Ask what an SAP consultant earns and you will get one number back. That number is almost always wrong, because it comes from job adverts, and adverts are marketing. They carry the figure a company hopes will attract applicants, not the figure it ends up paying.
We have just published the DACH SAP Salary Report 2026 Q3, and the central finding is that there are three salary numbers, not one.
The three numbers
The advert is what the job ad claims. It runs roughly 1.10 to 1.12 times the closing figure.
The brief is what a client actually has to budget to win someone. We measure it at 1.092 times the closing figure, in a range of 1.06 to 1.14. This is the ask, not the settlement.
The closing figure is what the hire signs for. It is the baseline, and it is what our website publishes.
For a senior SAP consultant in Germany that means 87,000 to 115,000 EUR in the advert against 79,000 to 104,000 EUR at close. Put practically: stated client budgets typically need 10,000 to 20,000 EUR adding before they reach the level at which the market actually clears.
Why the public data lands where it does
This is not sloppiness on the part of the salary aggregators. It is structural. They can only observe adverts, because adverts are the only part of the process that is published. What a company must budget internally, and what it finally signs, they never see. Neither number leaves the room.
The practical cost of the gap runs in both directions. A client who budgets from advert data is planning to lose candidates at offer stage. A candidate who benchmarks against it will feel underpaid by every real offer they receive. The distance between brief and close is the negotiating room, and most people are not aware it exists.
What the report is, and what it is not
It is a market view built from live client briefs and placement flow in a market we work in every week. It is not a measured placement-salary database. We do not run one and we do not claim one.
Eleven of the sixteen modules carry our own view. The other five are public market estimates and are labelled as such, because we run too few mandates in those to hold a view worth publishing. The report also carries the twenty-one public sources we checked against, and a section listing what we could not verify. Every salary report has gaps. Most do not publish them.
Read it
Bands by module and seniority, the method, the sources and the gaps:
DACH SAP Salary Report 2026 Q3 (English)
DACH SAP Gehaltsreport 2026 Q3 (Deutsch)
The figures and charts are free to reuse with attribution to Core Tech Recruitment. If you are benchmarking a specific role, we are happy to place it against comparable placements rather than against advert data.