How this register is built.

Two things are read from the Parliament’s own website: the public list of all Members, and each Member’s assistants page. Both have been crawled daily since 28/10/2024, and every change we observe — a new assistant, a departure, a reassignment — is recorded with the date we first saw it.

A start date of 28/10/2024 does not mean the person joined that day. It means our record begins that day, and the person was already in place when it did — their real start date is earlier and was never published to us. Our record of the register begins 28/10/2024. "Tracked since" marks a person who was already in place on that day — their actual start date is earlier and is not published to us.

This applies to a large share of the register: 719 of 739 Members and 5,913 staff relationships carry this start date.

A person’s record on this site can end in one of three ways:

• No end date — still serving, as far as our last crawl saw.
• A real date — the person was present on one crawl and absent from the next. We have recorded real departure dates this way only since 03/03/2026.
• 1 January 2000 — a placeholder, not a real date. It marks someone who had already departed before 03/03/2026, when we started recording real departure dates, so the actual date is unknown to us. 2,260 staff relationships carry this placeholder.

Because a departure on an unknown date cannot be placed in any particular month, these records are left out of the reconstructed headcount line on the trends page entirely — counting them would push the line above the number of staff actually in post. They still appear in the arrivals chart, where the arrival itself is a real, dated event.

Some staff categories have “(grouping)” in their name — for example “Accredited assistants (grouping)”. These are assistants employed by a grouping of several Members rather than by one office; a single assistant in a pool can be linked to as many as 30 Members at once.

Headcount figures on this site count each Member’s own staff separately from pooled staff, so a pool is not double-counted across every Member who shares it.

Assistants are not published with any stable identifier — only a name string. When two different people happen to share exactly the same name, this register cannot tell them apart, and they collapse into a single record. This is a limitation of the source data, not something a schema change on our side can fix.

Staff on this register fall into twelve categories published by the Parliament: accredited assistants, accredited assistants (grouping), local assistants, local assistants (grouping), paying agents, paying agents (grouping), trainees, service providers, specialised service providers, and assistants to the Quaestorate, the Vice-Presidency, and the Vice-Presidency / Quaestorate jointly.

Around October 2025 the Parliament renamed “Service providers” to “Specialised service providers”. Trend charts on this site merge the two names into one series so the rename does not appear as a sudden departure and arrival.

Everything on this site is derived from the Parliament’s public list of Members and their assistants, at europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/full-list. EP Register is an independent project and is solely responsible for its own selection, presentation and analysis of that material.