An investigation has revealed MEPs receive €4,950 per month in general allowances — on top of their salaries, travel expenses and daily allowances — which they could spend as they want.
In total, this system of general allowances has cost the European taxpayer around €40 million per year, according to investigative journalists from Follow the Money (FTM).
The allowance was controversial, FTM noted on February 18, because MEPs do not need to keep receipts and the European Parliament does not monitor their spending.
In 2017, a large majority of the EP called for unused allowances to be refunded at the end of each five-year term.
Yet such rules are set by a select group of MEPs – the Bureau – consisting of the EP President Roberta Metsola and 14 so-called vice-presidents. The latest group was elected in August 2024.
They decided to ignore the request by the European Parliament and voted not to introduce compulsory returns.
The Bureau did decide to provide an overview of the number of MPs who returned unused money voluntarily.
The overview was created earlier this year. FTM gained access to it, revealing that in the 2019-2024 term, MEPs returned a total of €4.3 million out of €253 million in general expense allowances: less than 2 per cent.
It was harder to determine how many individual MEPs had refunded money, it noted.
The document published by the European Parliament in response to the journalists’ request only showed the number of current and former members who refunded money in a given year.
It could include duplicate returns, making it impossible to determine how many politicians did in fact refund money.
It could be extrapolated that, on average, 5 per cent of sitting MEPs refund an unused portion of their expenses each year, it suggested.
After the 2024 elections, non-re-elected MEPs were reminded that they could refund unused money.
While 2024 set a record with €1.3 million refunded, only 44 former MEPs returned money that year, despite more than 300 MEPs not returning after last year’s elections, according to FTM.
The publication noted that it was striking how much was refunded in some cases. The 18 MEPs who did so in 2023 collectively returned €380,000 — an average of €21,000 per MEP and more a third of their total expense allowance that year.
According to the investigative journalists, this raised the question as to whether these MEPs were unusually frugal or whether the allowances were too generous.
They added, though, that without greater transparency on spending, no conclusion could be drawn.
There is no public data on the political groups to which these MEPs belonged.
In 2022, the Bureau had planned to evaluate the rules for general expense allowances based on refund data by the end of 2024 and adjust them “if necessary”.
That evaluation has been delayed. An EP spokesperson told FTM that the Bureau “reviewed the figures in January 2025”.
