Methodology

How totals are calculated

The headline number is gross claimed: we sum the Amount column for every row in the period. That’s the same convention IPEA uses in its own reports. Last quarter, that figure was $40.7 million across 248 parliamentarians.

For per-MP totals on the leaderboard, we filter to Role = “Parliamentarian”. Former Prime Ministers, post-retirement travellers, and surviving spouses are tracked separately and not mixed into the leaderboard. Staff travel charged to an MP’s allocation (where UserSurname differs from the MP’s surname) is still rolled up into that MP’s total — because the allocation is theirs.

What “discretionary” means here

Office Facilities (electorate office fit-out and refurbishment) is administered by the Department of Finance, not the MP. We exclude it from any “discretionary” subtotal. It still appears in the gross headline because IPEA reports it that way.

The “largest discretionary line” chip on each leaderboard card also excludes Employee Travel. That category is staff travel charged to a minister’s allocation — it inflates ministerial cards without telling you anything about the minister’s own behaviour. The full breakdown, including Employee Travel, is shown on the per-MP page.

How repayments are treated

IPEA publishes a separate repayments CSV each quarter (from 2022Q03 onwards). We ingest it and show repayments as their own line on every MP page — they are not netted off the gross claimed total. There are two reasons for that. First, a repayment’s reporting quarter is when the money was paid back to the public purse; the original claim being repaid may have been from a different quarter (the description usually carries that earlier activity date). Netting repayments against the gross of the quarter they’re booked in would misrepresent both numbers. Second, the gross figure is what IPEA itself publishes as the headline; we don’t want to recalculate it. The repayments line lets readers see what’s been clawed back without obscuring the source headline.

What’s not yet integrated

• Adjustments (corrections IPEA makes between releases) are not yet integrated. We re-ingest the published file each quarter, so corrections that IPEA bakes into a re-release will flow through, but ad-hoc adjustments in the separate file are not.
• Photos and bio lines are not yet shown. They’ll come with the next release.

Gotchas worth knowing

• Description dates can look old. Many rows reference activity dates from prior years (a 2026 Q1 payment with description “Printing and Communications 26 May 20” is a payment processed in 2026 for a service consumed in 2020). This is “payments processed this quarter”, not “services consumed this quarter”.
• Remote electorates legitimately need more travel. High travel totals for a Northern Territory MP are not directly comparable to a Canberra-based one. We don’t normalise for this — judge accordingly.
• Identity stability. From 2022Q03 onwards, IPEA emits a stable OfficeCode per MP that survives name changes. Pre-2022Q03 rows are matched by surname + first name; a small number of cross-period ambiguities may exist.

Licence and attribution

The underlying data is published by IPEA under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence. You’re free to reuse the figures we show, with attribution to IPEA. If you cite or screenshot this site, link to data.gov.au/data/organization/ipea as the upstream source.