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Given the current situation in the world we live in, it feels surprising that mercenaries in 40k are often non-existent. There is no equivalence of Blackwater or Wager Group in Warhammer 40k, except when it comes to the Rogue Traders but even then, these are barely explored and usually limited to just humans with a few xenos serving as specialists. Certain warring sides in a conflict may include multiple factions, but they are more often not motivated by ideologies or the desire to vanquish common enemies rather than monetary gain.

Here are some known examples of mercenaries:

+ Orks, particularly the Bloody Axes, fight on behalf of the Imperium.

+ The Loxalt and Drukhari fighting for Chaos.

+ Kroot fighting for both the Imperium and Chaos.

But that's it. There is not really a lot of them. It feels really strange that the Asuryani, which can seriously use mercenaries to bolster their small ranks, is not mentioned. It really doesn't make sense that the Aeldari go through the trouble of trying to manipulate other factions to fight wars for them rather than just pay them. The Asuryani certainly have excess resources to spend on this to add more disposable bodies to their side. If they ask a Planetary Governor for some troops to fight Orks in exchange for resources and advanced technology, I bet a lot of them will agree - for the same reason many of them are willing to trade with the T'au.

The hyper-capitalistic League of Voltann should also be act as mercenaries for the right price or as hirers of mercenaries.

Mostly because nobody wants to let their soldiers fight for anyone other than their own faction.

Because it's a grimdark and irrational enough universe that there's a very good chance the mercs would be killed afterwards so they wouldn't need to be paid?

Also the power disparity - if you have a ship you're not going to sell out to fight for others when you can raid/grow your forces/conquer. And if you don't have a ship why would anyone hire you when they can get their own cheap cannonfodder from the local PDF/slaves/etc?

Again, I'd attribute this to the recent oversimplification of the setting. GW wants the armies on the tabletop to look a certain way, and lore is written to cater for such a look. But there is no reason why mercs couldn't be more prevalent in the setting (I actually suspect the 40K RPGs probably showcase this to some degree?)

Mercenaries are largely going to be ex-military or belong to a nomadic culture that offers services as payment for passage or supplies.

For the former, the armies of 40k don't exactly have terms of service. You serve until you die in most cases unless you get really damn lucky (or unlucky if you're an Ork I suppose).
The scale of the armed forces in 40k also doesn't really encourage the mercenary lifestyle all that much. Why pay a group of 50 skilled ex-Guardsmen when the Imperium can just raise 5000 at a tithe? Chances are those ex-Guardsmen would just get drafted into that new Regiment as NCOs or officers and then they're back in the meat grinder.
Instead those mercenaries could work as private security for a governor or local dignitary/noble and live a comfortable life doing light protection duty.

The other thing is that a lot of the races and factions are going to be culturally opposed to the idea of mercenary work. The T'au work for the betterment of all which they can't do if they've broken off and go to fight for the highest bidder. Likewise a Sororitas convent wouldn't abandon their sacred duties to the Eccleisarchy for monetary gain.

Mercenary troops work more in smaller scale games like RPGs or Kill Team/Inquisitor where the individual models/characters have more creative freedom and you can really make your motley crew shine.

I agree it’s down to the scale. I can imagine that there are lots of mercenaries in the imperium at the planetary or city scale. Necromunda gangs for example. The Eisenhorn books had the Janissaries that were good for subterfuge and assassination but probably not big enough for a full battlefield presence.

I can see individual planetary governors having specialist Mercs on the payroll to supplement their bog standard PDF forces.

Regarding Eldar, they could, and almost certainly do, pay mercenaries for a range of things as part of the manipulation, but if you want to add an extra edge and make sure that they will do what you want you need to frame the action in a way that captures the people doing it. Certainly humans fighting only for money are less likely to go all out than those fighting for a cause that is dear to them.




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Also chaos wargames I can see consisting of mercenaries in many cases.

Mercenaries are everywhere at all kinds of scale.

They just don't feature in Army specific codex nor in big rulebook lore because those tend to focus on the pure core armed forces and the biggest and most important of battles. The Major engagements between factions who have very big, very well established armed forces of their own. They don't need to call in mercenaries and any outside help is likely viewed more as an alliance of convenience than mercenary trade.


Once you start drilling into BL and short stories and looking at the lore are different scales and locations you realise that mercenaries are all over the place. From individuals all the way up to well armed forces. Heck as noted by Flinty, some Inquisitors are basically operating as a large, diverse mercenary force when they aren't conscripting a local Imperial Guard force.


Even though Imperial Guard are basically "fight till you die" there are many worlds and situations where they do retire or at least complete a term of service.
There are many planets that likely rely on mercenary forces to help enforce and protect their system; there are many fringe worlds and such were Xenos and humans work side by side with contracts - even if sometimes the Imperial side would never admit to hiring them. Then you've got Rogue Traders who likely go all out hiring them here and there when they need too.


So there's a huge amount of variety and scope for mercenary armies.



The other angle is that GW hasn't made a mercenary army as such. The closest you get are things like Kroot, who have been honestly ignored for a very long time model and lore wise. Otherwise there isn't a big mercenary faction nor subfaction to get a codex and thus main lore focus.

Which kind of makes sense when so many factions are highly xenophobic and when the Imperial side really doesn't need another army when its got more than enough standing forces to draw from as allies. From multiple Marine chapters to the Admech, IG, SoB, Inquisition (who flit between having their own separate force to being included in others)

Commorragh has a whole mercenary district: Sec Maegra.

Eldar corsairs are also mercenaries for both the Dark Eldar and the Craftworlds, and allow them to intervene in affairs without revealing their identity.

Gav Thorpe's Path of the Outcast novel also showed Eldar settlements in the Webway composed of Eldar from all the various ways of life and they worked as mercenaries to accomplish their objectives. In that novel's case, there was a group composed of Outcasts, Harlequins, and Dark Eldar that was hired to go recover spirit stones.



There are mercenaries all over 40k. It's just that GW does not put a lot of limelight on them as they want well defined armies on the tabletop.

Chaos warbands are/were large collections of mercenary groups. In some sense so are the ork waaaaughs.

Alien and human mercenaries are also common on the edges of Imperial space- some are seen in the Dan Abnett inquisitor books and the Tau empire have been shown hiring large numbers of mercenaries (of many species- Human, Ork, Tarellian etc) to supplement their regular forces for new invasions (this was in the 13th Last Chancers series). The titular kill team infiltrated the Tau forces by posing as mercenaries. As mentioned, Kroot mercenaries are a thing and had rules back in 3rd edition. Ork Freebooterz typically operate as mercenaries, Blood Axe warbands in particular sometimes do too.

Rogue Traders hire mercenaries and contract out their forces as mercenaries too. Their relationship with the Imperium is essentially as privateers anyway.

Just remembered the Loxatl from the Gaunt series. Mercenary Xenos in the employ of the blood pact.

One of the Imperial Knights novels has a Freeblade hiring a mercenary army to help retake his home world.

Generally speaking in 40K we see formal military forces battling it out.

Mercenaries, within The Imperium, tend more to be hired to supplement PDF forces, or to raid neighbouring systems for whatever reason. And so we don’t tend to see the sort of situations they might crop up on the tabletop.

But they are out there. Kroot. Orks (Freebooterz and Blood Axes for the most part), Votann, even Eldar Rangers aren’t adverse to some blood money if it suits them.


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It’s also of….dubious legality within The Imperium. Whilst as ever nobody particularly minds what you do as long as your tithe is met and there’s no obvious signs of corruption (political, Xenos, chaos or what have you), you’d generally be in a right pickle should the need for hiring Mercs arise. Even if you’re successful in fending off an enemy thanks to their presence? You will be facing questions about why your PDF was so lacklustre you needed hired help in the first place.

I doubt there would be many questions as long as success continues and the tithe flows. Also for those governors of planets at any development stage below renaissance, then Mercs might be the only way to get technically adept soldiers that can be reliably trained to use more advanced stuff like aircraft and the more esoteric weapons.

There were Eldar mercenaries mentioned in the early days, and I would imagine you can hire Eldar Corsairs on occasion.

As is my favourite aspect of 40K? I guess….it depends!

A feudal world may still have an effective PDF, comprised of warriors shipped in from off-world, at least at first, and almost Space Marine like selection process from among the natives to keep the fresh recruits flowing? Others may be managed from an Orbital Station, with little in the way of formal Imperial presence planetside. And everything in between, including a PDF armed and armoured as any given historical army from the Bronze Age to Napoleonic (I kind of suspect any post-industrial revolution tech level would easily adapt to Lasguns, skipping huge chunks of directly comparable real world eras)

I'd say you're more likely to find mercenaries in lower scales of 40k battles. Considering what this galaxy throws at you, gathering such a force that makes you stand against a fully enraged waaagh or a chaos incursion is unlikely and will make mercenary armies less relevant, although detachments of them can totally come in handy. With most of the lore revolving about big wars, they're a bit harder to see but definitly exist!

Canonically there are already a lot of examples, some of which you cited: RT retenues, Orks as you said, Kroots, Eldar corsairs, Dark Eldar mercenaries on occasions come to mind.

However aside from the examples, you're pretty much free to imagine all kinds of mercenaries in smaller scale scenarios: gangers, PMC of governor, Tau-recruited auxiliaries, CSM selling their services to ambitious warlords, Eldar corsairs making a deal... The sky is the limit. The universe is big.

As a funny sidenot, I was personnaly sketching a project of converted guard that would acxtually be some kind of PMC subservient to my spaces marines, since according to their little backstory are sneaky and involved in so many gangster methods they like to send offcially independant dudes to preserve their numbers and anonimous moves, but that's really a continuation of my personnal army.

As a general rule mercenaries prefer to avoid high intensity combat that can easily get them killed.

Guess which is the most common from of large scale warfare in the setting? You are unlikely to convince mercenaries to put themselves between you and an Ork Waaagh, Chaos Black Crusade or a Tyranid Hive Fleet.

That doesn't mean they aren't around, but they are more common on policing or punishing roles in which they are more likely to hold the bigger stick and less likely to run into apocalyptic armadas of super death.

As others have said, mercenaries are all over the place. It's just that they aren't typically large-scale operations.

In regards to human mercenaries specifically, I imagine there are some pretty tough barriers to becoming a really "big" organization. Say you're based planetside. You can grow and grow and grow until you start approaching the same numbers as the local PDF. At that point, who's hiring you with enough work to feed all those mouths? And if you're that large, the PDF themselves might start to sweat about this massive millitary force that doesn't work directly for the planetary governor. So the governor/PDF have an interest in keeping your organization from reaching a certain size.

If you're ship-based rather than planetside, that begs the question of how you got your hands on one or more warp-capable ships. It's pretty rare that someone can do that without the backing of one of the big players, in which case you probably just kind of get absorbed into that faction. Rogue Traders could do it, as previously mentioned. Theoretically a rich noble with aspirations of glory could maybe pull it off, but they'd be a little fish in a big pond.

And on top of all that, large-scale mercenary work seems like it might be weirdly difficult to come across in the 41st millenium. You'd need to be within distance of a warzone (probably imperial) that has a conflict that is taking enough time to still be contested by the time you catch word of it and travel there to offer your services. Simultaneously, you need to be a large enough mercenary group to be able to meaningfully sway the course of battle, which also means that the enemy you're facing can't be *too* dire. (Otherwise you won't be strong enough to matter or you're too unlikely to survive to spend your paycheck.) And between jobs, you have to be able to feed and pay your forces.

tldr; human mercenary groups on a large scale are hard to maintain. It's much easier to just have a gang or mercs guild or independent contractors that get paid by small fish to deal with other small fish.

I could see mercenary groups being used to secure rear areas following a crusade as second line troops.

Sometimes such troops get stuck fighting uprisings/guerilla hold-outs or caught by enemy counter-attacks, so they can see plenty of action even if not intended to.

What counts as a mercenary? We tend to think of them as willing to fight for the highest bidder irrespective of cause, but some "causes" will use the mercs for food.

There are definitely mercenaries within the factions, but the nature of the 40k universe prohibits their use between the factions.

Ork Freebooterz are not going to be hired by the Imperium to fight the Tyranids. Chaos warbands at large are not going to be hired by the Eldar to fight the Orks. Space Marines are not going to augment a crusade with Eldar pirates.

But within those constraints, yes, there is a place for military contractors.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
What counts as a mercenary? We tend to think of them as willing to fight for the highest bidder irrespective of cause, but some "causes" will use the mercs for food.

There are definitely mercenaries within the factions, but the nature of the 40k universe prohibits their use between the factions.

Ork Freebooterz are not going to be hired by the Imperium to fight the Tyranids. Chaos warbands at large are not going to be hired by the Eldar to fight the Orks. Space Marines are not going to augment a crusade with Eldar pirates.

But within those constraints, yes, there is a place for military contractors.

The mercenary district within Commorragh is described as having mercs of many races. This could be viewed as either ruthless meritocracy or the Dark Eldar treating them all as expendables, though as with all things Dark Eldar, they cannot just betray and backstab everyone all the time as otherwise nobody would ever even try working for them.

The Gav Thorpe Eldar novels showed an Imperial governor using Eldar corsairs as mercenaries. He would give out the locations of the ships of political enemies so they would get raided. His enemies would grow weaker and the corsairs would get the prize of destroying those human ships for either the cargo or just for the thrills.

Ork Freebooterz do get hired by groups within the Imperium. It just happens rarely because someone has to be very desperate to both break Imperial law and deal with Orks!

A Tyranid invasion is actually the kind of situation that could be desperate enough to warrant the risk.

Necrons and Marines already fought with each other against Tyranids.

The thing is whilst everyone hates everyone else, all factions lose when Tyranids win. The worlds they leave behind are near useless for all factions without vast resource investment to make them functional again or vast amounts of time for the world to heal on its own (if it ever will).

Of course its also a situation where factions will use this to their advantage - eg trying to steer Tyranids into a massive Ork infested region... of course the orks love a good fight and Tyranids like fungal food so it didn't really work

In older editions, allies could easily be used to represent mercenaries but I think the tournament scene killed off allies as people used it as a way to produce power combos so it’s disappeared from more recent editions. But back in second edition you do most combos you needed to represent mercenaries.

I think what killed it off was one edition where subfactions became more and more common and where taking multiple detachments/armies from different subfactions became more and more normal.

That was the era where you'd take your close combat subfaction for all your close combat units in the army; the ranged one for the ranged etc...

It's also where some of the "Your army must fit your paint scheme if you use an official scheme" came from because you'd have 1 army scheme but might have 3 different subfaction armies on the table at once.



Thankfully those times are gone

 Overread wrote:
I think what killed it off was one edition where subfactions became more and more common and where taking multiple detachments/armies from different subfactions became more and more normal.

That was the era where you'd take your close combat subfaction for all your close combat units in the army; the ranged one for the ranged etc...

It's also where some of the "Your army must fit your paint scheme if you use an official scheme" came from because you'd have 1 army scheme but might have 3 different subfaction armies on the table at once.



Thankfully those times are gone

Yes it was a mess, I remember the term taudar flying around a lot.

Two main reasons:

1. Merc related lore isn't well fleshed out. There's a number of mercenary races/factions/groups that exist in the lore, most of them barely get more than a couple sentences worth of mention every few years. Outside of that most don't have models, those that do are associated with their own armies/factions that fight standalone rather than as mercenary allies, as GW has largely pushed the point of view that these factions are monolithic and exclusive in both fluff and crunch (Alliances notwithstanding).

2. The lore itself isn't really conducive to the idea of mercs. Everyone is presented as basically xenophobic (except the Tau), space travel is hard and requires massive multimile long vessels that can only be built by a limited group of governments and extremely wealthy individuals, etc. Compare to Star Wars or Battletech where factions are generally a but more of a cultural hodgepodge open to immigration and political interdealings, and space travel is more accessible to the rank and file.

The framing of 40k is very much total war between absolute totalitarian civilizations; in a setting where aliens are shoot-on-sight and members of your own species have already been conscripted by the state there's very little room left for mercenaries.

The Doyleist hurdle is also a pretty big one; the lore is informed by the game far more than the other way around these days, and mixing and matching armies attracts a lot of hostility/criticism from players when it's allowed, so GW's not likely to try and make mercenaries a thing.

The massive corruption in every side creates space for all the mercenaries you might ever want to play with. This thread has lore examples on every side except Tyranids.