A 90th percentile AI engineer in New York costs $385,000 a year. In Poland, the 90th percentile for the same title is $114,000.

Not median against senior. Not junior against staff. Top decile in both markets, pulled the same way on the same day.

That is a $271,000 gap for the same title, doing the same work, with the same models. At those numbers you can hire three engineers in Poland for the price of one in New York and still have $43,000 left over.

This post is about whether that gap reflects anything real, and what it means if it does not.

The New York distribution

Here is the full picture for AI Engineer in New York, as of August 3, 2026.

The interesting number is not the median. It is the shape. New York's 90th percentile sits at more than double the median, which tells you the top of this market is not a smooth curve. It is a small group of people being paid an enormous premium, mostly in equity, at a handful of frontier labs and well funded startups.

That shape matters for the comparison, and we will come back to it.

What Poland actually pays

Levels.fyi puts the Poland 90th percentile at $114,000. Independent market data lines up with that. Senior engineers in Poland working on B2B contracts typically invoice between $8,500 and $13,000 per month, which annualizes to roughly $102,000 to $156,000. Direct B2B arrangements without an agency in the middle run closer to $7,000 to $10,500 per month.

Two structural facts about the Polish market explain a lot of this.

First, roughly 70 to 80 percent of senior Polish developers work as sole proprietorships on B2B contracts rather than as employees. This is not a lifestyle preference. It is tax arithmetic. Most software engineers on B2B in Poland opt into a flat 12 percent income tax rate, where an employment contract would push them into a 32 percent bracket quickly.

Second, B2B contractors pay a fixed monthly social security contribution, roughly $500 to $600, rather than a percentage that scales with income. The result is that a Polish engineer on B2B takes home 13 to 26 percent more than an employee earning the same headline number.

So the $114,000 figure is not a suppressed wage. It is a market clearing price in a country where the tax structure is unusually favorable to high earning contractors, and where the local cost base is a fraction of New York's.

The honest problem with this comparison

If you stopped reading here you would have a misleading picture, so here is the part most cost comparisons leave out.

Total compensation in New York is not cash. A $385,000 package at a frontier AI lab or a well funded startup is heavily weighted toward equity. The cash portion might be $200,000 to $250,000, with the balance in RSUs or options that vest over four years and are worth whatever the company is worth when they vest. The Polish figures above are almost entirely cash, invoiced monthly.

Comparing $385,000 of mostly equity against $114,000 of mostly cash overstates the take home gap considerably. From the employer's side the comparison is fairer, because you are paying it either way, but the two numbers are not the same kind of money.

The elite Polish tier is higher than the 90th percentile suggests. Market reporting puts specialist LLM and generative AI engineers in Poland at up to 55,000 PLN per month on B2B, which annualizes well above the $114,000 figure. If you are trying to hire the single best applied AI engineer in Warsaw, you are not paying $114,000. The 90th percentile of a broad title is not the same as the price of the best person in the market.

Sample size is a real limitation. Levels.fyi's US data is deep. Its Poland data is thinner. Any single percentile off a smaller sample carries more uncertainty than the equivalent US number, and we would treat the Poland figure as a reasonable center of a range rather than a precise price.

Stating these plainly is the difference between a data point and a sales pitch. The gap survives all three caveats. It is just smaller and more textured than the headline implies.

So is the top 10 percent in New York better?

This is the question every engineering leader is now pricing into a headcount plan, whether or not they say it out loud in the meeting.

The honest answer is that the New York premium buys some real things and some imaginary ones.

Real: proximity to the frontier. The engineers being paid $385,000 are disproportionately at companies building the models, which means they see problems six months before anyone else does. Real: timezone overlap with US leadership, which matters more for ambiguous greenfield work than for well specified execution. Real: a hiring signal, because a person who cleared the bar at a top lab has been filtered by a process most companies cannot replicate.

Imaginary: the assumption that the filter is geographic. Poland graduates a large number of strong engineers, has a deep competitive programming tradition, and its senior engineers have been building for US and Western European companies for two decades. The reason a Warsaw engineer costs less is not that the talent distribution is worse. It is that they are competing in a local labor market against local employers, priced in a local currency, under a tax regime that makes a smaller number go further.

Compensation measures the market someone is standing in. It is a poor proxy for what they can build.

What this means if you are hiring

The three for one arithmetic is real, but treating it as a headcount trade is usually the wrong move. Three engineers are not three times one engineer. They need coordination, review, and someone to decide what gets built, and that overhead lands on a lead who is probably already the constraint.

The better use of the gap is not more people. It is a better person than your budget said you could afford. A New York budget for one mid level hire is a Warsaw budget for someone genuinely excellent, and excellent is the variable that actually moves delivery.

The practical obstacle is not talent or cost. It is structure. Hiring someone in Poland as an employee requires a legal entity there, plus 20 to 40 percent on top for employer side taxes and contributions. Contracting them directly on B2B is faster and is what most of the market already does, but it puts classification risk on you, and Poland's labor inspectorate gained new reclassification authority in July 2026.

The middle path is an employer of record. The engineer gets a compliant local arrangement and continuity, you get a single invoice and no entity, and neither side is carrying the classification exposure alone.

What this means if you are the engineer

If you are a strong engineer outside the United States, you are not overpriced and you are not underqualified. You are priced against the wrong market.

That is a temporary condition, and it is already correcting. Every year more US companies build the operational muscle to hire outside their own zip code, and every model release makes location a weaker predictor of output. The engineers who close that gap first are the ones who go looking for the work rather than waiting for it to arrive locally.

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Sources. Compensation percentiles for AI Engineer in New York and Poland from Levels.fyi, retrieved August 3, 2026. Polish market rates, B2B contract prevalence, and tax treatment from published 2026 Poland salary and hiring guides. All figures are total compensation in USD unless noted.

Nextdev places AI native engineers on contract with companies that need them, and acts as the employer of record in over 180 countries. If you are working out what a role should cost, or want to see what is available in a specific market, get in touch.