iGaming Salaries 2026: 25 Roles Across Six Hubs

In 2025, iGaming salaries increased by an average of 4.09% – the biggest jump in three years – and C-suite pay by 8.71%. While these figures give us an industry average, it is worth noting that salaries vary hugely between locations. An affiliate manager in Limassol is not earning the same as one in Tbilisi, nor is a product owner in Malta pulling in the same as one in Warsaw. With that in mind, 15M has taken the public figures for 25 roles in six industry hubs to make a location-based salary survey. We also use one worked example to show how each hub’s tax regime changes take-home pay, and set average rents alongside. And where we could not find information, we have made an estimate, marked as such in the table below.

Key Takeaways

• On gross pay, the gap between hubs for the same role reaches two to three times on 15M estimates – between the most expensive hub (Dubai) and the cheapest (Tbilisi). For example, head of affiliates: AED 380,000–550,000 (about $104,000–150,000), versus $45,000–70,000 in Tbilisi, roughly 2.2 times; junior affiliate manager, roughly 2.7 times. Malta is roughly twice Tbilisi: a head of affiliates can earn €80,000–100,000 a year in Malta and $45,000–70,000 in Tbilisi on the 15M estimate (at about 1.15 USD per euro). Tax redistributes that gap unevenly: it narrows against Warsaw and Lisbon without reliefs, but not against Tbilisi’s 20% flat rate. Malta taxes qualifying foreign staff at 15% from €65,000; Cyprus exempts 50% of income when pay exceeds €55,000; Dubai levies no personal income tax;
• Unfortunately, data is hard to come by. Aside from Malta, where the figures are derived from sources such as Boston Link, FreeMalta and salaries included in job ads, we only have limited data for compliance and engineering roles based in Limassol, and tech and product roles based in Warsaw and Lisbon. No iGaming job ads in Dubai include salary details; for Tbilisi we found only two Djinni postings (a SERM specialist and a senior affiliate manager at a remote start-up), too few to build role ranges. About three-quarters of the cells in the table (118 of 150) are therefore our own estimates, marked as such;
• Salary growth is uneven. Pentasia data suggests salaries in tech, analytics, and product roles are increasing, while those in support roles have stalled; average salaries for C-suite roles rose 8.71% in 2025, to £206,000. Hence budgeting for 2027 is dicey, as companies cannot index salaries with a single number.

Where the Numbers Come From, and Why They Disagree

In iGaming, public data on salaries falls into four categories, each with its drawbacks. Recruiter surveys are one source. According to the iGB Pentasia Salary Survey 2025, iGaming salaries have gone up by an average of 4.09% over the past year, the biggest increase in three years. The fastest growth was among managing directors and the C-suite (+8.71%); tech, analytics and product positions also benefited, while support roles have seen no change. We could not access the full Pentasia 2025 role tables, so we use only the headline figures.

Boston Link’s 2024 Malta survey, reported by iGaming Capital, belongs to the same group. It found that salaries have gone up by 5%, down from 11% five years ago. Senior developers can expect to be paid between €55,000 and €75,000, and heads of development as much as €100,000. Risk and payments managers can expect between €40,000 and €60,000. Maltese CEO packages run from €175,000 to more than €300,000.

The second type is reference sites and aggregators. FreeMalta, a website, publishes salary information for 54 different iGaming role groups. It admits these figures are its own “editorial estimates, not independently verified”.

Aggregator Track360 published a salary survey for affiliate managers in iGaming in July 2026, based on job ads published between Q3 2025 and Q2 2026 and on its own network data. In Malta, affiliate managers with between 2 and 5 years of experience can expect a base salary of $52,000–72,000. In the “EU hubs” — Barcelona, Sofia, Warsaw and Limassol – salaries are almost the same, $50,000–70,000, yet the same report says Eastern European hubs “cost 20–30% less than Western Europe for the same remit”. We did not smooth this discrepancy; for Warsaw and Tbilisi, we rely on the second statement.

Levels.fyi, which publishes figures submitted by users, belongs to the same group. These can provide insight into tech and product roles in each of the six iGaming centers.

Most iGaming job ads give generic statements about the fact that the salary paid will be “competitive”. In order to provide some specific data, the third type of source has been consulted. These are job sites where pay is actually mentioned in the posting: Pentasia (posted in Malta), Landing.jobs (posted in Lisbon), Djinni (postings in Georgia) and justjoin.it (posted in Warsaw for a position in LeoVegas). Only postings that were still viewable at the time of checking have been used.

The fourth type is government statistics (NSO in Malta, CyStat, Geostat, GUS, INE). It contains no iGaming-specific data and serves only as context; our role estimates are not based on it.

“We’ve reached a point where a bonus alone won’t seal the deal,” says Pentasia managing director Alastair Cleland, explaining the logic of the market [50]. Candidates, he says, want work that fits around their lives, and the employers who hear that are the ones who win.

Table 1: 25 Roles Across Six Hubs

Table 1 below gives an indication of the annual base pay (bonuses and NGR-linked schemes are not taken into account in this figure) in each location. All figures given in Table 1 are in the location’s own currency, expressed in thousands. Malta, Limassol and Lisbon are gross in euros. In Warsaw, the figure is gross in zloty on an employment (UoP) contract; B2B contracts in Polish iGaming are usually higher in headline terms but come without the benefits. Dubai’s are given in dirhams, where gross equals net. Tbilisi figures are in dollars, because this is how they are most often quoted in Georgia; pay is also often quoted net, and this is flagged in the methodology. Numbers in brackets refer to the source with that number in the list at the end. 15M estimates are given with no brackets.

Table 1. Annual base pay, thousands in the hub’s currency, gross (Dubai: gross = net; Tbilisi: see methodology). Cells with a number in brackets come from the source with that number; cells without one are 15M estimates. * – LeoVegas B2B salary ranges for a senior backend developer (€5,494–7,325 per month), converted at ~4.3 PLN per euro; does not include benefits. Snapshot of 5 November 2026. Sources: 3–5, 8–20, 22, 25.

Affiliates and Marketing: Malta as the Benchmark

Affiliate manager salaries in Malta can be pinned down from at least two sources. Pentasia (looking for a hybrid worker based in Naxxar) puts the range at €36,000–55,000 “depending on experience”, and FreeMalta lists €40,000–55,000 for mid-level candidates. Track360, which reports in dollars, gives $52,000–72,000 for Malta – roughly 13–14% above the FreeMalta range at about 1.15 USD per euro. The difference comes from a different sample (job ads plus Track360’s own network data, for 2–5 years’ experience) and from its use of Q2 2026 average exchange rates. According to FreeMalta, heads of affiliates can earn between €80,000–100,000, while Track360 puts this at $92,000–128,000. So, for head of affiliates, the two sources are almost identical. The junior level in Malta is €22,000–32,000.

For Limassol, we found no separate range by affiliate role: only Track360’s general “EU hubs” range ($50,000–70,000), and the ad pages carrying salary figures would not open at the time of checking. The Cypriot marketing column is therefore a 15M estimate built from the Maltese one. According to Kitalent, base salaries in Limassol are around 15–25% lower than in Malta. We applied this correction only partly: for most roles, our Limassol figures are 6–11% below Malta, while for affiliate manager, senior affiliate manager, and CMO they are higher, because Track360 puts the “EU hubs” almost level with Malta. At C-level, the gap reverses thanks to the non-dom regime.

Surveys published publicly also don’t give much insight into SEO specialist and media buyer salaries (head of SEO, head of CRM, media buyer), meaning that those figures in all six columns are extrapolated from other roles.

FreeMalta estimates that a mid-level SEO specialist earns around €30,000–42,000, and a senior around €42,000–60,000.

Tbilisi and Warsaw are hubs for hands-on marketing roles. Georgia: Geostat reports average wages of GEL 2,466 per month in Q4 2025, with higher wages (GEL 4,373) in the IT and communications sector. The exact numbers for SERM and gambling domain roles in Tbilisi could not be established, but according to Djinni, there is a job opening for a SERM specialist in gambling with a salary of between $700–900 per month.

Poland: according to Levels.fyi, the median salary for marketing professional positions is PLN 140,000 a year across all industries.

Affiliate manager and marketing roles: according to our research, a senior affiliate manager position at a remote iGaming start-up (team spread across Ukraine, Poland and Bulgaria) earns up to $4,000 net per month (this posting is not specific to Tbilisi; we use it as a benchmark for remote roles and as the upper limit of our estimate for Tbilisi). For an affiliate manager in iGaming in Warsaw, our research puts the range at PLN 120,000–200,000 gross per year.

Product, Data and Engineering: Where the Data Is Thickest

Tech is the only section where one role (Senior Game / Backend Developer) has a source in all six columns. According to Levels.fyi, the median total compensation for developers (self-reported data taken on 5 November 2026) is €54,700 in Malta, €71,600 in Cyprus, €51,600 in Lisbon, GEL 133,800 in Tbilisi, PLN 358,000 for a senior in Warsaw (in the other hubs, the median is calculated across all levels, which is why Warsaw appears more expensive on this list), and AED 312,000 in Dubai. In Limassol, senior backend engineers (Java or Go) earn between €70,000–90,000 and DevOps engineers between €75,000–95,000, according to recruitment consultancy Kitalent. By comparison, in Malta, Boston Link says senior developers earn between €55,000–75,000. So in tech, Cyprus is not necessarily “15–25% cheaper” but may actually be more expensive. That is the main disagreement between sources, and we have not smoothed it over.

In Warsaw, iGaming companies such as LeoVegas Mobile Gaming Group are hiring senior backend engineers across a number of areas – payments, retention and sports – on B2B contracts with no benefits package, for between €5,494–7,325 a month. An engineering manager can earn between €5,265–8,447 a month. Brought into an annual figure, this works out at between €66,000–88,000 for a senior engineer and €63,000–101,000 for a manager, broadly in line with pay in Malta and Cyprus. Product owners in Poland, meanwhile, earn gross salaries of between PLN 15,000–19,500 a month at mid-level and between PLN 22,000–30,800 at senior level on an employment contract. According to Levels.fyi, product managers earn a median total compensation of PLN 325,000 a year.

Lisbon is cheaper than Warsaw in euro terms for tech. Senior Java developer salaries in Lisbon (Landing.jobs) range from €50,000–67,000, while senior data engineers can expect €60,000–74,000 and data scientists €60,000–70,000. The median salary for a product manager, according to Levels.fyi, is €75,600, but note the data is based on only 17 responses. Dubai has the highest salaries for product roles: the median salary for a product manager is AED 430,000 (about €100,000), while that for a developer is AED 312,000 (about €75,000) – on par with Cyprus. We couldn’t find any iGaming job postings listing salaries for Dubai, so the remaining column shows a 15M estimate, based on the medians from Levels.fyi; for Product Owners, it is lower than the median for product managers because the median includes senior and lead levels.

Compliance and Payments: Limassol Pays More Than Malta

Compliance is the second block, after tech, where Limassol typically leads Malta. According to Kitalent, senior-specialist MLROs in Limassol can expect a gross salary of €85,000–120,000 and VPs of Compliance €130,000–180,000. In Malta, FreeMalta puts MLROs at between €70,000–90,000 (or €80,000–110,000 with an appropriate qualification). Head of compliance roles are estimated to pay between €70,000–105,000, while compliance managers are expected to make between €45,000–60,000. Being already approved by a regulator is thought to increase pay by 20–30%, while start-ups offering crypto-related gambling services pay compliance directors 35–40% above what other operators do, according to Hays Cyprus figures cited by Kitalent.

Payments-related roles pay less on average, with Boston Link estimating a risk, payments and fraud manager will make between €40,000–60,000 in 2024, and FreeMalta predicting payments managers will make between €40,000–55,000 and payments analysts between €25,000–35,000. For the other hubs, these are 15M estimates off the Maltese base.

C-Level: One Market, Two Different Answers

The picture is a little more complicated when it comes to C-suite salaries. Pentasia, reporting on the iGB Salary Survey 2025, says average iGaming C-suite salaries have risen 8.71%, more than any other segment, to £206,000 (growth the year before was 14.88%). Boston Link says Maltese CEOs can expect total pay packages ranging from €175,000 to more than €300,000. FreeMalta, meanwhile, values a CEO at €90,000–130,000, a CTO at €75,000–100,000 and a CMO at €60,000–100,000. The difference is explicable: a recruiter survey shows the total packages of large operators; a reference site shows base pay at an average company. In the table, we put €90,000–300,000+ and cited both sources.

For Limassol, Kitalent estimates a CTO’s salary at €150,000–200,000 and a CRO’s at €150,000–220,000 – higher than the Maltese estimates. According to Kitalent, the tax regime lets a company pay less than it would in London while the employee keeps more: a CTO on €180,000 in Limassol keeps more than a CTO on €240,000 in London.

“How you pay people signals what you value,” says Andrew Cook, managing director at Conexus Leadership. Long-term incentive plans, equity and performance-related schemes, he says, are no longer simply a “nice to have” at C-level [2].

Table 2: Tax and Cost of Living

Gross pay is half the picture. Below is what official statistics and tax law say about each hub, plus the rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city center according to Livingcost.org (as of 21 June 2026). All figures are monthly.

Table 2. Context by hub. Official statistics and tax regimes are listed by country; rent and expenses are listed by city (Livingcost.org, as of June 21, 2026, in U.S. dollars per month). Sources: 18, 26–49.

Below is an illustrative senior role with a gross salary of €80,000 a year. This is a 15M calculation: in Malta, operating under the Highly Skilled Individuals regime, that role pays €12,000 in income tax (not including social contributions or GESY). In Cyprus, that role would command tax relief via the 50% exemption, meaning only €40,000 is taxable. At the bands €22,000–32,000 and €32,000–40,000, that would translate into €2,000 each, or €4,000 in total tax. Dubai levies no personal income tax. In Tbilisi, the same money in dollar terms is taxed at 20%. In Warsaw and Lisbon, gross earnings take the biggest hit: Poland taxes everything above PLN 120,000 at 32%, while in Portugal the top rate is 48% (above €86,634), and the marginal rate at €80,000 is also above 40%. The moral of the story is that gross figures are meaningless when comparing hubs. If your employer is moving a whole team to a “cheap” hub, you will need to do the math again and see what the net take-home actually is.

What This Means

For operators. You cannot index a 2027 budget with a single number: on Pentasia’s figures, the average is 4.09%, at C-suite level it is 8.71%, in tech and product roles there is upward pressure, and in support roles the index is zero. Hiring foreign staff? If your team is in Malta, work out how many senior staff clear the €65,000 threshold for the 15% regime – that is an argument to use when hiring from abroad. If you are looking at Limassol, do not count on savings in compliance or engineering, as those roles are already dearer in Cyprus than in Malta.

For affiliate companies. A team of five (a head of affiliates, two affiliate managers, an SEO specialist and a media buyer) will cost around €260,000 a year in Malta, $155,000 in Tbilisi and PLN 910,000 (c. €210,000 at roughly PLN 4.3 to a euro) in Warsaw – a 15M calculation from the midpoints of the Table 1 ranges. If we convert the amounts to a single currency (at an exchange rate of about 1.15 USD per euro, €262,000 ≈ $300,000), the gap between Malta and Tbilisi is about 1.9 times, consistent with the “roughly twice” figure above: head roles in Tbilisi already command dollars at international rates.

For suppliers. Expect to spend €40,000–50,000 on an account manager or a BizDev in Malta, and this is one of the few roles where the salary ranges in Malta and Limassol are nearly identical (account manager — €40,000–50,000 and €38,000–50,000; BizDev – €40,000–50,000 and €40,000–60,000). Expect to spend €34,000 for junior and up to €70,000 for senior game mathematician and game designer roles in Malta. In Warsaw, we estimate salaries for the same roles under an employment contract to be between PLN 150,000 and PLN 250,000 (approximately €35,000–58,000). We have no B2B data for these roles.

For candidates. Ask about gross and net income and the tax regime. The same base amount of €80,000 results in different net amounts in Malta (15%) and Cyprus (half is tax-free). In Lisbon, the marginal tax rate on €80,000 is over 40%, and the top rate of 48% applies starting at €86,634 (excluding IFICI). And take a look at rent: in Dubai, a one-bedroom apartment in the city center costs $2,083 per month, while in Tbilisi it’s $628 – and that eats up a significant portion of the difference in salary.

Methodology

Snapshot of 5 November 2026. Table 1 notes the annual base pay without bonuses, in the hub’s own currency. Malta, Limassol and Lisbon figures are in gross euros. Warsaw figures are gross in zloty on an employment contract; B2B rates from the job postings have been converted to annual amounts; in the text, they are shown in euros, as in the source, while in Table 1 (Senior Developer, Warsaw) they have been converted to zlotys at an exchange rate of approximately 4.3 PLN per euro. Dubai figures are in dirhams, with no tax. Tbilisi figures are in dollars: most Georgian ads are denominated in dollars and often quote net, and a gross salary at the 20% flat rate would be around a quarter higher. The Tbilisi developer figure from Levels.fyi is quoted in lari, unconverted. Cells with a number come from that source directly or are converted from it (conversions are marked with an asterisk or described in the text); cells without one are 15M estimates. These estimates were made using the following methodology: the ranges quoted for Malta were corrected downwards (Limassol base salaries 15–25% lower than Malta per Kitalent; for marketing roles we applied it only partly – our Limassol figures are 6–11% lower — while in compliance, tech and C-level Limassol is higher), Track360’s correction factor of 20–30% lower was applied for Eastern European hubs, and the Levels.fyi figures for tech and product median salaries were used for each hub to anchor the estimates. For Warsaw, the estimates are 12–22% lower than those for Malta; for Tbilisi, they are 40–50% lower; here, the Track360 adjustment is supplemented by Geostat and Djinni benchmarks. The data for Dubai and Tbilisi is the weakest: we were unable to find any iGaming job postings with salary information for Dubai, and for Tbilisi, there are only two postings on Djinni (a SERM specialist and a senior affiliate manager at a remote startup), which aren’t enough to draw conclusions about the roles. Exchange rates are used only in one cell of Table 1 (Senior Developer, Warsaw, approximately 4.3 PLN per euro) and in approximate calculations in the text: about 4.3 PLN per euro (a team of five; game mathematicians and designers in Warsaw); about 1.15 USD per euro (comparison of Malta and Tbilisi; Track360 vs. FreeMalta); about 3.67 AED per dollar, along with 1.15 USD per euro (Dubai medians in euros; comparison of Dubai and Tbilisi). Cost of living figures were sourced from Livingcost.org (Numbeo was unable to be accessed when the research was conducted), and the average-pay figures are taken from official sources but encompass all industries, not only iGaming.

Sources

1. iGaming Capital, “Salaries across the iGaming sector rose by an average of 4% in 2025”, December 18, 2025. https://igamingcapital.mt/salaries-across-the-igaming-sector-rose-by-an-average-of-4-in-2025/
2. Pentasia, “Leadership pay as a strategic lever: why C-suite compensation is climbing”, 2025. https://www.pentasia.com/blog/leadership-pay-as-a-strategic-lever-why-c-suite-compensation-is-climbing-334
3. iGaming Capital, “A spotlight on iGaming salaries in Malta”, January 7, 2025. https://igamingcapital.mt/a-spotlight-on-igaming-salaries-in-malta/