When Apple chief executive Tim Cook appeared in the Oval Office earlier this month to announce a mind-boggling $600 billion (€515bn) investment in the US, it might have set some pulses racing on this side of the Atlantic.
The move is widely seen as an attempt to dodge Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, generating positive headlines for the president and his efforts to reshore American jobs, particularly in manufacturing.
After all, a similar announcement in Trump’s first term in office soothed that administration enough for the iPhone-maker to skirt any levies on its products in that period.
Still, whether the investment is real or an exercise in PR designed to give the tech giant political elbow room without having to seriously untangle its complex global supply chains, it was a reminder of just how uncertain the terrain has become in only a few months since Trump’s inauguration.
And how exposed the State might be to any relocation of activities by Big Tech companies operating here.
That the State is ever more reliant on corporation tax receipts from a handful of globe-bestriding technology behemoths such as Apple, Google and Meta to fund its spending plans is well established by now.
It’s been the subject of a raft of warnings from an alphabet soup of Government agencies and watchdogs in recent years.
Less explored in the public commentary is the importance of tech workers, many of them in exceptionally well-paid jobs compared with national averages, as both a source of other tax receipts (income tax, USC and PRSI) and also as consumers buying goods and services in the economy.
The software, services and social media companies along Dublin’s so-called Silicon Docks appear to be largely shielded from the initial impact of the tariff tidal wave. There is no suggestion yet of a significant, immediate hit to Irish tech jobs – the piston driving much of the Republic’s economic growth engine – from the new EU-US trade regime.
Yet, if a company such as Apple, which employs some 6,000 people here, is feeling enough pressure to redirect investment to the home front, could there be a future in which Ireland will have to grapple with a lower rate of job creation within the tech industry?
[ Big Tech firms pay average salaries of up to €155,000 to staff in IrelandOpens in new window ]
We can catch a glimpse of the Big Tech employers’ significance as a source of high-salaried jobs in the Republic through their Irish subsidiaries’ most recent full financial year company filings and some cases taken at the Workplace Relations Commission.
Staff at a Dublin-based research and development subsidiary of Amazon that made a loss of €23 million last year were paid on average of just more than €124,000 each.
When pension payments, share awards and social welfare costs were added in, the average cost for the 1,540 employees at Amazon Development Centre Ireland Ltd was €172,000. The accounts show that the workers at the Irish entity were paid €191.2 million between them in wages and salaries in 2024.
Gary Rooney, a senior former Dublin-based manager with Twitter who was deemed by the company to have resigned when he failed to sign up to the new “hard-core” work environment set out by Elon Musk after his takeover in 2022, was awarded €550,131 by the Workplace Relations Commission over the circumstances of his departure.
Twitter International Unlimited, now X, has appealed the award to the Labour Court. Rooney says he was unfairly dismissed and continues to earn more than €16,000 less per month due to the cut in salary he has taken since starting work with a bank as well, as the loss of substantial bonuses linked to Twitter’s share performance before its sale. The case continues.
At Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn Ireland, the average salary topped $179,000 in the 12 months to the end of June 2024, according to its most recent filings.
These averages conceal a range of pay levels and packages across a broad spectrum of job profiles. It’s also important to note that salaries are only one component of the generous benefits packages that Big Tech offers to lure and keep top talent.
At least as important to the purchasing power of tech workers here are the lucrative share-based rewards on offer from the world’s most valuable companies, which employees often unwind to fund large, capital purchases such as houses. But the wages and salaries figures provide a snapshot of pay conditions at some of the biggest employers in the State.
Official data further illustrates the scale of the disparity in pay between tech workers and those in other sectors of the Irish economy. Tech workers fall into the information and communication category of economic activity in the classification system used for statistical collection in Ireland and across the European Union.
This broad grouping includes not just computer programmers and software publishers but also telecommunications, book publishing activities and the film and radio industries. It encapsulates a much wider sphere of economic activity than just the Big Tech multinationals.
With that caveat in mind, Ireland’s information and communication technology sector (ICT) accounted for 12.3 per cent of the State’s total take from income taxes in 2024, according to figures from Revenue. That’s an almost €3.7 billion slice out of a nearly €29.7 billion pie, meaning it made the largest single sectoral contribution to the Exchequer within this tax heading.
It’s not in a league of its own, exactly. Financial and insurance activities were a close second, accounting for nearly 12 per cent of total income tax receipts last year, with manufacturing and professional and scientific activities – categories that capture the multinational-dominated pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors – also just behind.
Still, the ICT sector’s contribution to income taxes is outsize, given that it only accounts for 6-7 per cent of employment in the State.
What’s behind this incongruity? In a 2023 research article on the role of the ICT sector in the Irish economy, the Central Bank of Ireland said the industry generates the largest amount of income tax revenue per employee of any economic sector.
That’s mostly to do with the fact that average earnings in the sector are so far ahead of other industries. Essentially, because of the “progressivity” of the Irish tax system, as the bank’s economists put it – meaning higher earners are taxed at relatively higher rates than lower earners – ICT workers paid about 2.5 times the amount of income tax as the average employee in 2022.
ICT workers of all employment statuses – full-time, part-time and trainee – earned an average of €72,177 in 2024, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO). That was a whopping 57.5 per cent higher than the overall national average of €45,813. When part-time workers are excluded, the average full-time salary in the information and communication sector last year was €75,304, 39.7 per cent above the national average of €53,888.
That level of purchasing power has been a game-changer in certain areas of the economy, notably in the Dublin housing market. “This is a very broad statement,” says Miriam Finn, a Dublin-based estate agent-turned-buyers’ agent who helps house-hunters find properties, “but tech workers are probably one of the only types of [single-income] first-time buyers who can now buy in Dublin within the M50.”
Her first-time buyer client profile has shifted notably in the past few years.
“It definitely has changed,” she says. “A couple of years ago, you might have a new solicitor, or a solicitor and a teacher got together. But it’s becoming unaffordable for them to buy a home in Dublin.
“We’re getting a mixture of tech buyers,” she explains. “Our higher-end tech buyers, which would be a different market altogether, they’re generally from the US.”
But even early-career Irish tech workers are among the highest earners vying for properties within the city proper. “You take the Irish tech buyers, they’re generally time poor. They just want help [finding a property]. They want guidance on where to buy. It could be couples or singles, but generally, a lot of them are first-time buyers with good buying power.”
It means, unlike a lot of first-time buyers struggling to find value in a crowded market, they can afford to be choosy. “They’re very specific in what they want,” says Finn. “A lot of them are buying ex-Dublin Corporation houses in the well-established areas like Dublin 12, Dublin 8, Stoneybatter; all a very close commute to the city centre.”
Location has become particularly important for this cohort of buyers since the pandemic, and the mandatory office returns enforced by many of the leading tech companies in the State. “It’s all about the shortest commute to work,” Finn says.
Beyond the anecdotal, however, it’s not easy to get a proper sense of the impact that tech salaries and benefits have had on housing availability and prices in the capital. “It’s a hard one to unpack,” says Ciarán Nugent, an economist at the Nevin Economic Research Institute.
“I would just stress that IT workers make up about 7 per cent of total employment. About 40 per cent of them are foreign nationals. We don’t really have a good idea about how many of them are in for a year, in for two years, and what the nature of their pay is.”
Tech salaries have been responsible for a “lot of the growth in average wages” nationally in recent times, Nugent says, a point raised by Central Bank economists in the 2023 article about the role of the ICT sector in the wider Irish economy.
They noted that the rate of earnings growth among this cohort of employees has drastically outstripped other sectors since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Average weekly earnings among ICT workers were a hefty 39 per cent higher in the first quarter of 2025 than they were over the same period in 2020, the CSO said in May. That’s more than 10 percentage points higher average growth rate for all economic sectors combined.
Given all of that, it’s safe to assume that ICT wages are having some impact on housing prices, says Nugent. “But the actual number is going to be hard to discern and pick out from all the other variables that are driving Irish housing demand,” he says.
For Irish income tax receipts, the €3.7 billion question is how long that pace of growth can continue. In what has been a troubling echo of the period immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic, when Big Tech companies froze hiring and shed jobs left and right, household names such as Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have announced more global cuts over the past year, with some Irish roles firmly in the firing line.
By some estimates, more than 90,000 jobs had been lost in the tech sector worldwide between the start of 2025 and its halfway point. The ripple effects have definitely been felt here.
On the ground, there is little sense that this is another “correction”, given that companies are still hiring. Nor does it appear to be a reshuffling of priorities in the wake of Trump’s election. There is, however, another important variable in play.
“Where we would see some impact is obviously around artificial intelligence [AI],” says Jason Barr, director and head of technology recruitment at Hays Ireland. The recruitment firm has seen a small influx of software engineers from certain companies, such as Microsoft, coming to market in recent months, many of whom have found new jobs relatively easily.
While the implementation of AI tools hasn’t significantly impacted this tier of tech workers, Barr says: “There is going to be a change coming, probably in the next 12 to 24 months.”
At the moment, however, the burden of AI jobs displacement is being felt in other business departments. Neither is it anything particularly new, Barr says. “Obviously, everyone is talking about AI,” he says. “I think those transitions to automation have been happening for the last 10 or 15 years.”
Hays sees the impact as “an evolution” of the finance and human resources functions within tech companies. In the short run, it means a lot of software and tech services companies will have to hire to develop and implement those AI tools.
“I don’t think the salaries are going to change,” Barr says. “What I’d say is that the big companies, they’re going to need people who are using AI as a superpower.”
In the long run, the picture is somewhat less clear. AI may mean fewer entry-level or graduate-entry jobs in Big Tech, which could impede progress to higher levels of pay and rewards. “I do see a big gap in the next graduates coming through,” says Barr. “Because a lot of their jobs when they’re going up the ladder, when they are learning, may be gone.”