Definition
A perquisite is a benefit, payment, or privilege received by an officeholder or employee in addition to — and separate from — their fixed salary or ordinary wages. The term encompasses both formal allowances sanctioned by law and informal advantages attached to a position by custom or circumstance.
In legal contexts, the term carries two distinct but related senses:
(1) Employment and office: Any fee, allowance, or benefit accruing to an officer or employee by reason of their position, beyond stated compensation. This includes statutory fees permitted to public officers for specific services, as well as non-cash benefits (use of property, services, access) attached to a private employment or office.
(2) Historical property law: In older common law usage, perquisite referred to property acquired by a person through their own industry or purchase, as distinguished from property received by descent or inheritance from a father or ancestor. This sense is now largely obsolete in active legal writing but appears throughout historical English land law materials.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Any monetary or other incidental benefit beyond salary; a gratuity; a privilege held or claimed exclusively by a certain person or class.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Something gained from a place or employment over and above ordinary salary or fixed wages; especially, a fee allowed by law to an officer for a specific service.
The common meaning and the legal meaning are unusually close, which is part of what makes the term a trap. In ordinary modern English, "perquisite" (and its informal shortening, "perk") has drifted toward informal workplace benefits — a company car, free meals, gym access — carrying no particular legal weight. In legal and regulatory contexts, the classification of something as a perquisite can have tax, disclosure, and ethics consequences that attach to form and intent, not merely informality. A benefit that looks like a perk in common speech may be a compensable emolument or a prohibited gratuity in the relevant legal framework.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
No formally codified subtypes exist under this term as such, but in practice the term appears across three distinct legal settings with different operative significance:
Officer's fees: Fees collected by public officers (court clerks, sheriffs, notaries) for specific official acts, authorized by statute. Whether a particular fee constitutes a lawful perquisite or an unlawful exaction has been the subject of public officer and fee-office litigation.
Executive compensation (modern): In corporate and tax law, perquisites are a recognized category of executive compensation subject to disclosure requirements and tax treatment distinct from base salary or bonus. The SEC's disclosure rules for named executive officers treat perquisites as a defined category in the summary compensation table.
Historical land law: Property acquired by a person (as opposed to inherited), relevant to dower, curtesy, and entail analysis in older title chains.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is structurally ambiguous across time, and researchers moving between historical and modern sources face two distinct risks.
First, the property-law sense (acquired vs. inherited property) dominated older English legal literature and appears in Blackstone, Coke, and period treatises on real property. A researcher encountering "perquisite" in a nineteenth-century deed abstract, title opinion, or equity pleading should not assume it refers to compensation — it may describe the mode of acquisition of land with consequences for dower rights, tenancy by the curtesy, or fee tail analysis.
Second, in modern compensation and public ethics law, perquisite has acquired a semi-technical status. Corporate disclosure practice, IRS guidance on fringe benefits, and state ethics statutes each use the term (or its functional equivalent) in ways that do not always align with one another. A benefit properly disclosed as a perquisite for SEC purposes may still be taxable compensation under the Internal Revenue Code, and may separately trigger ethics restrictions on public officers under state law. These three frameworks operate independently.
Anderson's cross-reference to EMOLUMENT is the most practically useful navigational signal in the historical sources. Researchers should treat perquisite and emolument as companion terms: perquisite tends to emphasize the incidental or extra character of the benefit, while emolument is the broader term encompassing all returns from office or employment. Constitutional emoluments clause analysis (both the Foreign and Domestic Clauses) has generated significant modern litigation that does not use "perquisite" as a term of art but is doctrinally continuous with the same underlying concept.
The informal shortening "perk" appears frequently in non-legal business writing and occasionally in deposition testimony and contract negotiations. It carries no independent legal meaning and should always be traced back to the formal term when legal consequence is at issue.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence offer the most complete historical entry, presenting all three operative senses: (1) gains of place or office beyond stated wages, (2) property acquired rather than inherited, and (3) manorial incidents such as fines of copyhold, heriots, and amercements. The third sense reflects the feudal administration of copyhold tenure and is essentially a historical artifact — it appears in English manorial records and older treatises on copyhold but has no living application outside historical title research.
Webster's 1913 confirms that the compensation sense was the dominant popular meaning by the late nineteenth century and already included the statutory-fee meaning for public officers. The illustrative quotations (Prescott on military pillage, Addison on the advantages of doing good) reveal how broadly the term was used in period writing — reaching well beyond formal legal employment into any advantage attached to a position or role.
Anderson's entry is a bare cross-reference to EMOLUMENT, which is editorially instructive: by 1893, perquisite was understood as a subspecies of the broader emolument concept rather than a freestanding legal category. The historical dictionaries collectively do not address the modern executive compensation and disclosure usage, which is an entirely twentieth-century development.
Jurisdictional Note
Public officer fee structures — determining which collections constitute lawful perquisites versus prohibited exactions — are governed by individual state statutes and vary substantially. In the federal context, the constitutional dimensions of emoluments have generated recent judicial attention. Corporate perquisite disclosure is a federal matter under SEC rules, largely uniform in application to public companies.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Emoluments Clause; Executive Compensation and Disclosure; Public Officers and Official Fees.