The Rebel Alliance were the sole driving force opposing the Empire, and it was very much a situation of the big powerful enemy being too strong to take on at once.
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For this reason, the rebel alliance opted to take part in smaller, targeted, and carefully planned missions which would all work together to cripple sections of the Empire, making them an easier target while staying on the move. But with the amount of men which the alliance needed to pose even the smallest threat against the empire, as well as all the weapons and vehicles, how much exactly did it take to run this army and pay for their various missions in taking down the Empire?

I’m about to break it down so smash the like and subscribe buttons, check out the StarForceOne discord, and let’s get into it. So in Andor season one, we got to see a very intense arc which showed us some of the methods of the Rebel Alliance. Around 5 BBY, the Rebels, in their early stages, executed a covert operation led by Senator Mon Mothma to steal a whole sector's payroll on Aldhani. With a six-person infiltration team, including the double agent Lieutenant Gorn who worked with the Imperials as well as Rebels, and late addition in Cassian Andor, they planned to utilise the local festival for cover to perform a night raid and get away with the credits.

The operation faced many challenges, including an unexpected firefight during the heist and multiple casualties. After a successful escape, the team regrouped, which is when Andor eliminated a potential traitor, Arvel Skeen, and departed for Niamos, his now-occupied home planet.

The payroll that this entire mission was centred around was a total sum of 80 million credits, which sounds like it could be a lot of money.. But since we don’t know much about the Rebel’s budgets, it could also be very little. So in order to gauge how significant this haul was, we’ll use it as an isolated example of Rebel fund acquisition and see just how far the money would stretch when spent on various vehicles, weapons and so on. Of course this will be rough, because we don’t have any solid numbers in canon or legends, but it should be a good estimate that scales up in relation to how many similar heists were performed.

What we’ll do to figure this out is look at a couple battles the rebels were in, and try to calculate the rough cost of each of them. First up we’ll break down the Battle of Yavin, the iconic event which ended in the destruction of the first death star. This entailed a total of 30 fighters and bombers working together in an attempt to destroy the death star before it was able to successfully destroy the rebel base, holding some of the most powerful leaders of the alliance movement.

There were 22 X-Wings, which cost 65,000 credits each used, so 22 of them would be 1,430,000 credits. Alongside these starfighters were 8 Y-Wing bombers, which were the same price, meaning that 8 of them would cost the Rebels 520,000 credits. Although many people joined the alliance for free out of a passion against the empire, there are still various costs relating to the aircraft and pilot’s care which the rebels need to account for. So to estimate the cost per pilot we’ll just see the salary of a USA airforce pilot which is $100k.

Translating that into credits through the method we discovered through this video here, which I highly recommend you check out, this would be around 75,000 credits per pilot, totalling 2,250,000 credits. This means that in total, the battle of Yavin required the Rebel Alliance to spend 4,200,000 credits. They’d be able to perform 19 of these attacks on the death star in order to fully deplete the credits gained on aldhani.