Market brief · Dublin–Belfast corridor · August 2026
Companies hiring in Dublin and companies hiring in Belfast think they are in separate markets. The people they want do not. Here is what the corridor pays, where the jobs sit, and what it costs to hire.
Software staff already in the job earn about £52,000. Jobs advertised today average £67,000.
Both are right. Employers advertise the roles they cannot fill. The lower figure counts everyone already there, including long-servers on old pay.
£52,000 is what the workforce earns. £67,000 is what a hire costs. Budget from the wrong one and you lose the person.
Accounting has no such gap — the two measures agree within 4%. This is software, not statistics.
Dublin has 826,000 people in work. Belfast has 155,000. But the towns in between are where the growth is: employment near the border grew 11% in three years, while Belfast grew 4%. Use the buttons to change what the map shows.
Pay in Dublin is 22% higher than Belfast and 50% higher than the border towns, once you adjust so euros and pounds buy the same amount. That looks like a simple win for Dublin until you look at housing.
A home in Dublin costs 9.6 times a year’s pay. In Belfast it costs 5.1 times. So a person moving north takes a pay cut on paper and can often buy a bigger house. That is the argument that actually moves people, and almost nobody is making it.
| Area | Typical pay | Vs Belfast | Home cost, × pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dublin | 35,990 | +22% | 9.59 |
| Meath | 33,840 | +15% | 7.99 |
| Louth | 30,327 | +3% | 7.83 |
| Belfast | 29,524 | — | 5.08 |
| Lisburn & Castlereagh | 26,162 | −11% | 7.56 |
| Armagh, Banbridge & Craigavon | 25,488 | −14% | 6.22 |
| Newry, Mourne & Down | 23,996 | −19% | 7.19 |
Of every software job advertised in the north with a salary on it, 74% are in Belfast. For accounting jobs, Belfast is only 47%. Outside Belfast the software market barely advertises at all — three or four jobs in each town. Accounting keeps real volume everywhere.
So a company that wants an engineering team is choosing Belfast whether it meant to or not. A company that wants a finance team can put it almost anywhere on the corridor and still hire.
| Town | Software jobs | Average offer | Accounting jobs | Average offer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All of Northern Ireland | 233 | £66,829 | 1,660 | £45,019 |
| Belfast | 172 | £70,633 | 773 | £47,453 |
| Lisburn | 4 | £60,000 | 80 | £38,940 |
| Craigavon | 4 | £45,000 | 87 | £42,671 |
| Newry | 1 | none stated | 54 | £43,340 |
| Armagh | 3 | £41,667 | 16 | £36,631 |
| Greyed rows rest on very few adverts. Treat them as a hint, not a number. | ||||
You can measure pay two ways: ask people what they earn, or count what employers are offering. For accountants in the north the two answers are £45,019 and £46,766 — under 4% apart. When two separate methods land that close, the number is safe to use.
For software they do not agree. People already in the job earn about £52,000. Jobs being advertised now average about £67,000. Both are correct. Employers advertise their senior and hard-to-fill roles, while the first figure counts everybody already in post, including people on older salaries.
What that means in practice. £52,000 is what the northern software workforce earns. About £67,000 is what it now costs to hire one. If you budget from the first number you will lose the candidate. Recruitment surveys put it lower still, near £44,000 — build a team on that and you start roughly £8,000 a head under the market.
The north publishes pay for narrow, specific jobs — you can look up software developers and get a real figure. The south does not. Its most detailed public figure puts software engineers, accountants, doctors and teachers into one number called “professionals”, and it is three years out of date.
The live job advert data that fills the gap in the north does not cover the south at all. So the honest answer to “what does a developer earn in Dublin compared with Belfast” is that no public source can tell you. That is not a gap in this brief. It is a gap in the market, and it is why so much cross-border hiring is priced on guesswork.
The talent and the adverts are concentrated there. The surrounding towns look cheaper because there is almost nothing to measure, not because the people are cheaper.
Every town sustains real hiring volume and pay drops meaningfully outside Belfast. This is where the corridor genuinely works as one market.
Moving someone north looks like a pay cut and often is not, once housing is counted. Lead with what the money buys.