DevOps Engineer

Salary band

Base salary, gross annual

25th percentile

€58,000

Median

€72,000

75th percentile

€92,000

For reference: the statutory minimum wage in Germany has stood at €13.90 gross per hour since January 1, 2026 — roughly €2,410 gross a month for a full-time role at 40 hours/week. (BMAS: Mindestlohn steigt zum 1. Januar 2026 auf 13,90 Euro)

Gross fixed salary per year for a mid-level DevOps Engineer (3 to 7 years of experience) at a German SMB or Mittelstand company. Berlin, Munich and Hamburg in the SaaS and scale-up scene pull upward (85 to 105 k€); the classic Mittelstand and regional locations trend lower (55 to 68 k€). Kubernetes in production, AWS or GCP experience with IAM and networking depth, and Terraform module ownership pull upward; pure Jenkins or on-prem VMware profiles without cloud experience trend lower. Compliance-heavy environments (BaFin, KRITIS, insurance, health) pull noticeably upward. Engineering roles in Germany usually have no variable compensation component; scale-ups offer VSOP or ESOP on top. On-call pay is often handled separately as a standby allowance plus call-out hours.

Sources: Destatis Verdiensterhebung (April 2025), Berufsgruppe 43 IKT-Berufe; StepStone Gehaltsreport 2026, DevOps Engineer Deutschland; Glassdoor Gehaltsdaten DevOps Engineer Deutschland 2026; Honeypot State of Software Engineering Germany 2025