I used to rent a 1100sq ft 2br for $350 next to Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva a couple years back I have a friend who's currently renting a great 1br rig

I used to rent a 1100sq ft 2br for $350 next to Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva a couple years back I have a friend who's currently renting a great 1br right in the middle of Tel Aviv (near Dizengof) for ~$600 Dev salaries are largely in the range mentioned by yuvadam, may be a bit on the high end, many engineers and normal (non-eng) people are making less than 10k NIS/month There are tons of HW engineering jobs in FPGA, VHDL, ASIC design, telecom, RF, optics, embedded, may be even more than pure software jobs. If you work for IBM, Intel, Cisco R&D in the Wadi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi ) you're likely to make up to ~80-90k/y as a senior (non-managing) engineer with >10y of experience. It's really a mecca for hardware startups, much more active than Silicon Valley in that domain (historically due to military contracts); if you're looking for top engineers to design a VLSI system-on-chip or some super-smart router, or a smartphone or something, I'd probably search there first.