Security Engineer Salary in Europe 2026: Pay, Demand and Skills

The median advertised security engineer salary in Europe is about €66,000 a year in TalentUp’s 2026 job ad data, but the range is wide: from about €40,000 in Italy to €87,500 in Ireland for core cybersecurity roles. Pay depends heavily on country, specialisation and seniority, so a single “European average” is a poor basis for an offer.

This benchmark uses TalentUp’s database of job postings from January to September 2026. It covers median advertised pay by country, by role (security engineer, SOC analyst, penetration tester, cloud security engineer, security architect) and by seniority. It also shows how many cybersecurity ads appear in each country, which skills and certifications employers ask for, how common remote and hybrid work are, and what NIS2 and DORA mean for demand. It is written for employers pricing these roles and for candidates checking their market value.

Security Engineer Salary by Country

The table shows median advertised annual salaries in 2026 for core cybersecurity roles: security engineers, SOC and security analysts, penetration testers, cloud security engineers, security architects and CISOs. We only show countries with at least 45 salaried ads after deduplication.

Three things to keep in mind when reading these figures:

• Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland are missing on purpose. Few ads there state a salary (16 core ads in Germany, 31 in France, 22 in Austria), so a median would be unreliable. The small German sample points to medians well above €80,000, but we don’t report it as a benchmark.
• Poland looks high because of where the data comes from. Most Polish salaried ads come from IT job boards where salary ranges are mandatory and contractor (B2B) rates are common. B2B rates are usually higher than employment contract salaries, because the worker pays their own social security.
• The spread inside each country is wide. In the UK, the middle 50% of ads runs from about €52,000 to €92,000. Specialisation and seniority, covered below, explain most of that gap.

For how salary levels compare across tech hubs more broadly, see our top tech cities analysis.

Salaries for SOC Analysts, Pentesters, Architects and Other Security Roles

“Security engineer” is an umbrella term. The roles under it have different supply, demand and pay, so benchmark the specific role, not the family.

Pooled across the UK, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France and Ireland, January–September 2026. The UK and Poland account for most ads in every row, so read the table as a ranking of roles rather than a European average.

The ranking follows how much each role shapes decisions and how scarce the experience is. Architects design controls across the whole organisation. Cloud security engineers combine two skill sets that are each in short supply. SOC analysts include many entry-level and shift-based roles, which pulls the median down.

The UK, the only market with enough data to compare roles within one country, shows the same pattern: security engineers at €65,800 (n = 117) and SOC and security analysts at €62,800 (n = 79). CISO and head-of-security ads rarely publish pay: only 15 did in our sample, too few for a reliable figure.

For roles that barely existed a few years ago, such as AI security engineer, see how to set pay ranges for emerging roles.

How Seniority Changes Cybersecurity Pay

We grouped salaried ads by the seniority stated in the job title. Ads without a level in the title (the largest group) are mostly mid-level roles.

In the UK, a senior or lead title adds about 37% to the median of ads without a level, and junior roles pay about a third less. In Poland the step is smaller (14%), partly because many Polish ads with no level are already experienced contractor roles.

Manager titles don’t always pay more than senior technical titles. “Security manager” covers everything from a one-person security function in a small company to a large SOC team, while “principal” and “staff” engineers in big tech pay at the top of the market.

Practitioners warn against reading averages as typical pay. Taz Wake, an incident response specialist at Halkyn Consulting and SANS course author, made the point about UK salaries after seeing a training provider advertise a £72,000 average:

Cybersecurity Jobs Demand in Europe

Between January and September 2026, TalentUp recorded about 33,400 unique job ads with cybersecurity titles in 18 European countries (47,400 before removing duplicates posted on several job boards). That is roughly 0.7% of all job ads in those countries.

Source: TalentUp job postings database, January–September 2026, 18 European countries.

By role, the unique ads split into about 6,640 security engineer ads, 4,840 SOC and security analyst ads, 1,770 DevSecOps, 1,470 security architect, 1,250 cloud security, 1,080 penetration tester and 550 CISO or head of security ads. The remaining ads are for consultants, GRC and risk specialists, security managers and other cybersecurity titles.

Portugal, Ireland and Poland have the highest share of cybersecurity ads. All three host large shared service, nearshore and tech centres that hire security teams for the rest of Europe.

On the trend: cybersecurity ads made up between 0.6% and 0.8% of all ads in the same January–September window of 2024, 2025 and 2026. The job boards in our database changed between those years, so we don’t read these figures as growth or decline. Outside our data, ENISA has estimated the EU’s cybersecurity workforce shortage at about 300,000 people.

For how security compares with other tech roles, see the most popular jobs in IT in 2026.

Security Engineer Skills and Certifications Employers Ask For

We analysed the full text of about 4,000 cybersecurity ads from 2026. The first table covers core security roles (about 2,100 ads); the certification table covers all 4,000.

The profile employers want is an engineer who codes and works in the cloud, not just an operator of security tools. Python, Azure and AWS each appear in more core security ads than any single certification.

Certifications matter, but mostly for specific roles. 29.4% of ads name at least one security certification. CISSP and CISM dominate in governance, architecture and management roles. OSCP is the reference for offensive roles: it appears in 69 of 140 penetration tester ads. ISO 27001 appears in 23.4% of all cybersecurity ads, more often as a framework to implement than as a certificate to hold.

Experienced security leaders also warn against screening on certificates alone. Jim Seaman, a UK security and risk consultant, former RAF Police counter-intelligence officer and author of Apress books on PCI DSS and protective security, put it this way:

In the UK, 20.7% of cybersecurity ads mention security clearance (SC, DV or similar), mostly for defence and public sector work. That narrows the candidate pool and pushes up pay for cleared candidates.

Remote and Hybrid Work in Security Roles

About 27% of the cybersecurity ads we analysed mention hybrid work, and about 4% advertise a fully remote role. Roughly 46% mention remote, hybrid or home working in some form, but this broader figure includes partial and conditional offers.

Hybrid is most explicit in the UK (45%), Poland (44%) and Ireland (40%), and least explicit in France (12%) and Italy (16%), where ads often mention télétravail or smart working without describing a hybrid model. Fully remote roles are rare everywhere: SOC roles need shift cover, and many public sector and defence roles need on-site or cleared work.

For employers in smaller markets, hybrid or remote options are the easiest way to widen the pool. But remote hires bring location-based pay decisions that you should settle before you post the role.

NIS2, DORA and the Cyber Resilience Act: Why Demand Keeps Rising

Three EU laws widen the number of organisations that need in-house or contracted security skills:

NIS2 makes management bodies accountable for cybersecurity risk management, which moves security spending to board level. It applies through each member state’s national law, and several countries transposed it late, so obligations and timing differ by country. DORA applies directly in every member state and requires ICT risk management, incident reporting and resilience testing, which drives demand for security architects, GRC specialists and pentesters in banks and insurers.

Italy stands out in our data: 16.2% of Italian cybersecurity ads mention NIS2, more than twice the European average.

How to Benchmark Security Engineer Salaries

For employers, the data points to five practical rules:

1. Benchmark the specific role. A SOC analyst, a cloud security engineer and a security architect differ by €25,000 or more at the median. Map each job to the closest specific role before you look at numbers.
2. Use country data, not a European average. The gap between Italy and Ireland is more than double. If you hire across borders, set a pay policy for location first.
3. Price the scarce skills. Clearance, cloud security, offensive security (OSCP) and governance credentials (CISSP, CISM) narrow the pool. Place these hires above the median of their country.
4. Remember that advertised pay is not paid pay. Ads show what employers offer to attract candidates. Use them for the market range, and use salary benchmarking of actual pay to set bands.
5. Publish a range you can defend. Where national laws transposing the EU Pay Transparency Directive apply, employers must give candidates pay information before the interview. Security candidates compare offers closely, so a vague or low range costs you applicants. See how to write transparent salary job postings.

For candidates, the same data is a negotiation tool: find the median for your role and country, then argue for your position against it with your seniority, cloud skills and certifications. You can check market ranges for free with TalentUp’s pay transparency salary benchmarking tool.

Sources

• TalentUp. Job postings database, January–September 2026: about 33,400 unique cybersecurity job ads in 18 European countries, 1,475 salaried ads and a text sample of about 4,000 ads (see methodology above).
• TalentUp. European Salary Benchmark Report and salary data methodology.
• European Union. Directive (EU) 2022/2555 (NIS2). EUR-Lex.
• European Commission. NIS2 Directive: securing network and information systems. Shaping Europe’s digital future.
• European Union. Regulation (EU) 2022/2554 on digital operational resilience for the financial sector (DORA). EUR-Lex.
• EIOPA. Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
• European Commission. Cyber Resilience Act. Shaping Europe’s digital future.
• ENISA. Cybersecurity Skills Conference: strengthening human capital in the EU (21 September 2023).
• European Union. Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency. EUR-Lex.