MPs’ pay in context


The Institute for Fiscal Studies runs a utility — Where do you fit in? — which allows you to enter your pay and council tax so that you can see how you fare in relation to the rest of the population. I entered annual pay of £65,000 and council tax of £1100, which is about representative of MPs’ situation.

This is the result:

Taking into account household size and composition (click here to see how), we have calculated your position in the income distribution. With a household after tax income of £1225 per week, you have a higher income than around 99% of the population – equivalent to about 59.3 million individuals.

A picture of the United Kingdom income distribution is shown below, with all incomes expressed in terms of the equivalent amount for a household of your type. Each bar corresponds to an income band of about £7, and to maintain a reasonable scale, it has been necessary to truncate the distribution at incomes above around £737 per week. Around 4%, or 2.6 million individuals, have incomes higher than this, after adjusting for the size and composition of their households. Your income is so high that you lie beyond the far right hand side of the chart.

MPs’ pay is not excessive, but it’s not low either, in the context of the people served.

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