Average cost to the taxpayer for each member of congress

Q: What is member representational allowance?

The Members Representational Allowance is the budget authorized by the Committee on House Administration for each Member of Congress in support of the conduct of official and representational duties to the district from which elected.

Congressional Salary

Under law, the salary of Members of Congress are set for an automatic annual cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) increase unless Congress votes to not accept it.

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Congressional Salary
Congressional Pension
Death Gratuity Payments
What is the total payroll for Congress?
How much does the Senate cost per year?
What is member representational allowance?
How are Congressional offices paid for?

Since 2009, the COLA increases have been denied, leaving the salaries of rank-and-file legislators serving in the US Congress at $174,000 annually. Leaders of the House and Senate are paid a higher salary than other Members.

Senate Leadership

Majority Party Leader - $193,400
Minority Party Leader - $193,400
Senate President Pro Tempore - $193,400

House Leadership

Speaker of the House - $223,500
Majority Leader - $193,400
Minority Leader - $193,400

Congressional Pension

Since 1946, Members of Congress with at least five years of service or federal employment can also be eligible for a generous pension that pays two to three times more than pensions offered to similarly-salaried workers in the private sector. The value of the benefit is determined by a formula based on the initial date of election to office, the length of service, and the average of the three years of highest salary.

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 was enacted to cut off pensions for former members of Congress who are convicted of corruption-related crimes. The Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 added to the list of crimes that would result in forfeiture of federal pension.

However, in 2017 NTUF disclosed a loophole in the law that has enabled two convicted former Members to continue collecting a taxpayer-funded pension while in jail. The reform laws only apply upon final conviction, leaving open the eligibility for pension payments while appeals are ongoing, which could last for several years.

Death Gratuity Payments

Lesser-known among congressional perks is the tradition of granting death gratuity payments to the heirs of members who pass away while serving in office. The amount is equal to the member's yearly congressional salary and the payments are provided regardless of the financial status of the member, many of whom are millionaires. From 2000 through 2021, the payments have cost taxpayers $5 million.

Additional benefits and perks are detailed here.

The shopping spree is a fun concept. The winner of a game show or sweepstakes gets five minutes to race through a store piling high a shopping cart with all the goodies they can get their hands on.

Inevitably, the prizewinner gravitates toward the big-ticket items to get the most bang for someone else’s buck.

Of course, watching a shopping spree is less fun if you’re the one footing the bill. It’s even worse when there are 535 “shoppers” haphazardly throwing $13 million worth of items into the shopping cart every minute.

Yet, that’s what Congress does with the taxpayer dollars taken from the Americans they represent. Instead of carefully deliberating on every dollar spent—as American families do to make the most of their limited budgets—Congress clears the shelves with little regard for the price.

It votes for omnibus spending packages that cost trillions of dollars and span thousands of pages without even having enough time to read what’s in the legislation.

It’s past time for Congress to start behaving like responsible stewards. Congress is entrusted to represent the interests of the American people and to spend taxpayer dollars as carefully as the taxpayers would themselves.

The Heritage Foundation’s Budget Blueprint envisions what responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars could look like, laying out a 10-year federal budget with $15.5 trillion less piled into Congress’ shopping cart. That’s about $3 million per minute for those watching at home. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Many of the spending items that the Budget Blueprint would remove from Congress’ metaphorical shopping cart would save Americans not only from bad deals, but also from bad—even actively harmful—products.

That includes curtailing funding for global organizations that work against American interests, eliminating shipping regulations that drive up prices for American consumers, and cutting off federal dollars from left-wing institutions that undermine American values.

The Budget Blueprint includes 230 different policy recommendations across the federal budget to substantially reduce federal spending, cut taxes, and unleash the American economy.

America’s fiscal situation is dire: The national debt stands at more than $230,000 per U.S. household. How did we get here? Our representatives in Congress are accountable to the people, so how do they get away with spending taxpayers’ hard-earned money so recklessly?

There are several ways members of Congress have fed the notion that government spending won’t cost you, the average taxpayer, anything.

Members of Congress have downplayed concerns about our increasingly unsustainable deficits and national debt. Some have even promoted the pseudoscientific Modern Monetary Theory, which suggests that the Federal Reserve can just print money to pay for multitrillion-dollar utopian socialist programs.

Americans suffering through inflation are experiencing for themselves the folly of this wishful thinking.

Instead of ignoring the debt problem, the Budget Blueprint shows how to balance the budget and bring down inflation in the process.

Left-wing members of Congress also have falsely claimed that the 1% of the richest Americans and “big corporations” can foot the bill for the leviathan government they are creating. Unfortunately for the left, there’s a math problem and an incentive problem with their approach.

First, the math problem: In 2021, federal government spending exceeded 30% of the economy, which is roughly $2.3 trillion more than the total amount of income earned by the top 1%.

Even if it were feasible to impose a 100% federal income tax—while ignoring all the state and local taxes they pay—there simply aren’t enough very wealthy individuals to shoulder the weight of all this spending.

While the rich directly pay most federal taxes now, there’s no way to tax your way out of a $30.8 trillion hole without smacking the middle class with big tax increases. Huge taxes on the middle class are the only way that European countries can remotely afford their high levels of spending.

The other problem with high taxation on investment, business, profits, and the wealthy is that it stops innovation, destroys businesses, and pushes more wealth and investment overseas or squashes it altogether.

Tax policy that drives away businesses, jobs, and opportunity only hurts working Americans and makes it that much harder to get out from under a mountain of debt.

The tax and fiscal policies in the Budget Blueprint, on the other hand, were designed to boost the economy. A strong and thriving economy would lift more and more Americans into the middle class and beyond, while easing inflation.

Modeling projects that the Budget Blueprint’s policies would create 6 million full-time jobs, permanently expand the economy by 6.2%, and increase the median worker’s after-tax wages by $2,200 per year.

The Budget Blueprint achieves that by offering several solutions to reduce the harmful practice of overtaxing investment, the lifeblood of sustained economic growth. It would extend expensing of capital investments, allowing companies to deduct capital investments as they’re made, instead of following convoluted, decadeslong depreciation schedules that allow inflation to eat into the value of any deduction.

Similarly, the Budget Blueprint would allow for the full recovery of investments in structures and end the research and development amortization tax disadvantage.

The Budget Blueprint would reduce tax rates on businesses and individuals. It would cut the corporate tax rate to 15%, making America one of the most attractive places in the world to do business, benefiting American workers in the process.

The Budget Blueprint would make permanent the individual Trump tax cuts of 2017, which benefited American households across the income spectrum. And it would reduce and simplify tax rates further, consolidating seven income-tax brackets into three.

At its heart, the Budget Blueprint is about trusting Americans to keep more of their own money. Is there any doubt that they’d spend and invest it more prudently than Congress?

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

What is the total payroll for Congress?

For all members of the House of Representatives and Senate.

How much does the Senate cost per year?

Senate Salaries (1789 to Present).

What is member representational allowance?

The Members' Representational Allowance is the budget authorized by the Committee on House Administration for each Member of Congress in support of the conduct of official and representational duties to the district from which elected.

How are Congressional offices paid for?

Article I, Section 6, of the U.S. Constitution, authorizes compensation for members of Congress “ascertained by law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States.” Adjustments are governed by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989 and the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.