This article looks at mid-level political professionalisation and a specific category of elected officials – deputy mayors – and their relationship to financial compensation. It draws on a corpus of 56 interviews. How do deputy mayors manage to reconcile the duties of their office – which are often hugely time-consuming – with their professional occupations, given that they cannot live off of their political salaries alone ? What conditions make this balancing act possible, and to what economic realities do they correspond ? Are deputies able to modulate their professional and political activities in order to adjust their income sources ? Financial compensation is course the result of value-based calculations, but the transactions that it corresponds to are socially situated and resemble forms of self-negotiation. Although the situation of elected officials often causes financial and interpersonal tensions between their political engagement, their professional activity and their “non-working“ life, this survey demonstrates that elected representatives are constantly looking to balance these different elements. Three sets of variables are analysed : personal investment in one’s office and the kind of compensation received ; the type of professional occupation exercised ; and engagement in the family sphere.