Junior roles advertise a median of — a month and internships —, but only — of postings show any pay. Country and job functions are factors that cause significant difference across salaries. The data is collected by Karimi's data team (www.karimi.ai) using vacancies published in 2026 by companies hiring in Europe, sourced from the company Career pages.
Internships here exclude work-study and working-student roles. They pile up at customary stipends (€500, €700–800, €1,000), with a second group near €2,000–3,000 where interns are paid as employees. Junior pay is tighter, centred on €2,000–3,000. Pay above €6,000 is grouped into the last band.
Countries with at least 30 salaried junior postings; internship dot shown where there are at least 20 internships (work-study and working students excluded). The gap is widest in the Netherlands and Italy, where interns get an allowance. In the UK, Austria and Poland interns are paid close to junior rates: UK interns are usually employees, and Austrian ads quote collective-agreement pay.
Countries with at least 200 postings. Austria requires a minimum salary in job ads, and it shows. Nordic, Swiss and Luxembourg employers almost never publish pay, so those medians rest on few postings.
Each posting is compared with the junior median in its own country, so a function is not rewarded for being common in a high-pay country. Consulting, software, sales, finance and research pay 13–21% above; hospitality pays about 8% below. Marketing, creative and legal are left out: once student roles are removed, fewer than 60 junior postings with pay remain.
All role types together, each posting compared with the median for its country and role type. Research organisations pay the most; consumer, lifestyle and hospitality employers pay the least.
Median gross monthly pay. The line is the middle 80% of postings, the bar is the middle half, and the dot is the median. Junior pay is highest at startups and in the public sector and NGOs, and lowest at corporates, which publish most of the salaries. Internships sit near €800–€1,000, except in the public sector.
Same reading, from the smallest employers to the largest. Junior medians step down as employers get bigger: about €3,000 at solo and micro firms (30 postings) and €2,375 at enterprises. Solo and micro internships are left out, because there is only one salaried posting.