The Real Benefits of Working for the EU — With a Salary Calculator

EU salaries are talked about a lot and understood badly. The headline gross figures are high, the deductions are real, and a large part of the value never shows up on the payslip at all — free schooling for your children, health cover, relocation support and a pension that most national systems cannot match. This guide lays out what an EU official actually receives, with the official 2025 figures, and gives you an interactive calculator to estimate a package for any grade.

To receive any of it you first have to pass an EPSO competition — but it helps to know what you are competing for.

Salary: the basic grid

Permanent officials are paid on a single scale. Administrators (AD) occupy grades AD 5 to AD 16; assistants (AST) occupy AST 1 to AST 11; the two share the same grade values where they overlap. Within each grade you move up a step roughly every two years. These are the official gross basic monthly salaries in force from 1 July 2025, before allowances and before the duty-station adjustment:

Two adjustments then reshape that number. A correction coefficient weights your pay to the cost of living at your duty station — Belgium and Luxembourg are the reference (100), so the same grade is worth more in Dublin (130.7) or Copenhagen (130.5) and less in Sofia (66.1) or Bucharest (72.9). And a set of allowances is added on top.

Free schooling: the European Schools

This is the benefit that quietly changes the maths for families. Children of staff of the EU institutions can attend the European Schools — a network of official multilingual schools in the main duty-station cities (Brussels, Luxembourg, and others) offering a full curriculum from nursery to the European Baccalaureate, which is recognised for university entry across the EU and beyond. For staff of the institutions, attendance is free of tuition fees.

Where a European School place is not available at your location, an education allowance helps cover the cost of an approved school: €357.62 per child per month in 2025 (up to a ceiling, and doubled for expatriate staff), plus a smaller pre-school rate. Combined with the dependent-child allowance, the effective support per child is substantial — a factor worth modelling explicitly if you are moving a family.

Relocation: getting you and your family there

The institutions expect you to move — often across a border — and they fund it. New recruits typically receive:

• Installation allowance on taking up duties, to help set up a home in the new country.
• Reimbursement of travel costs for you and your family from your place of recruitment to the duty station.
• Reimbursement of removal (moving) costs for your household goods, within set limits.
• Daily subsistence allowance for an initial period while you find permanent accommodation.

On top of that, staff who work outside their home country receive the expatriation allowance — 16% of basic salary plus household and child allowances, with a floor of €714.89 per month. Those living abroad but not entitled to expatriation get a 4% foreign-residence allowance instead. The calculator above lets you toggle between the two.

The rest of the package

• Joint Sickness Insurance Scheme (JSIS). Comprehensive health cover for you and eligible dependants, reimbursing around 80% of medical costs (more in serious cases), funded by a contribution of about 1.7% of basic salary.
• Pension. A defined-benefit occupational pension accruing at 1.8% of final basic salary per year of service, funded by a 9.7% employee contribution. It is generous by national standards and portable in the sense that it is an EU scheme.
• Household & dependent-child allowances. €241.21 plus 2% of basic for a household; €527.06 per dependent child, per month.
• Annual and home leave. Generous annual leave, plus additional travelling time and a paid annual journey to your home country for expatriate staff.
• Family-friendly working. Part-time and teleworking arrangements, parental and family leave, and childcare facilities at the main sites.

What comes off the top

None of this is take-home. EU staff are exempt from national income tax on their EU pay, but three deductions plus an internal tax apply:

The internal tax is progressive and reduced by abatements for dependants, which is why the net figure in the calculator is shown as a range rather than a single exact number. As a rule of thumb, lower grades keep around 80% of gross and the highest grades closer to two-thirds — still, crucially, with free schooling and health cover on top.

If you are still choosing which route into the institutions to target, our guide to AD vs AST vs CAST career paths compares every option, and our piece on verbal reasoning in a second language covers the test that most shapes your ranking.

Salary figures, allowances and correction coefficients are basic monthly amounts applicable from 1 July 2025, from the annual update published in the Official Journal of the European Union, C/2025/6564 of 11 December 2025. Pension, sickness-insurance and solidarity-levy rates and the internal-tax scale are set out in the Staff Regulations and Regulation (EEC, Euratom, ECSC) No 260/68. Figures are updated periodically — verify current amounts and your personal entitlements with your institution.

Frequently asked questions