While it's possible to make 10k/month, he's in a rather small percentile of people doing so. The average salary in the IT industry is around $1800-2000. Which is still quite a lot, considering the cost of living.

I keep hearing about these famous salaries in Croatia as well but my impression is that most people get a starting monthly net salary of 1000€ after masters in CS or SDE. Then there's some people who interned during college which get salaries from 1200-2000€ after college depending on how much networking they did. Then there's like 1% of developers/scientists who make 2-5k€ by being able to somehow market them to some external big corps as specialists or consultants but most people including me do not know how to do this. Is your cousin doing remote work for some fancy company or is that by being a full time in a local company?

He is doing full time for a local company. Given that he is in his very late 20's (almost 30). He started around 1200Euro but built his way up to his current salary by jumping companies/roles every 2 years for a salary boost (similarly to how its done in the states).

Salaries in the region can vary wildly.

Your data for Croatian dev salaries is mostly accurate - junior hires will net up to €1k, if they have some exp (interns or good personal projects) that miight go to €1.5k. Actually €1.5k is median dev salary, with seniors fetching €k2 net and team leads maybe up to €2.5k.

Note that this is all net monthly salary. Taxes, social, medical and pension contributions (all witheld by employer) add to roughly again that amount for these salary levels. Here's a recent survey (in Croatian but you'll be able to make sense of the charts and tables) with a lot more details (PDF): https://www.ictbusiness.info/media/infografika/developerske-...

Then there's freelance work, which exploded in recent years, partly due to a miscalculated tax break: if you're freelancer and register as a sole proprietor, you pay miniscule tax for up to €40k per year, handily beating most local companies' hiring budgets.

This lead to massive uproar by said companies, and there's now quite heated debate around the minutia of it. There are primarily two reasons for the complaints: first is that remote companies (which often hire these freelancers on full-time basis) basically get 50% discount, and the second is that local companies started laying off people and "conntracting" them as "freelancers", which is illegal but the guidelines on how exactly that's determined are extremely vague.

And that's just one country :)

That's a very good salary in the U.S. too.

That corresponds to a gross pay of ~ US$96k, which gets a decent middle class life in many parts of the U.S. (you can live pretty well on that if you choose a non-coastal city.) You can even live decently in America's 3rd largest city (Chicago) on that.

I'll bet that goes a much longer way in Sofia.

Which company pays this in Sofia? VMWare? My company has engineers in bulgaria but they don't make that kind of money (still good money, but not $5.6k good).

That’s an insane salary for Eastern Europe. I worked with people in the Balkans who grossed that much a year.

The $5k range is not uncommon in Poland for senior people. You can even see this much in stack overflow ads.

That's gross salary, right? It would be the top of the range in Hungary (gross also).