Nigel Farage earned over £2m from the equivalent of 219 working days for jobs outside Parliament during his first two years as Clacton-on-Sea’s MP, The i Paper can reveal.

Farage logged 1,603 hours of work for 16 companies between his election on 5 July 2024 and resignation on 8 July 2026, analysis of his declared financial interests shows. His decision to step down triggered Thursday’s by-election, which he won comfortably.

His declared outside income during that period works out to £1,252 an hour – about 99 times the £12.71 minimum wage. The number of days worked is based on ONS data showing the average UK working day is 7.32 hours.

At the same time, he contributed to Parliament fewer than 90 times, and it is not clear how many working days he spent in Clacton. Farage did not respond to questions from this paper on how much time he has spent in his constituency.

These numbers shine further light on the Reform leader’s various sources of income amid mounting scrutiny over financial support and donations given to him and his party.

Farage is the subject of a parliamentary standards inquiry over an undeclared £5m gift from Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, which the Reform leader said was for his security and “wasn’t political in any sense at all”. The inquiry, suspended upon his resignation last month, has now reopened.

“MPs are elected to represent their constituents – if they spend significant amounts of time earning money on the side, they are not doing the job voters elected them to do,” said Kamila Kingstone, of the non-partisan charity Spotlight on Corruption.

It is not uncommon for MPs, who earn a basic annual parliamentary salary of £98,599, to have other sources of income, and Farage is not the only MP who has outside earnings. The Register of Members’ Financial Interests contains details of all MPs’ income, including Farage’s, and excludes earnings such as gifts, hospitality or income through property or shareholdings.

However, Farage’s outside income is notably higher than that of most other MPs. Over the past two years, he has declared the second-highest earnings outside Parliament, with Rishi Sunak calculated as having made at least £2.6m between July 2024 and July 2026, according to open-source projects MP Second Jobs and MP Data. Sunak said last year that he would donate his income from Goldman Sachs – from whom he has earned over £1m so far – to charity.

Farage and Reform UK did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

GB News, gold dealing and Cameo videos

Farage earned £2,007,665 during his first two years as MP. The vast majority came from just three sources.

Broadcaster paid Farage £685,882 for an estimated 294 hours of work.

Gold dealer paid him £685,500 for what appears to be 52 hours’ work.

, where customers can request bespoke video messages from celebrities, paid Farage £222,886.

Veronica Hawking, of campaign group 38 Degrees, said: “If you’re… spending nearly half your working time on private side-hustles, it raises the question – who are you really working for?”

“Nigel Farage claims to speak for ordinary workers. But while families in Clacton and across the country count every penny through the cost of living crisis, the leader of the Reform party is raking in millions from TV gigs, bullion dealers, and video shoutouts.”

“Parliament must work for ordinary taxpayers, not celebrity politicians,” she said. Her group has been calling for a ban on MPs’ second jobs.”

However, some argue that allowing MPs to continue to earn money outside Parliament widens the range of skills and experience among MPs.

Sebastian Charleton, of right-wing think tank the Adam Smith Institute, said: “Allowing MPs to keep a foot in the real world is one way that Parliament can stay connected to the concerns facing ordinary Brits. Banning second jobs will not clean up our politics. It would lower the quality of the national debate, and ensure that Westminster is run entirely by insiders.”

Asked in 2025 about earning more than £800,000 outside his job as an MP, Farage told : “If you can find an MP that works longer hours, I will pay for lunch.”

1,603 hours working other jobs

There is no register of the time an MP spends in their constituency and Farage does not advertise his surgery hours, during which politicians and their teams hear directly from their constituents.

In an 18 June blog post, Farage wrote: “Regular readers of this column will know that I spend as much time as I possibly can meeting local community groups, businesses, charities, and the occasional pub landlord. Last weekend was no different. I made a number of visits across the constituency and met some of the people who make Clacton so great.”

During his first two years as an MP, he contributed to Parliament fewer than 90 times, including 20 written questions. By comparison, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s contributions ran to around 900 and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s to about 200.

On his website, Farage has written 51 blog posts related to Clacton, with the first one published in November 2024, four months after his election.

He said initially that he would not hold face-to-face surgeries with constituents, citing official guidance on safety concerns, before reversing that position after the Speaker of the House of Commons office said it had “no recollection” of advising him not to hold in-person meetings.

The safety of politicians has become a concern since the murders of Labour’s Jo Cox in 2016 and Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021.

In July, a man was arrested over a social media post in which he allegedly threatened to shoot Farage. Counter-terrorism police investigating the death of Ann Widdecombe, a former MP and Reform spokesperson, have reopened an inquiry into an alleged “firebombing” incident at Farage’s home last year.

He opted not to attend the Clacton by-election count on Friday, saying his team assessed it would be unsafe for him to do so, although Essex police said it did not advise any candidates not to attend the count.

According to Farage’s declarations, his single highest payment was £270,000 from Direct Bullion, received on 29 May 2026 for work as a “Brand Ambassador” for four “estimated maximum hours worked per month” over three months. Another payment of £189,300 from the company in December 2024 included an undisclosed amount for work carried out before his election.

Responding to an August 2024 BBC report that he earned £97,928 in his first instalment of earnings from GB News, Farage said the money included VAT and covered work carried out before he was an MP and for other duties. The figure, used for this paper’s analysis, was later revised in the Register to £81,607.00. The role remained listed as “Presenter”.

He also appears to have earned close to £100,000 from , for which he has written articles throughout his time in Parliament. This salary is dwarfed by Boris Johnson’s reported salary of £275,000 during when he was weekly columnist for the same paper in 2018.

Money earned as a content creator on social media accounted for £265,349 in Farage’s earnings, taking up 743 hours of his time. Of that, 351 hours were spent on X, for which he was paid £21,117.

“This is more than just about one person. This is about a wider failure in the rules that allow MPs to hold multiple jobs, creating perceptions of – and sometimes real – conflicts of interest between public service and private interests,” said Kingstone, of Spotlight on Corruption.

Politicians, she said, need to “give the public confidence that their MPs are working firmly in the interests of those who elected them, and not to fill their own coffers.”

MPs have long been allowed to keep second jobs, “provided it is kept within reasonable limits and there is transparency about the nature of the activity and the amount of time spent on it”, according to the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

Asked a month after his 2024 election whether his other work would interfere with his job as MP, Farage said: “Am I going to take this job seriously? You bet your life I am.”