He'll also be decently rewarded with a salary of €11,255.26 a month before tax, or €8,772.70 after paying EU tax and insurance contributions.
If that sounds like a lot, it's less than half of what EU commissioners get, and just 38% of what EU judges are paid. Don't feel bad for Septimus, though; unlike them, he can take a lucrative side gig too.
But that's just the start of what Septimus can collect.
The mystery of the parliamentary allowance
Every month, Septimus gets another €4,950 as a general expenditure allowance paid into his bank account. That's supposed to cover the costs of his work as an elected EU politician: renting an office in his constituency, mobile phone bills, newspaper subscriptions, or events and publications where he can tell voters about how well he's doing on their behalf.
There's no way to verify that MEPs actually spend the money as they should, because “not one single receipt is required” for the €40 million paid out each year from EU taxpayers, as Nick Aiossa, director of Transparency International's EU office, told The European Correspondent (TEC).
Not every MEP has a constituency office, and the allowance doesn't match real rental costs in each country. While MEPs should give any unspent money back at the end of their term, barely any of it is returned.
Septimus wants to help his political party do well in national and local elections. He decides to rent a huge office in his home country, with one desk for his own assistant and 20 more leased at low cost to his party colleagues. He also spends some of the money on a youth group linked to his party, and to repair a local church, gaining plenty of publicity for his party.
Under European Parliament rules, he can voluntarily declare that he's spending the money within the rules. He doesn't bother, similar to most MEPs.
Getting paid to travel and to turn up
Septimus will be spending a lot of time travelling between Brussels, where the Parliament does most of its work, and Strasbourg, where it holds formal parliamentary sessions.
He'll be reimbursed for first-class rail travel or a business-class air fare up to €424.80 per trip, or €35,400 per year. He'll get allowances to cover meals and drinks, motorway tolls, and luggage fees. There's also another allowance adjusted for the distance and length of the journey.
He'll also get paid just to turn up at work, with a €359 daily allowance when he signs in at the parliament building for a committee meeting or a parliamentary plenary session. This could net him about €2,154 per month for some of the year.
Paying the help
Septimus needs a few minions to read and write long documents for him, and tell him what he should say to lobbyists, to voters, and when he speaks in the Parliament. He has a budget of €32,072 to pay salaries and social security costs for up to four assistants in Brussels and Strasbourg, as well as assistants in his home country.
Inspired by French far-right politician Marine Le Pen, Septimus hires assistants from his party at home to help him with European Parliament work, who instead spend most of their time preparing the party for national elections.
He also promises lucrative assistant roles in Brussels and Strasbourg to party members, on the condition that they donate part of their large salary back to the party.
Aiossa said this is “not truly voluntary” because it's “compelling an employee through a recruitment process.”
Political groups
MEPs belong to national political parties that club together to form political groups within the Parliament. Those also get EU funding for EU-related events, research, communications, or office costs, at a total of around €50 million a year. That can go to organisations or people linked to the parties, and it isn't always clear what that money actually buys.
The now-defunct far-right Identity and Democracy group, which included Le Pen's party, is under investigation for misspending €4.3 million between 2019 and 2024, including a German anti-abortion campaign and an unusually high advertising invoice for an Austrian far-right newspaper. The group later merged into the Patriots, which was found to have misspent nearly €280,000 in 2024.
The Patriots are refusing to repay the money owed by Identity and Democracy. It will repay the 2024 amount, using its current funding allocation, but may not face further sanctions since the Parliament didn't ask for a formal fraud probe. Transparency International is seeking an investigation.
Who benefits?
Although some MEPs have used expenses to buy themselves nice things, the most flagrant abuses involve redirecting funds meant for EU-related work to national political parties. A Paris court found Le Pen and 23 others guilty this year of embezzling nearly €3 million over 12 years by hiring European Parliament assistants to work for her own party.
MEPs can be a very valuable source of funding for national parties, especially new ones that need to spend big to build up their campaigning.
“All these little schemes usually amount to trying to extract as much from the fruit to give back to the party as possible,” Aiossa said. “A lot of them don't think it's wrong. They think it's normal that they would use public money for their legislative mandate to campaign nationally, because they're all politicians.”
For Transparency International, the most critical issue is the lack of oversight by the Parliament and its unwillingness to investigate breaches of expense rules.
“The fact that you are not holding MEPs or political groups to account for misusing taxpayers' money, and instead protecting your own, is not helping trust in the institution from citizens,” Aiossa said.
“I think that they've got this wrong. They've got it very, very wrong.”