Members' expenditure · April 2025 to March 2026
View 01
A party’s total spend mostly just restates how many seats it holds, so this view divides by seats instead. On that basis the parties turn out to be remarkably close together, and the interesting variation sits between individuals rather than between parties.
Drill down
Click any bar above to see that party's averages, range and full member list.
View 02
Each blob is one member who served the full year. The useful question is not who tops a league table, it is whether your MLA sits anywhere unusual. Most of them don’t — and the few who do turn out to have a reason that has nothing to do with how carefully they spend.
Hover for a name, click for the full breakdown. The vertical rule is the median. Colour marks nothing except what you have selected, on purpose.
The right hand end
Three of the four highest records in this return are not spending decisions at all. They are what it costs to keep a constituency office answering the phone while a member of staff is on parental leave or otherwise absent, paid from two separate categories that exist for exactly that purpose. The fourth is William Irwin’s retirement, which is covered under Comings and goings.
Replacement staff costs are uncapped, because illness does not negotiate. Additional support is capped at £25,000 over a maximum of six months. Both figures come from the Assembly’s published staff costs table.
View 03
Staff cost is 82% of the whole thing. Once you see that, most arguments about MLA expenses turn out to be arguments about how many people they employ.
View 04
The office column looks like spending. Split it by how much choice the member actually had and it mostly isn’t. Rates are set by a valuation nobody in the building controls. Rent is fixed by a lease already signed. Power, water, phones and insurance arrive whether anyone is in or not. What is left — the part where a member decides to buy something — is one pound in every seven, and the biggest single thing they buy with it is paper, ink and postage.
Built from 6,351 individual transactions across the Assembly’s three published breakdowns — rent and rates, office operating costs, and start-up costs. Every member reconciles to the penny against the summary return.
Inside the chosen fourteen per cent
The return gives a heading, a date, a supplier and usually a short description. That is enough to make a reasonable guess at what most of this money was for, so we have. These groupings are ours, not the Assembly’s, and we would rather say so than pretend to a precision the source does not have.
Guessed from the description and supplier on each line, falling back to the account heading where the return records nothing but a month. Roughly two thirds of this money is named clearly enough in the source to be confident about.
Member by member
Every full-year member’s chosen spend for the year. This is the only column in the entire return that reflects a personal decision about money, and the whole range of it fits inside eight thousand pounds. Click anyone for their complete ledger.
View 05
Five members each, everywhere. Pick a constituency and compare the people who represent the same streets as each other.
View 06
Ministers cost slightly less than backbenchers, not more. And you can identify every single office holder from the allowances column alone, because a government car means they stop claiming travel.
Each office holder's allowances against the average claimed by the other members of their own constituency.
| Member | Role | Claimed | Neighbours | Gap |
|---|
Constituency neighbours means the other full-year members returned for the same constituency.
View 07
Members make two separate spending decisions. Constituency office spend is rent, rates and equipment: the shopfront. Staff cost is how many people they employ. You might expect these to rise together, on the theory that some members are simply bigger spenders than others. They don’t. A member with an expensive office is no more likely to have a large team than a member with a cheap one, which means there is no such thing as a high-spending MLA, only MLAs who spend on different things.
Each dot is one full-year member. Click one for the full breakdown. The dashed lines split the chamber at the halfway point on each measure, so the corner someone sits in tells you which of the two they lean towards. For anyone who wants the statistic: the relationship between the two measures scores 0.11, where 0 would mean no connection at all and 1 would mean they rise and fall together.
View 08
Worth showing precisely because there is no story here. Split the chamber by designation and the cost per seat lands within about 1.5% across all three. Anyone arriving at this data hoping to find that one side costs more will leave disappointed.
Designation follows each party's own declared position. Independent and People Before Profit are grouped with Other, which is where they sit in the chamber's own arithmetic.
View 09
Six of the 94 records are not a normal year in post. Read them as frugality or extravagance and you will be wrong about all six. This view exists so nobody has to.
View 10
Every item here is an ordinary office cost, published by the Assembly itself. This page exists because a single total hides the detail, and some of the detail is worth seeing. Click any row to see which members it covers.
Software and services, whole chamber, whole year. Click a row for the members.
Forty-five of the ninety members run the same casework system, at £1,476 a year each. Nineteen pay for a graphic design tool and five for an AI assistant, neither of which appeared in this return a few years ago. One member claims £11.99 a month for a verified badge on social media.
Newspapers, tea and biscuits
Newspapers are one of the most frequently recurring items in the whole return. Nine members claim for one, 118 times between them, usually a pound or two at a time from a local shop, though a couple of members buy in bulk instead. Tea, coffee and biscuits show the same pattern: small amounts, claimed often, across a lot of members.
The shops: The Top Spot, Kearneys, Archibalds, Vivo, Mace, Russells, Spar, Paperchase, Tesco and Asda. The titles run from the Belfast Telegraph to the Fermanagh Herald, the Newtownards Chronicle and the County Down Spectator.
The small end
The smallest single line in the whole £11.9 million is fourteen pence. There are thirty-one lines under a pound.
Most of these are newspapers, milk and biscuits bought a few pounds at a time, or consumables billed on by the Assembly. At the other end of the same scale, Emma Sheerin’s entire discretionary spend for the year is a single line of £49.02.
The kettle census
Appliances and equipment bought during the year, counted from the description on each line. Click a row for the members.
A purchase recorded only by its month will not appear here, so treat these as minimums. The dearest single item in this list is a coffee machine at £594.99; the cheapest kettle was £17.50 from Tesco.
Forty-two rooms
When a member holds an advice surgery away from their office they hire a room. Forty-two venues appear in the return: Orange halls, parish centres, community centres, a credit union, a Masonic club, women’s groups, an agricultural society and a castle.
And finally
Reproduced exactly as published. Worth noting as a caution against leaning too hard on the description field.
There is also a Spar receipt dated December 2026 and another dated January 2025, in a return covering April 2025 to March 2026.
View 11
That depends entirely on what you divide it by, which is the whole problem with big numbers in headlines. Here are the divisions that seem fair.
Every figure comes from the Assembly’s published Members’ Expenditure return for April 2025 to March 2026. All 94 records and all five columns reconcile exactly to the published totals, so nothing here has been estimated.
Party affiliation is as at 31 March 2026, the last day of the period. Doug Beattie is recorded as UUP because he sat as a UUP member throughout this year; he left the party on 31 May 2026, after the period closed. Gary Middleton is recorded as a full year for the same reason, having resigned in April 2026.
Per-seat figures divide by the party’s current seat count, not by the number of records, since three seats changed hands mid-year and would otherwise be counted twice.
The constituency office column is broken out from the Assembly’s three detailed breakdowns for rent and rates, office operating costs, and start-up costs — 6,351 transactions in total. Every one of the 93 members with office spending reconciles to the penny against the summary figure, and the three files together come to £1,597,126.56, which is the summary column exactly.
A handful of lines in those files are accounting corrections rather than spending. David Hilditch left in 2024 and appears only as a negative rates accrual. Stewart Dickson has a rent line reversed and reissued when his landlord changed mid-year. Colin McGrath’s March rent was paid in April 2026 and Brian Kingston’s rates bill covers part of the previous year. Nine lines in the return are negative, totalling −£3,535. All of it is left exactly as published.
Groupings inside the chosen band are inferred by us from each line’s description and supplier, and are a best guess rather than an official category. Where the return records nothing but a month, the guess falls back to the Assembly’s account heading and is labelled as such. The Assembly’s own headings are used unchanged everywhere else.
Colour here marks selection and category, never party. Assigning parties their usual colours would have made a chart about payroll look like a chart about something else.