In brief:
- Between July 2019 and July 2022, MPs earned £18 million in addition to their parliamentary salaries: an average of £9,240 per MP each year.
- Over half of this amount was earned by just 13 MPs.
- Theresa May earned the most, nearly £2,500,000. That’s equivalent to an additional £68,000 a month.
- Conservatives earned an average £13,550, more than MPs from any other party. Labour MPs earned an average £2,325.
- Male MPs earned an average £9970. Female MPs earned an average £5890.
The annual salary for an MP in the United Kingdom is £84,144. But MPs can earn additional income by, for example, giving speeches, writing articles and advising companies. They must declare these earnings, but not in a format that enables easy comparison across MPs. So, we’ve written some code which converts all their payment declarations into a common format. For the period of Boris Johnson’s parliament (July 2019 – August 2022), there’s £18 million of them.
That works out roughly as £9400 per MP per year. That is mostly earned through second jobs (with a fixed, regular salary), but also through other ad-hoc tasks like writing books (Figure 1). As MPs don’t report income from rental properties or financial assets, these aren’t included in this analysis.
Earnings are highly concentrated. Most MPs have not declared any additional income, whilst 13 MPs account for over 50% of the total (Figure 2). Theresa May alone earned 14% – nearly £2.5 million or £68,000 a month – through speeches.
Technically, the money Theresa May earns is paid to a company called Theresa May Limited, from which she takes an annual salary of £87,000. But she is also the sole shareholder in that company and its latest accounts (dated March 2021) showed it held around £850k in retained earnings. So in this analysis we include the full-amount she made through speeches, not just the amount she choses to currently pay herself from her own company.
Most of the top-earners are from the Conservative Party. This is especially clear when we expand the waffle chart to include the top-45 MPs (Figure 3). All those shaded blue are Conservative Party MPs. The average Tory MP earns around5x the amount of the average Labour MP (Figure 4). They spend significantly more time doing second jobs (Figure 5).
There is also a gender pay-gap. The average female MP earned £5890 in addition to their salary. The average male MP earned £9970 (Figure 5). Theresa May’s highly lucrative speeches significantly skew the data, however. The average for all women excluding Theresa May is £2250.
The more experienced an MP, the more they tend to earn. Figure 6 splits the MPs into six buckets, based on which Parliamentary cycle they entered the House of Commons. Those with more than 15 years experience earn significantly more than the newest members.
Notes on data:
These data have been prepared on a best-endeavours basis. As the original dataset is highly unstructured it is possible that, in places, our code has incorrectly identified payment values and/or time commitments. We have also made some assumptions common to all MPs. For example, we assume a working day equals 7.5 hours, and payments from second jobs are received on a monthly basis (thus MPs will have received payments due for work until end July 2022). Where an MP provides a range for the amount of time spent on a task (e.g. 25 – 40 hours), we use the upper-end of the range.
Some of these additional earnings are donated to charity or an MP’s local party organisation. These amounts are still included in the statistics cited above. The value of donations is a very small percentage of total earnings.
When using these data or the charts above, cite www.datalobo.com
The raw, unstructured data can be downloaded from www.membersinterests.org.uk