The economics of the imperium are never really explained, partly because it's SO complex, especially when a good part of the work done is based on manifest destiny, honour, faith and old fashioned servitude/slavery.
In Horus Rising, army soldiers on 63/19 are paid in low-denonimation imperial scrip, so we can assume there are paid workers too. The locals have no idea what it is and don't wanna take it. The Imperium say they have to. Will a couple of million off duty army personel mess up the local economy? Yeah, probably, but not at a scale the Imperium worries itself about. That's a problem for the newly installed governor to worry about, and if it means a load of people starve for the next few years, that's fine.
In Blood Games, the Palace is being fortified by indentured ogryns who we can assume have no options for anything else. They can buy drugs, or trade maybe, but it's clear that there are plenty of indentured workforces in the imperium, either basically slaves, or maybe honour-bound to serve, maybe tithed from compliant planets just like army regiments are.
In Kaban Machine and Mechanicum, Mars has a similar situation. There are adepts who seem to be able to sell their services to the highest bidder, and change jobs, working for different magos as they wish, but it's not clear what they're bidding WITH. Money, resources, opportunities for knowledge and learning? At the high level, the magos get their resources through power-brokering. I'll provide energy for your forge if your mines supply me with promethium for the next hundred years, etc etc.
> In Horus Rising, army soldiers on 63/19 are paid in low-denonimation imperial scrip, so we can assume there are paid workers too. The locals have no idea what it is and don't wanna take it. The Imperium say they have to. Will a couple of million off duty army personel mess up the local economy? Yeah, probably, but not at a scale the Imperium worries itself about. That's a problem for the newly installed governor to worry about, and if it means a load of people starve for the next few years, that's fine.
This is all predicated on the notion that, within the first few minutes of people using said scrip, dozens of people willing to exchange Imperial scrip for local money wouldn't pop up.
Sure, the Imperial scrip may not be something locals are familiar with, but, if the 40k universe has shown us anything about private citizens and economics, there are most certainly people in the local population that would recognize the value of it and offer some sort of exchange rate for local currency.
Locals may not have any use for it, but they may be willing to offer a money exchanger Imperial scrip in exchange for local currency if they give them 20 cents on the dollar(it's worthless to the locals otherwise).
Then the exchanger can turn around and offer it to uphive merchants or nobles, who are much more likely to have an actual use for Imperial scrip, at 60 cents on the dollar.
So here's an example:
- soldier receives 200 units of Imperial scrip on payday
- soldier goes to bar to buy booze
- one booze is five units of local currency
- the barkeep isn't sure the conversion rate of Imperial scrip to local currency, so they say it's five units of Imperial scrip per booze
- soldier is a captive audience with no real alternative so they pay five units of Imperial scrip
- the next day, the barkeep finds himself with 100 units of Imperial scrip, but none of his vendors accept it
- a new money exchanger has opened down the street and offers six units of local currency for every five Imperial scrip units, knowing he can get a better rate even further uphive
- barkeep doesn't have anyone else to exchange with so he accepts it
- money exchanger now has 100 Imperial scrip at the cost of 120 local currency
- money exchanger heads uphive to exchange with a merchant guild or a noble house
- guild/house have access to wider sector traders that accept Imperial scrip freely and, uphive, one unit of Imperial scrip is equivalent to ten local currency units(based on purchasing power, etc)
- money exchanger sells their 100 Imperial scrip at the rate of 6 local:1 Imperial
- money exchanger ends up with 600 local currency at the cost of 120 local currency
The only real loser here is the soldier.
The barkeep made 20% more on their sale for nothing extra. The money exchanger made 500% profit for walking uphive. And the guild/noble house got Imperial scrip for 60% of what it would normally cost simply by having access to markets that freely accept Imperial scrip.
This all hinges on one thing, can you actually buy anything useful for the Imperial scrip on large enough scale?
As I understand it, scrip is defined as substitute for currency, usually backed by a company (in this case probably the Imperial Army), usually only used in their own isolated community (something like a isolated mining town or military base, in this case probably Imperial Army ships).
Company would pay their workers in scrip and they could then spend that scrip in the local company store for very basic things (food, booze) and tools, it was kind of useless anywhere else and depending on a company it might've been hard to exchange it for a real currency that could be used elsewhere.
If you can't use the Imperial scrip for anything more substantial then some basic soldier luxuries, only on Imperial army ships and bases and only in small quantities ... no matter how good exchange rate you'll get, it's gonna be useless.
Given that this scrip is being used to purchase goods and is consider some form of valid currency, it seems implied that there is some sort of redemption process for people possessing scrip that they can convert it to Throne gelt or a local currency.
Else, why would any bar on any planet serve Guardsmen if they knew their money was worthless? It would be a much bigger plotline and source of conflict if Guardsmen showed up places, had a worthless scrip that couldn't be exchanged for anything, and then proceeded to effectively steal what they wanted in exchange for worthless scrip. I know it's entirely within the realm of possibility within 40k, but you figure with all the rebellions going on, someone would have said something about "and the barkeeps never get any money for what the Guardsmen drink!" at *some* point.
> partly because it's SO complex
It's not that complex. Lot of novels imply strongly that the Imperium basically uses a Guild-economy, rather than modern day free markets.
A guild economy, mixed with barter systems, mixed with modern day free markets, mixed with top-down governmental control and requisition, from multiple departments who don't care what the other are doing
All mixed up in various combinations depending on the planet, sector, or whatever is happening at the time.
Maintaining a unified system of currency across planets from top to bottom let alone systems or sectors when your only unified system of correspondence is astrotelepathy by psykers means everywhere has to kind of manage that kind of thing on their own.
The simplest way to think of things like housing, acquisition of property or commissioning of services in the Imperial economy is to treat it like a medieval European fuedal economy : there is small coin for the little things but any big purchases are either something you have to 'earn' or trade with people higher up the pyramid of life for. Workers need homes, the people who need the workers have to supply these homes. Your business needs to get a new cargo 8 hauler to take the 4 tonnes of grox steaks to the Ecclesiarchy kitchens in time for the Ascension Day feasts? You agree to a supply deal with a local Mechwright who can get you something reconditioned that used to be used by the PDF or you go to the Bishop and request that he arranges transport (though he may ask for more in exchange).
Scrip is like food stamps, issued by your employer so in theory you may be able to trade it but you wouldn't save up scrip to purchase a house
Script is also, and most importantly, only legal within a strict limit. Like the factory itself would have a shop or two, maybe a food court. This is the entire scope of your money. Works nowhere else.
Their is a general currency bur that tends to be used more by inquisitors...etx
Others use local, get paid on a credit from their local job able to exchanged locally.
Depends on service what your suplliesld. Like some indentured are fed and board by their Masters...but you have nothing outside.
Other paid.
Guard example seem to get pay but are kept in barracks, fed, given basic bed and so... so service is served...
Referencing Horus Rising and a few other books, it seems to vary significantly, especially if we take the liberty of extrapolating backwards based on 40k sources such as the Dark Heresy RPG books. Generally speaking, it seems very likely that each sector, system, and probably even segmentum has its own currency or set of currencies, which may not be inter-compatible (how the hell does one trade the sea-shell currency of a low tech ocean world for a digitized currency held on a dataslate?)
We know that Imperial soldiers and remembrancers got paid in some form of currency, as it was a plot point in Horus Rising, but we also know that indentured servitude is fairly commonplace, which makes sense given the feudalist nature of the Imperium, so not all workers got paid to begin with. It's worth noting however that remembrancers and soldiers were essentially state employees, so while they definitely received paychecks, judging by the variety of ways laborers are treated in other sectors of the Imperial economy it seems reasonable to assume many workers didn't receive any form of currency at all, rather being given corporate scrips similar to the corporate towns of the 1800s that they could exchange for goods and services provided by their employer - but no where else. Given the sheer scale of the Imperium, it's also reasonable to assume some corporations paid out in local, sector, segmentum, or even Imperial currency (which I will henceforth refer to as Throne Gelt) depending on circumstance and the need for their employees to travel around a given volume. Your hive-city construction foremen may never leave the planet, so it makes more sense to pay him in local currency, but it's pretty likely that your traveling merchant crews will have occasion to leave their bulk hauler and spend money - so you're going to want to make sure they have throne gelt or something they can spend, to keep them happy and ensure shipments are handled properly.
Based on what we have seen thus far of the Imperium's civilian operators throughout most of the books, he brought on people of wealth and local power, and gave them high ranking positions in exchange for their ongoing support. The nobles got rich off the influence their new positions gave them, and the Emperor got his empire. The working class got paid in food, medical rations, probably even entertainment vouchers. It is highly unlikely any of them had actual money.
I always imagined it was like rome, and they had different types of money in the various sectors. I imagine since the technological level of the imperium is so all over the place as in medieval calvary on the same field as kasrkins, that it varies from planet to planet, sector to sector. Maybe one planet has coins, maybe another uses cards or paper money. Maybe this hive world over here is like house harkonnen from dune and says, "lol, slaves dont get paid," or this feudal world over there uses bartering. The imperium as a galaxy spanning empire, it probably has a "national" currency, but it probably has local money as well
Several different kind of script money. Credits, throne gelts, whatever works. It destroys local economies, imagine five million guardsmen in your town paying everything in Monopoly script for 6 months. Oh and you HAVE to take it. Good luck getting anyone to accept it but that's now a you problem, buddy.
I don't know anything about the Great Crusade, but it's not uncommon in the Empire for people to be paid. Soldiers get wages, some even get land and titles for the officers, arbites get paid. The Navy pays its sailors (although a distinction is made here between sailors and "human consumables"). On a planetary level, this is handled individually anyway, as the economy is mostly handled by planetary organisations (houses, guilds, corporations). The Ecclesiarchy will probably pay the simple masses with God's wages or give the workers a final pilgrimage after a set working time. The Administraum has a lifetime commitment, but even there I can imagine a small "pocket money" with which you can improve the monotonous meal with a few flavour enhancers or donate to the Ekklesiarchy.
My first instinct is to go to [Bellisario's Maxim](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BellisariosMaxim), but that's just not nearly as interesting as guessing at the economy of 40k. So here we go.
The economy of the early Imperium is something that the writers left alone, and that was very probably a wise decision. That said, the modern Imperium takes its taxes in materials and manpower; money does exist, but it tends to localized currencies.
Conversely, the early Imperium was still quite centralized. They had yet to start putting more power into the hands of local rulers as a practical necessity of ruling an interstellar empire, so it would be probable that most cash was flowing out from Terra with the Expedition Fleets.
Then, like now, the AdMech would have had a parallel economy with *a lot* of interplay between their own and the main Imperial economy. We don't know a lot about their economy, but they sometimes take payment in raw or refined materials or other forms of wealth that they can convert into something useful to them. Their main gimmick is being the Imperium's industrial sector, so they take in materials and put out finished goods as well as providing tech-support, on something like a contract basis. They jealously guard their knowledge and their monopoly on the Imperium's technology, so that they can leverage their position more fully. The end result is, that despite being quasi-monastic in a few ways, they're one of the wealthiest and most economically active parties in the Imperium.
There would be trade between forge worlds and individual forges, and it would also be in the form of finished or semi-finished goods, knowledge, military services, etc. Somewhat ironically, the AdMech have a much more standardized society than the rest of the Imperium, so they're much better positioned to issue their own currency and keep it viable throughout the galaxy.
Slavery, servitorization, and all other kinds of forced labour. Mechanisms varied, and local government was sometime used as a middleman for producing labor at gunpoint, but the Imperium had no expectation of paying people for their work.
Like, Great Crusade legion fleets were at the leading edge of conquest, and they were filled with "serfs", which is just used as a fun archaic synonym for slaves. Pick up a Horus Heresy book and you'll find slave labour within the first few pages, on average. It was slave armies with slave servants capturing new workers on the planetary scale.
The answers you're getting about payment are all so vague and diverse because the books don't provide much evidence for payment as a main mechanism behind anything. They're brimming with canonical slavery, though.
*You guys are getting paid?*
I've read a couple times that there is no official currency in the Imperium.
It's so big and fragmented that it would be impossible to maintain.
Instead, every sector, or sometimes even every planet, maintains their own currency.
I imagine the Imperium clerks could made up their own currency on the spot and start paying people with shiny rocks if they wanted.
The economics of the Imperium are poorly, and rarely, explained but there is a form of cash, both on the local and galaxy stage
During the book…I think its ‘Descent of Angels’ an Imperial Army trooper uses Imperial currency on a newly compliant planet instead of the local currency
Even into the 40k era there seems to be both local currency and “Imperial” currency that can be used
In the more recent books that focus on crime and Inquisition it explicitly states that workers in Hives for example receive scrips. I think there’s references to Imperial Guards being paid in scrips. Workers on Navy ships seem to have been treated more like indentured servants, Sea of Souls makes reference to to generations of workers on various levels who have formed gangs. It’s less clear how these are paid if at all.
One of the book series I love (Scattered Stars by Glynn Steward) aligns with my head cannon for Imperial currency. In that world humanity has spread to the stars but it can take years if not decades to cross the breadth of human civilization, so what happened is some of the human nations grew to local dominance and their currency & banking system is used in an area around them, and you can exchange between local currency (planet / nation you're currently in) and those wider currencies.
Seems like a situation that would fit w40k. In each sub-sector there'll be dominant planets whose economies are used to peg all the other economies around them. Their currency is accepted on all worlds in their sphere and can be exchanged for the local currency on the world you dock at / land on.
Some of these currencies are likely in wider use than the others (e.g. Macragge probably has a wider sphere of economic influence than other regional powers) and of course there's likely a central Martian and Terran currency as well.
They have script; aside from it being minor plot point in a few stories, a new government issuing its own currency is an important mechanism of control. It is every bit as much a tool of empire building as men with guns.
An existing currency system will have its own norms, rules, debt, loci of power, etc. Forcing adoption of a new currency abolishes that. And it is forced, because the new script is the only thing the new government will accept as taxes, so you better have some come tax day, which means you need to sell goods and services for that. And the issuer of the new currency can use that leverage to dictate prices, wages, and loans and use the economic power to completely reshape the economy and who is powerful within it. If I’m only paying half a throne for a ton of wheat, and not issuing loans for a server farm, that’s going to drive the economy to stop pursuing chatGPT and start producing a lot of wheat so that they can sell enough to me to pay their taxes.
And that’s just in the roll out, issuing a new currency also means you get to set fiscal (budget and spending and taxing) and monetary (interest rates and money supply) policy, where are key tools for governing as well.
And that’s all just the new script. This being the Imperium, there is going to be a lot of debt and financing for Rogue Trader expeditions, corvée labor, indentured servitude, and just outright slavery, with it trending more and more towards those as the interconnectivity of the Imperium falls apart with the Heresy.
There is no one single system, and there is no central treasury collecting tax money uniformly across the empire and then spending it in a centralised way, unlike modern governments, and there is no single currency.
Most of the time the Emperor or his representatives will have an arrangement with a particular planet to provide x/y/z, and then it's entirely up to that planet how they go about doing it, which could vary anywhere from slavery to salaries and contracts, and those would be paid in whatever local currency that planet uses to manage its affairs.
"It depends".
The Imperium has never had anything like a centralized economy or currency, so it would probably vary on a case-by-case basis. I would imagine something similar to the settlement rights granted Guard who retire following a crusade would have been pretty common, or else other forms of "retirement packages" following service, which would then depend more on where, specifically, a soldier/worker wound up settling down.
The Mechanicum, well...their workforce is mostly slaves, to begin with, and their ruling class, the priesthood, was getting to test all sorts of toys and pillage all kinds of goodies during the Crusade.
The economics of the imperium are never really explained, partly because it's SO complex, especially when a good part of the work done is based on manifest destiny, honour, faith and old fashioned servitude/slavery. In Horus Rising, army soldiers on 63/19 are paid in low-denonimation imperial scrip, so we can assume there are paid workers too. The locals have no idea what it is and don't wanna take it. The Imperium say they have to. Will a couple of million off duty army personel mess up the local economy? Yeah, probably, but not at a scale the Imperium worries itself about. That's a problem for the newly installed governor to worry about, and if it means a load of people starve for the next few years, that's fine. In Blood Games, the Palace is being fortified by indentured ogryns who we can assume have no options for anything else. They can buy drugs, or trade maybe, but it's clear that there are plenty of indentured workforces in the imperium, either basically slaves, or maybe honour-bound to serve, maybe tithed from compliant planets just like army regiments are. In Kaban Machine and Mechanicum, Mars has a similar situation. There are adepts who seem to be able to sell their services to the highest bidder, and change jobs, working for different magos as they wish, but it's not clear what they're bidding WITH. Money, resources, opportunities for knowledge and learning? At the high level, the magos get their resources through power-brokering. I'll provide energy for your forge if your mines supply me with promethium for the next hundred years, etc etc.
Valdor they also have a form of imperial script also
> In Horus Rising, army soldiers on 63/19 are paid in low-denonimation imperial scrip, so we can assume there are paid workers too. The locals have no idea what it is and don't wanna take it. The Imperium say they have to. Will a couple of million off duty army personel mess up the local economy? Yeah, probably, but not at a scale the Imperium worries itself about. That's a problem for the newly installed governor to worry about, and if it means a load of people starve for the next few years, that's fine. This is all predicated on the notion that, within the first few minutes of people using said scrip, dozens of people willing to exchange Imperial scrip for local money wouldn't pop up. Sure, the Imperial scrip may not be something locals are familiar with, but, if the 40k universe has shown us anything about private citizens and economics, there are most certainly people in the local population that would recognize the value of it and offer some sort of exchange rate for local currency. Locals may not have any use for it, but they may be willing to offer a money exchanger Imperial scrip in exchange for local currency if they give them 20 cents on the dollar(it's worthless to the locals otherwise). Then the exchanger can turn around and offer it to uphive merchants or nobles, who are much more likely to have an actual use for Imperial scrip, at 60 cents on the dollar. So here's an example: - soldier receives 200 units of Imperial scrip on payday - soldier goes to bar to buy booze - one booze is five units of local currency - the barkeep isn't sure the conversion rate of Imperial scrip to local currency, so they say it's five units of Imperial scrip per booze - soldier is a captive audience with no real alternative so they pay five units of Imperial scrip - the next day, the barkeep finds himself with 100 units of Imperial scrip, but none of his vendors accept it - a new money exchanger has opened down the street and offers six units of local currency for every five Imperial scrip units, knowing he can get a better rate even further uphive - barkeep doesn't have anyone else to exchange with so he accepts it - money exchanger now has 100 Imperial scrip at the cost of 120 local currency - money exchanger heads uphive to exchange with a merchant guild or a noble house - guild/house have access to wider sector traders that accept Imperial scrip freely and, uphive, one unit of Imperial scrip is equivalent to ten local currency units(based on purchasing power, etc) - money exchanger sells their 100 Imperial scrip at the rate of 6 local:1 Imperial - money exchanger ends up with 600 local currency at the cost of 120 local currency The only real loser here is the soldier. The barkeep made 20% more on their sale for nothing extra. The money exchanger made 500% profit for walking uphive. And the guild/noble house got Imperial scrip for 60% of what it would normally cost simply by having access to markets that freely accept Imperial scrip.
This all hinges on one thing, can you actually buy anything useful for the Imperial scrip on large enough scale? As I understand it, scrip is defined as substitute for currency, usually backed by a company (in this case probably the Imperial Army), usually only used in their own isolated community (something like a isolated mining town or military base, in this case probably Imperial Army ships). Company would pay their workers in scrip and they could then spend that scrip in the local company store for very basic things (food, booze) and tools, it was kind of useless anywhere else and depending on a company it might've been hard to exchange it for a real currency that could be used elsewhere. If you can't use the Imperial scrip for anything more substantial then some basic soldier luxuries, only on Imperial army ships and bases and only in small quantities ... no matter how good exchange rate you'll get, it's gonna be useless.
Given that this scrip is being used to purchase goods and is consider some form of valid currency, it seems implied that there is some sort of redemption process for people possessing scrip that they can convert it to Throne gelt or a local currency. Else, why would any bar on any planet serve Guardsmen if they knew their money was worthless? It would be a much bigger plotline and source of conflict if Guardsmen showed up places, had a worthless scrip that couldn't be exchanged for anything, and then proceeded to effectively steal what they wanted in exchange for worthless scrip. I know it's entirely within the realm of possibility within 40k, but you figure with all the rebellions going on, someone would have said something about "and the barkeeps never get any money for what the Guardsmen drink!" at *some* point.
> partly because it's SO complex It's not that complex. Lot of novels imply strongly that the Imperium basically uses a Guild-economy, rather than modern day free markets.
A guild economy, mixed with barter systems, mixed with modern day free markets, mixed with top-down governmental control and requisition, from multiple departments who don't care what the other are doing All mixed up in various combinations depending on the planet, sector, or whatever is happening at the time.
I assumed it was mainly a work for food and continued life deal
Pay?
It's crazy enough to work
Idk Jim, looks heretical to me.
Maintaining a unified system of currency across planets from top to bottom let alone systems or sectors when your only unified system of correspondence is astrotelepathy by psykers means everywhere has to kind of manage that kind of thing on their own. The simplest way to think of things like housing, acquisition of property or commissioning of services in the Imperial economy is to treat it like a medieval European fuedal economy : there is small coin for the little things but any big purchases are either something you have to 'earn' or trade with people higher up the pyramid of life for. Workers need homes, the people who need the workers have to supply these homes. Your business needs to get a new cargo 8 hauler to take the 4 tonnes of grox steaks to the Ecclesiarchy kitchens in time for the Ascension Day feasts? You agree to a supply deal with a local Mechwright who can get you something reconditioned that used to be used by the PDF or you go to the Bishop and request that he arranges transport (though he may ask for more in exchange). Scrip is like food stamps, issued by your employer so in theory you may be able to trade it but you wouldn't save up scrip to purchase a house
Script is also, and most importantly, only legal within a strict limit. Like the factory itself would have a shop or two, maybe a food court. This is the entire scope of your money. Works nowhere else.
Their is a general currency bur that tends to be used more by inquisitors...etx Others use local, get paid on a credit from their local job able to exchanged locally. Depends on service what your suplliesld. Like some indentured are fed and board by their Masters...but you have nothing outside. Other paid. Guard example seem to get pay but are kept in barracks, fed, given basic bed and so... so service is served...
Referencing Horus Rising and a few other books, it seems to vary significantly, especially if we take the liberty of extrapolating backwards based on 40k sources such as the Dark Heresy RPG books. Generally speaking, it seems very likely that each sector, system, and probably even segmentum has its own currency or set of currencies, which may not be inter-compatible (how the hell does one trade the sea-shell currency of a low tech ocean world for a digitized currency held on a dataslate?) We know that Imperial soldiers and remembrancers got paid in some form of currency, as it was a plot point in Horus Rising, but we also know that indentured servitude is fairly commonplace, which makes sense given the feudalist nature of the Imperium, so not all workers got paid to begin with. It's worth noting however that remembrancers and soldiers were essentially state employees, so while they definitely received paychecks, judging by the variety of ways laborers are treated in other sectors of the Imperial economy it seems reasonable to assume many workers didn't receive any form of currency at all, rather being given corporate scrips similar to the corporate towns of the 1800s that they could exchange for goods and services provided by their employer - but no where else. Given the sheer scale of the Imperium, it's also reasonable to assume some corporations paid out in local, sector, segmentum, or even Imperial currency (which I will henceforth refer to as Throne Gelt) depending on circumstance and the need for their employees to travel around a given volume. Your hive-city construction foremen may never leave the planet, so it makes more sense to pay him in local currency, but it's pretty likely that your traveling merchant crews will have occasion to leave their bulk hauler and spend money - so you're going to want to make sure they have throne gelt or something they can spend, to keep them happy and ensure shipments are handled properly.
Based on what we have seen thus far of the Imperium's civilian operators throughout most of the books, he brought on people of wealth and local power, and gave them high ranking positions in exchange for their ongoing support. The nobles got rich off the influence their new positions gave them, and the Emperor got his empire. The working class got paid in food, medical rations, probably even entertainment vouchers. It is highly unlikely any of them had actual money.
I always imagined it was like rome, and they had different types of money in the various sectors. I imagine since the technological level of the imperium is so all over the place as in medieval calvary on the same field as kasrkins, that it varies from planet to planet, sector to sector. Maybe one planet has coins, maybe another uses cards or paper money. Maybe this hive world over here is like house harkonnen from dune and says, "lol, slaves dont get paid," or this feudal world over there uses bartering. The imperium as a galaxy spanning empire, it probably has a "national" currency, but it probably has local money as well
> Maybe this hive world over here is like house harkonnen from dune and says, "lol, slaves dont get paid," Or like the Roman Empire.
Always gotta have that 1 guy
Several different kind of script money. Credits, throne gelts, whatever works. It destroys local economies, imagine five million guardsmen in your town paying everything in Monopoly script for 6 months. Oh and you HAVE to take it. Good luck getting anyone to accept it but that's now a you problem, buddy.
I don't know anything about the Great Crusade, but it's not uncommon in the Empire for people to be paid. Soldiers get wages, some even get land and titles for the officers, arbites get paid. The Navy pays its sailors (although a distinction is made here between sailors and "human consumables"). On a planetary level, this is handled individually anyway, as the economy is mostly handled by planetary organisations (houses, guilds, corporations). The Ecclesiarchy will probably pay the simple masses with God's wages or give the workers a final pilgrimage after a set working time. The Administraum has a lifetime commitment, but even there I can imagine a small "pocket money" with which you can improve the monotonous meal with a few flavour enhancers or donate to the Ekklesiarchy.
My first instinct is to go to [Bellisario's Maxim](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BellisariosMaxim), but that's just not nearly as interesting as guessing at the economy of 40k. So here we go. The economy of the early Imperium is something that the writers left alone, and that was very probably a wise decision. That said, the modern Imperium takes its taxes in materials and manpower; money does exist, but it tends to localized currencies. Conversely, the early Imperium was still quite centralized. They had yet to start putting more power into the hands of local rulers as a practical necessity of ruling an interstellar empire, so it would be probable that most cash was flowing out from Terra with the Expedition Fleets. Then, like now, the AdMech would have had a parallel economy with *a lot* of interplay between their own and the main Imperial economy. We don't know a lot about their economy, but they sometimes take payment in raw or refined materials or other forms of wealth that they can convert into something useful to them. Their main gimmick is being the Imperium's industrial sector, so they take in materials and put out finished goods as well as providing tech-support, on something like a contract basis. They jealously guard their knowledge and their monopoly on the Imperium's technology, so that they can leverage their position more fully. The end result is, that despite being quasi-monastic in a few ways, they're one of the wealthiest and most economically active parties in the Imperium. There would be trade between forge worlds and individual forges, and it would also be in the form of finished or semi-finished goods, knowledge, military services, etc. Somewhat ironically, the AdMech have a much more standardized society than the rest of the Imperium, so they're much better positioned to issue their own currency and keep it viable throughout the galaxy.
Slavery, servitorization, and all other kinds of forced labour. Mechanisms varied, and local government was sometime used as a middleman for producing labor at gunpoint, but the Imperium had no expectation of paying people for their work. Like, Great Crusade legion fleets were at the leading edge of conquest, and they were filled with "serfs", which is just used as a fun archaic synonym for slaves. Pick up a Horus Heresy book and you'll find slave labour within the first few pages, on average. It was slave armies with slave servants capturing new workers on the planetary scale. The answers you're getting about payment are all so vague and diverse because the books don't provide much evidence for payment as a main mechanism behind anything. They're brimming with canonical slavery, though.
You guys are getting paid?
*You guys are getting paid?* I've read a couple times that there is no official currency in the Imperium. It's so big and fragmented that it would be impossible to maintain. Instead, every sector, or sometimes even every planet, maintains their own currency. I imagine the Imperium clerks could made up their own currency on the spot and start paying people with shiny rocks if they wanted.
I believe Thrones are the main currency but it does probably depend on the sector or world.
The economics of the Imperium are poorly, and rarely, explained but there is a form of cash, both on the local and galaxy stage During the book…I think its ‘Descent of Angels’ an Imperial Army trooper uses Imperial currency on a newly compliant planet instead of the local currency Even into the 40k era there seems to be both local currency and “Imperial” currency that can be used
In the more recent books that focus on crime and Inquisition it explicitly states that workers in Hives for example receive scrips. I think there’s references to Imperial Guards being paid in scrips. Workers on Navy ships seem to have been treated more like indentured servants, Sea of Souls makes reference to to generations of workers on various levels who have formed gangs. It’s less clear how these are paid if at all.
One of the book series I love (Scattered Stars by Glynn Steward) aligns with my head cannon for Imperial currency. In that world humanity has spread to the stars but it can take years if not decades to cross the breadth of human civilization, so what happened is some of the human nations grew to local dominance and their currency & banking system is used in an area around them, and you can exchange between local currency (planet / nation you're currently in) and those wider currencies. Seems like a situation that would fit w40k. In each sub-sector there'll be dominant planets whose economies are used to peg all the other economies around them. Their currency is accepted on all worlds in their sphere and can be exchanged for the local currency on the world you dock at / land on. Some of these currencies are likely in wider use than the others (e.g. Macragge probably has a wider sphere of economic influence than other regional powers) and of course there's likely a central Martian and Terran currency as well.
[Ah yes... pay...](https://youtu.be/hoTFjVY8zNM?si=c8ys5Lmi1zFRsb3U)
They have script; aside from it being minor plot point in a few stories, a new government issuing its own currency is an important mechanism of control. It is every bit as much a tool of empire building as men with guns. An existing currency system will have its own norms, rules, debt, loci of power, etc. Forcing adoption of a new currency abolishes that. And it is forced, because the new script is the only thing the new government will accept as taxes, so you better have some come tax day, which means you need to sell goods and services for that. And the issuer of the new currency can use that leverage to dictate prices, wages, and loans and use the economic power to completely reshape the economy and who is powerful within it. If I’m only paying half a throne for a ton of wheat, and not issuing loans for a server farm, that’s going to drive the economy to stop pursuing chatGPT and start producing a lot of wheat so that they can sell enough to me to pay their taxes. And that’s just in the roll out, issuing a new currency also means you get to set fiscal (budget and spending and taxing) and monetary (interest rates and money supply) policy, where are key tools for governing as well. And that’s all just the new script. This being the Imperium, there is going to be a lot of debt and financing for Rogue Trader expeditions, corvée labor, indentured servitude, and just outright slavery, with it trending more and more towards those as the interconnectivity of the Imperium falls apart with the Heresy.
Service is its own reward
There is no one single system, and there is no central treasury collecting tax money uniformly across the empire and then spending it in a centralised way, unlike modern governments, and there is no single currency. Most of the time the Emperor or his representatives will have an arrangement with a particular planet to provide x/y/z, and then it's entirely up to that planet how they go about doing it, which could vary anywhere from slavery to salaries and contracts, and those would be paid in whatever local currency that planet uses to manage its affairs.
"It depends". The Imperium has never had anything like a centralized economy or currency, so it would probably vary on a case-by-case basis. I would imagine something similar to the settlement rights granted Guard who retire following a crusade would have been pretty common, or else other forms of "retirement packages" following service, which would then depend more on where, specifically, a soldier/worker wound up settling down. The Mechanicum, well...their workforce is mostly slaves, to begin with, and their ruling class, the priesthood, was getting to test all sorts of toys and pillage all kinds of goodies during the Crusade.
Servitors and mechanicus tech thralls
I always pictured it like RL where you work as a slave and get paid thinking you are not. That and servitors