What Do MPs Actually Cost Us?

Every system described on this page — the independent pay-setting body, the published expense claims, the strict rules on what can and can't be claimed — exists because of a single event. On 7 May 2009, the Daily Telegraph began publishing a series of leaked expense claims obtained through Freedom of Information requests. The details ranged from the trivial (a lightbulb, a tin of dog food) to the notorious: one MP's claim for cleaning the moat at his country estate, and another's claim that funded an ornamental duck house.

The public reaction was severe and immediate. Before the scandal, MPs set their own salaries and expenses rules through the House itself. Within weeks, Parliament passed the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, creating the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) to take that power away from MPs entirely. IPSA became fully operational in May 2010. In total, 392 MPs and peers were ordered to repay £1.3m in misclaimed expenses, and six MPs were criminally convicted — some receiving prison sentences. One attempt to argue that parliamentary privilege protected MPs from prosecution was rejected by the UK Supreme Court.

Everything else on this page — an independent pay-setter, a published expenses system, strict staffing budgets — is downstream of this single event.

An MP's basic salary is £98,599 from April 2026 — a 5% rise on the previous year, made up of a 1.5% "benchmarking adjustment" plus a 3.5% cost-of-living increase. This follows £91,346 (April 2024) and £93,904 (an interim rise from April 2025). Since 2011, MPs have not set their own pay at all — IPSA decides it entirely independently, with no MP or minister able to overrule it.

IPSA's own benchmarking analysis — comparing MPs' pay against senior civic-society roles and MPs in comparable democracies — concluded MPs should be earning closer to £110,000 by the end of the current Parliament (due 2029), and is moving pay toward that figure in stages rather than all at once.

Log scale — the true jump from £400 to £98,599 would make early bars invisible on a straight linear chart.

MPs are enrolled in the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund (PCPF) — a defined benefit scheme, similar in structure to those offered to civil servants, teachers, and NHS staff, and notably more generous than the defined contribution pensions most private-sector workers now have. The standard MP contribution rate is 11.1% of salary, building a pension at a rate of 1/51st of final salary for every year served — meaning an MP who serves a full five-year Parliament builds a pension worth roughly 5/51ths of their final salary, index-linked and paid for life from state pension age onward.

On leaving office, MPs also receive a "Resettlement Grant" — effectively severance pay to help with the transition out of Parliament — payable to anyone who loses their seat at a general election.

Salary is a small fraction of the real cost. Each MP receives a separate budget — administered by IPSA, not paid to the MP personally — to cover staff salaries, office rent and running costs, accommodation, and travel between Westminster and their constituency. For 2025/26, IPSA's core budget for this ("Subhead A") was set at £268.5m across all 650 MPs. In February 2026, IPSA had to request a supplementary estimate of a further £12m (roughly 4% more) after under-estimating how quickly a large new cohort of MPs — following the 2024 general election — would draw down their budgets, bringing the effective total closer to £280.5m for the year.

IPSA's own data shows roughly 80% of this goes toward paying MPs' staff — the researchers, caseworkers, and office managers who handle constituent correspondence and casework, not the MP's own take-home pay. This means the true "cost of an MP" to the taxpayer — salary plus staffing and office budget combined — averages out to roughly £530,000 per MP per year across all 650 seats, though individual costs vary significantly by constituency size, location, and staffing choices.

This total isn't stable year to year — it spikes predictably after every general election, when new MPs have to set up offices and hire staff from scratch. The 2024 election, in which more than half the House of Commons turned over to new MPs, produced the steepest single-year jump in the fifteen years IPSA's business-cost data has existed, which is the direct cause of the February 2026 supplementary estimate above.

The post-2009 system is far stricter than what it replaced, but isn't free of controversy. A 2023 investigation by openDemocracy found MPs and peers had claimed a combined £180m in expenses, including more than £1m specifically for PR firms and spin doctors — with some contracts going to companies with close personal or political links to the MPs awarding them. The same investigation highlighted individual claims critics considered questionable: one MP claimed £1,852 for professional photographs, including £924 specifically for pictures of her own constituency; another spent £400 on a personal photoshoot; a third claimed £725 for photos.

Against this, it's worth noting IPSA's own data shows around nine in ten MPs do not claim their full available allowance — meaning stories about individual questionable claims, while real, don't necessarily represent typical MP behaviour across the system as a whole.

Every figure on this page so far has been a separate piece — salary, staffing budget, the building, the Lords. Put them together and the total known annual cost of Parliament to the taxpayer is at least £523m:

Treat this as a floor, not a ceiling. The Lords figure is the most recently confirmed full-year total (2022-23) and excludes estates and works spending, to avoid double-counting the Restoration & Renewal line above; it will have moved since. It also doesn't include every ancillary cost of running either House — security, the Commons and Lords Libraries, Hansard, broadcasting, and central administrative functions aren't separately broken out here. Even on the most conservative reading, though, this is comfortably over half a billion pounds a year — before you even get to what any individual MP is personally paid.

Unlike MPs, most of the roughly 776 members of the House of Lords eligible to attend receive no salary at all for their parliamentary work. Instead, they can claim a flat-rate daily attendance allowance — currently £371 for a full sitting day or £185 for a half day — only on days they actually attend, plus travel expenses. There's no obligation to claim it, and peers who hold a ministerial or paid office-holder role aren't eligible to claim it on top of their salary. This is structurally very different from the Commons: a peer who never attends costs the taxpayer nothing in salary terms, while one who attends every sitting day of a typical parliamentary year could claim in the region of £70,000–£80,000 in allowances alone, without ever holding a ministerial position.

Coverage of the cost of Parliament from our tracked sources will appear here automatically once this page is connected to the topic feed.