers after tax.
It seems that the cost of living and salaries correlate very strongly and it’s hard to find high-salary countries that also provide good value when it comes to the cost of living.
🇺🇸 USA
Quality of life
In the next graph, I combined salaries and quality of life index by Numbeo which includes:
- Cost of living and purchasing power
- Affordability of housing
- Pollution including air, water, etc.
- Crime rates
- Health system quality
- Traffic (commute times)
Summary
Here are the top countries based on how often they rank well on each criterion. Obviously, these parameters aren’t binary, so for a more nuanced view check out the full graphs above.
If you found this article useful you may find my books useful as well.
Like any other analysis, this one also isn’t perfect. If you have better data or research to share, please let me know!
🗒️ Originally published on my Substack.
🎥 This post is also available as a YouTube video.
