That's the problem you see?
After taxes it's 80k which is NOT allot outside France (not even paris) and you are in the high-income class, you see when you want good people you have to pay them the right amount of money so they can pay everywhere for a good life. It's like saying, but 20$ a day is a perfect income for Morocco, why don't we have the best tech peoples around??
And frankly, the recent backlash against big tech in relation to the ever rising compensation of SV people depicts a dark portrait of the "best tech people" around. This has more to say about the lack of moral standards in the industry than about the lack of incentives of the European Startups Ecosystems...
Personal Allowance Up to £12,500 0%
Basic rate £12,501 to £50,000 20%
Higher rate £50,001 to £150,000 40%
Additional rate over £150,000 45%
From £9.5k to £50k you pay 12% national insurance in addition to income tax, so it's really 32% not 20% tax.
Over £50k you pay 2% national insurance.
Your employer will also be paying 13.8% national insurance.
Once your income exceeds £100k you start losing your personal allowance at a rate of £1 for every £2 over £100k, so you have no personal allowance after earning over £125k. This means that your effective marginal tax rate between £100k & £125k is about 60%
Did you know, for instance, that you taxable income is 90% of your real income [0]? So the 45% rate kicks in at a 175,340€ wage, not actually 157,806€.
Anyway, it does not matter because of the unusually large income splitting [1]. If both adults have a 157,806€ wage and say, two kids, the total income would be 315,612 with three fiscal shares, and thus would pay 3 times the amount of taxes owed for a 315,612/3 income (i.e. 105204€), where the marginal tax rate is 30%, not 45% [2].
Anyway, it does not matter either because the main income tax in France is not the "income tax", but the "generalized social contribution" (flat rate).
My point is not to write an essay on French taxation, but to show that simply comparing tax brackets and rates is useless, since the definition of "taxable income" is not the same between different countries, how brackets, rates and taxable income are used to actually compute the tax amount is not straightforward, there are many others taxes, and so forth.
[0] https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/questions/com...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_splitting
[2] Amount of tax is number of n T(i/n), where i is income, T is the function which maps income to taxes owed and n is the number of fiscal shares. Because T is convex, n T(i/n) is less than T(i).