This matches my experience as a Dutch contractor. FTE salary for devs caps out around 70-80k, often as a company policy. It's even stricter for large companies

This matches my experience as a Dutch contractor. FTE salary for devs caps out around 70-80k, often as a company policy. It's even stricter for large companies or governmental institutions that have formally published salary bands. Often, to get into the higher bands you need to have some sort of management responsibility like leading a department. Highly priced specialist labor like software developers fits poorly into that structure. The commonly accepted way around this is for those institutions to hire contractors, which is a business-to-business transaction for which no such price limits or management requirements exist.