Brussels started 2018 with a bold, simple claim: Membership of the European Union is great value because it costs citizens less than a cup of coffee a day.

As Jean-Claude Juncker moves aggressively to expand the post-Brexit EU budget, POLITICO put the claim to the test.

It's time to sort the myth from the reality: for less than one cup of coffee a day, every EU citizen benefits from #EUbudget. pic.twitter.com/8XC93CP9bd — European Commission (@EU_Commission) January 7, 2018

While there are huge, surprising differences in how much Europeans in different countries pay to the EU, the union costs citizens less than half a cup of coffee daily — and as little as a tenth of a cup — in most of the 28 member countries.

In this new "EU Coffee Index," POLITICO ranks each member country, using the EU's own statistics, according to how much citizens pay the EU (so disregarding money each country receives back such as regional or research funding), and how much coffee (with milk) that costs them. It factors in the U.K.'s budget rebate and the other national budget adjustments connected with it.

If you think Germans pay the EU bills, you're wrong. The EU costs Germans €0.84 euros a day per person, barely half the price Luxembourgers pay: €1.57 every day.

Italians may find the EU's coffee comparison the least appealing: Thanks to the cheap coffee in Italy, the EU ends up costing Italians just over half a cup per day (0.56 to be precise).

Belgium is the only other country where the EU costs the population more than half a cup of coffee a day.

Brexiteers are also in for bad news: The U.K. gets a better deal than most EU countries in terms of both cash and coffee.

Bulgaria gets the best EU deal, paying just €0.18 per day — equivalent to 0.17 of a cup of coffee.

For a country suffering a decade of austerity, Greece really suffers on the coffee front, with an average cappuccino costing €2.91. The flipside of that raw deal is that the EU costs Greeks the least amount of coffee of any EU country: just 0.15 cups per day.

Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark and Finland pay the most per person toward the EU budget. In the case of Luxembourg and Belgium, they pay around seven times more than Bulgaria and Romania.

Trenchant EU critics such as Hungary and Poland also fare well on the index: Only Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria pay less cash per person to the EU.

The 13 countries that pay the most in financial terms all joined the EU before or in 1995.