Hi,

i submitted my phd last week and so far it looks as if the supervisors and reviewers are quite happy about the whole thing, despite my not so good feeling about part of the work.
Having started to look for postdoc positions i am wondering what kind of money is reasonable. I was already offered one position paying 1500 euros a month (after taxes) - that one i actually turned down because that just seems like too little money to me.
I applied to another position and after emailing back and forth with the person responsible it turned out that they would pay 1700 euros a month. I seriously thought that i would at least scratch the 2000 euros barrier :-( Am i expecting too much? I dont want to get rich from a postdoc, but i also want to be able to afford more than during my student days.

-monkey

======= Date Modified 16 Nov 2009 14:52:58 =======
Have you not already posted something similar some time ago?



http://www.postgraduateforum.com/threadViewer.aspx?TID=11931



About your post above, well, I think you have to consider that it will be the first postdoc and that you should be able to get paid more with the years/further postdocs. I would think that with 1500 (or even 1700) euros, you are doing better than during your student years, surely?!



Good luck with the job hunting...

how so? ~1500 euros is the lower end of what a PhD student gets paid here.

Mmm, I don't know where "here" is, but for me (funded by UK Research Council), I get just more than £1k per month, and converting 1500 euro into GBP gives me about £1300, which is more than what I get now.

Fair enough though, other students might get more?!

Good grief!!! I get around £2000 a term! (and only for the terms, not for the summer). Ok, I'm not of a full research council scholarship but a uni one, but even so, I'd have been rather pleased with that salary as a first off. We all have to start somewhere. Admittedly I'd hope to earn more than that, but then if that is the kind of money being offered there (you don't state where 'there' is) then maybe you'll have to suck it up and go with it and hope to move up the incremental scale. I guess one thing is certain, if you don't start somewhere you won't then get the career. Oh, and incidentally, when you say minimum wage... here minimum wage is (I think) £5.80 an hour.

As it's Euros I'm guessing Europe somewhere - that sounds about right for anywhere that has strict national rules on pay scales dependent on years of service. It can add up to less than a PhD stipend in some countries if the tax situation goes wrong (as happened to a friend in Belgium).

It's that blasted education inflation again!

Unfortunately you're the at bottom of a higher pile now, work hard and publish then you can get a higher paid position (well at least that's the carrot that is being dangled for me). I've just started my first post doc and don't get paid more then 2000 euros a month, but then again, I get paid in lovely old-fashioned, low-value pounds.

In the UK, the average postdoc is about 24k, so say approx. 27,000 euros gross. So compared to the UK (and given that some European countries pay higher academic salaries compared to the UK), the pay is low.

But you don't say which country the job position is in???

In my University in London the minimum salary for a Post Doc position is 29K per year before tax (including London wage), but the average in my department is around 31k. It depends on what kind of grant it is, and if it is your firs post doc or not.
As far as I know the salary range for Ph.D. students in the UK is quite wide, between 1000 and 1600 £ per month. Again, it depends if the money comes from a governmental research body (1000£) or other sources, like an industry (up to 1600 pm).

When I have seen adverts for post-doc positions in my department they are all at about £29k...the research assistants are all on £24k here so you would kind of expect the post-docs to be more than this really...I thought this was the general rate across the country really, I didn't realise there was so much variation!

I think what Keenbean says is reasonable. It might not apply to other institutions or regions but when I left my RA post I was earning almost £24K and this was in Northern Ireland where salaries are usually lower. I aim to have a salary when I complete of between £25-30K. While it's true, that a person have to start somewhere I also think it's not unreasonable to want to live a bit better than on a student salary. Like the other posters said it depends where you live, I know this salary scale in Ireland would be meagre not sure about other EU countries.

This is not necessarily the case.
In some countries years of experience increase the salary - but many countries have standardized government grants for post-docs that are independent of years spent in employment (i.e. from PhD to faculty You'll be earning the same on the same grant).

In Europe in most places You will probably earn around 2000 Euros per month after taxes as a post-doc (in scientific disciplines at least, no experience in the humanities), varying widely depending on who is paying You.
It depends on the country, whether the post-doc grant is taxable or not, the local tax rate, and it may include or not include a number of things (health insurance, unemployment/social security, etc.).
The lower end is around 1500 after tax, the highest starting I've seen in Europe outside industry is the Marie-Curie grant including mobility allowance (on the order of 2700-2800 depending on local taxation).
i.e. It's about 2000±25% after tax, with some outliers.

(The UK is a bit of pain in this respect - living costs are higher, but the salary is if anything less.)


This nature article from last year may be of some use:
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2009/090205/full/nj7230-750a.html

Also - here are this year's "subsistence rates" from EMBO grants (i.e. post-doctoral salaries depending on country), usually they are a decent indicator of what is +- "normal" for a science post-doc locally after tax, though they tend to be on the high end of the spectrum (especially for middle-income countries - You won't get anywhere near this much from a local grant in the likes of Hungary or Slovenia):

http://www.embo.org/documents/ratesnational2010.pdf