This article provides approximate net salaries at Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, located in Warsaw, Poland.

About Frontex

Frontex is an EU institution that promotes, coordinates and develops European border management and institutions responsible for this function in EU Member States. Frontex also facilitates the uptake of the concept of Integrated Border Management. The agency also engages in a multitude of other border guarding-related functions such as monitoring migration flows, carrying out vulnerability assessments of Member States institutions, organises joint operations and rapid border interventions, carries out search and rescue at operations at sea. Frontex also supervises Standing Corps, the EU’s border guard service.

Most EU institutions, including Frontex, do a notoriously poor job in communicating their salary scales as they often indicate just the basic pay and little other detail, and quite many even fail to adjust it by the Correction Coefficient. This is not helpful for people without experience in the EU system, and a hindrance for quite many staff members that consider changing their positions as this makes it really difficult to understanding a person’s future income.

This article series will seek to address the lack of information on actual net salaries in EU institutions.

Salaries

The salaries below are presented according to four typical personal/family situations of future employees:

• by type of contract (Contract Agent, Administrator, Assistant, Secretary and Clerk) and
• function group (FGI-FGIV, AD5-AD16, AST1-AST11, AST/SC1-AST/SC6).

The mentioned personal/family situations are:

To get an idea of your actual salary at Frontex, you should look at the right cell in one of the four columns in the tables below that best corresponds to your personal/family situation. In calculating these values we have summed up not only the basic salary, but also the applicable allowances and deductions: household allowance, child allowances, expatriation allowance, pension contribution, sickness, accident and unemployment insurance, as well as community tax. All values in the last four columns are also adjusted by the European Commission’s Correction Coefficient for Poland, so they present a realistic approximation of take-home pay/full remuneration package calculation.

As usual in these types of articles, I have to add the caveat that your precise salary can be calculated only by the EU institution’s HR department that knows your particular professional and personal circumstances.

The information below gives you a realistic estimate of what you can expect to earn at Frontex. People interested in working for EU institutions often only look up the basic pay for their type of contract and grade. This is a mistake as the actual net salary can differ up or down quite a bit, compared to the basic salary.

If you want to understand what elements constitute the full salary package in the EU institutions and their weight in the total remuneration calculation, please read the article applicable to your type of contract: Contract Agents, Administrators, Assistants, Secretaries and Clerks.

Lastly, the information also applies to the Frontex border guards also know as the Standing Corps. Officers serving as European Union border guards will get the exact same salaries as “regular” employees of Frontex, plus, they might be entitled to some additional allowances like the Shift Allowance and Standby Duty Allowance.

How to read the tables

Here’s an explanation of how to read the tables below.

Let’s assume that you have applied for an AD6 Administrator’s vacancy in Frontex. You are a Dutch national (any nationality except Polish fits here) with a spouse and two children. From the table below you can deduct that your basic salary without any adjustments would be EUR 5669, however, by working for Frontex in Poland your net take-home remuneration package would be EUR 5026. A Polish national with a similar family situation would earn EUR 4235.

Contract Agent salaries at Frontex

Administrator salaries at Frontex

Assistant salaries at Frontex

Secretaries and Clerks salaries at Frontex

Work culture

It is notoriously difficult to obtain information about the work culture in a particular EU agency.

The best source that I’ve found is to consult the relevant GlassDoor article for the respective EU institution.

This is a GlassDoor article about Frontex.

In you are interested in more information about the Standing Corps, read the dedicated articles for each European Union border guards employment category:
>> How to become a Frontex border guard?
>> Salary and benefits – European Border and Coast Guard Officer, Basic Level (Contract Agent FGIV)
>> Salary and benefits – European Border and Coast Guard Officer, Intermediate Level (Assistant AST4)
>> Salary and benefits – European Border and Coast Guard Officer, Advanced Level (Administrator AD7)

What is the salary of the Frontex Executive Director?

Allowances and other benefits for EU institutions staff

Several allowances and other benefits can quite significantly boost an EU official’s income. This largely depends on whether the person is an expat and has a spouse and/or children. When considering a job at an EU institution, people too often do not take these benefits into account. Important – these benefits are available to Administrators in grades AD 5-16, Assistants in grades AST 1-11, Secretaries and Clerks in grades AST/SC 1-6, and Contract Agents in grades FG I-IV.

• Travel costs on taking up duties
• Daily subsistence allowance (during probation period)
• Installation allowance and coverage of removal costs (one-time payments)
• Expatriation allowance or Foreign Residence allowance
• Household allowance
• Dependent child allowance
• European School enrollment for children or Education allowance if there is no local EU school
• Healthcare costs reimbursement to a level of 80-85% through the EU’s Joint Sickness Insurance Scheme (JSIS) for the employee and any direct family members and dependents. 100% reimbursement of costs in case of a serious illness
• Accident insurance
• Annual travel compensation
• Birth grant
• Parental leave
• Unemployment allowance
• Removal expenses when leaving your home country and again when leaving your EU institution
• EU pension, survivors and orphan’s pensions, invalidity allowance
• Lump sum payments in case of permanent invalidity or death
• Lump sum funeral expenses, up to EUR 2350

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