Compensation for political mandates is strangely marginal in the study of elected officials’ paths. However, it can be a key to analyze political professionalization, defined, in the Weberian filiation, at least as to live exclusively from one’s mandates. Here, we query this situation in terms of economic dependence on mandates. In other words, we consider compensation as a source of income which comes into tension with other sources of income from professional activities or from the family sphere. For this, we base our findings on fieldwork carried out in France, using in-depth biographical interviews and questionnaires with elected officials occupying intermediate positions in the political field. They are faced with the possibility of living on their mandates, and this is why we can analyze trade-offs that they operate between different income-generating activities and identify the parameters and conditions for these trade-offs. Therefore, we aim to put Max Weber’s famous formula “to live on politics” on the research agenda, considering it as a process rather than an established situation that would define professionals in politics.