MEPs: the bill we do not see

What does an MEP really cost? The television-panel answer is: 11,255.26 euro gross a month. Enough already to unsettle anyone living by work, taxes and household prudence. But the serious answer is far less reassuring. Because the cost does not equal the salary. It equals everything flowing from that seat: allowances, staff, daily subsistence allowance, reimbursements, travel, pension, leaving payment. A perfectly legal machine. Not least because the machine’s rules are born inside the machine itself.

Each of the European Parliament’s 720 Members receives 11,255.26 euro gross a month (Parliament’s latest stated amount, for 2025), equivalent to 8,772.70 euro net after EU tax and contributions. On top come 4,950 euro a month for general expenditure: office, documentation, equipment, representation, administration. Then comes the largest item: up to 32,072 euro a month for staff. These sums are not paid directly to the elected Member, it should be stressed. But it is public money nonetheless. And already the picture changes: salary, general expenditure and the assistants’ budget can reach around 579 thousand euro a year for a single seat. Before daily subsistence allowances, travel and pensions.

The daily subsistence allowance is 359 euro a day for official parliamentary activities. Ordinary travel is reimbursed under criteria including flights up to business class, first-class rail and mileage reimbursement for cars. All regulated, all provided for, all filed under the noble heading of ‘operations’. But the citizen, the one paying, faces an accounting fog. Perhaps he sees the salary. He does not see the structure.

Here is the crux: declaring transparency is not enough. It must be imposed. For the general expenditure allowance, Parliament allows Members voluntarily to publish audits or confirmations of the proper use of funds. Voluntarily? Where money is public, accounting should not depend on the beneficiary’s goodwill. It should be automatic, itemised, monthly and accessible to everyone.

For 2026 the European Parliament’s budget allocates over 2.6 billion euro. Parliamentary assistance alone, meaning Members’ personal staff, accounts for over 273 million; in 2025, 252 were spent. Representation costs money, certainly. But the democratic cost becomes indigestible when it becomes illegible.

Solutions exist: compulsory publication of each elected Member’s expenditure; automatic repayment of undocumented sums; stricter caps on staff and reimbursements; an ordinary contributions-only pension; no end-of-term allowance for those immediately taking other public posts; a single annual report, clear and comparable, for each seat.

Democracy need not be poor. It must be restrained. It must neither humiliate itself nor humiliate the taxpayer. It must account for itself. Because when public office becomes an opaque income stream, the problem is not anti-politics: it is the indignation of those who work every day for a fraction of those sums and no longer understand which court they are maintaining the palace for.

And remember, this concerns only the MEP. Still unaccounted for are the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Auditors, the European Central Bank, the Committee of the Regions, the Economic and Social Committee, the European External Action Service, the agencies and the entire administrative constellation revolving around Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and beyond.

The reckoning, then, is not over. It has only just begun.