How big is the EU Budget?

Not very big is the simple answer!

The EU budget compared to most of the EU countries budgets is relatively small. For the 2014 financial year the total budget was €143 billion. In pounds at today’s exchange rate that is roughly £112 billion pounds. That at a glance looks like an enormous amount of money to ordinary people like you and I. But let’s compare it to the UK Government budget.

The UK Governments budget is over £750 billion! That means that the UKs budget could pay for the entire European Union entity nearly 7 times! Or if you like percentages the European Unions total budget is only around 15% of the UK Governments total budget.

Before we go any further here are a few vital bits of information about the EU and how it affects the UK.

1.      The UK rebate reimburses the UK by 66% of the difference between the revenue provided by the UK and the expenditure received by the UK.

2.      Approximately 94% of the EU budget funds programmes and projects both within member states and outside the EU.^[23] Approximately 6% of the budget is used for administrative costs, and less than 3% is spent on EU civil servants' salaries.

Although pro exit campaigners will try to blind you by how much it costs us and how big the budget is. These things always need to be put in to comparison. The UK spends roughly £18 billion on its EU membership and reclaims around half of that through farmers and projects.

So the UKs net expenditure to the EU is £9 billion which equates to 1.2% of the total UK government budget!

The real question we should be asking is not shall we leave the EU but where the hell is the rest of the money going!