There are a lot of reasons for that. People come to Congress from a range of backgrounds and experiences. But two things are safe to say. The first is that no one in Congress became a millionaire solely on a congressional salary. And second, it seems safe to assume that one reason there are so many millionaires in Congress is that they’re better able to get by on what Congress pays.
It is true that congressional salaries are higher than they’ve ever been. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reviewed the history of annual salaries for the House and Senate, allowing us to illustrate how those incomes have changed over time.
But of course, a $3,000 salary in the 1850s had a lot more buying power than it would today. If we adjust those salaries into 2022 dollars (using the consumer price index and historic data from Oregon State University), we see that congressional salaries were higher than they are now for most of the past century. Since about 1993, there’s been a fairly consistent downward trend in the inflation-adjusted salary of a member of Congress.
Look, I’m certainly not going to say that a $174,000 annual salary is peanuts. It’s still more than twice the median household income. But that, too, is down since the early 1990s. Congress used to earn more than four times the median income nationally.
Members of Congress have an encumbrance that most Americans don’t: They need to have residences in both their home districts and in Washington. When considered as a function of median incomes in D.C., Congress’s salary is even lower, less than twice the median in the city.
We can look at this a different way. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates incomes for managers and professional workers. From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, members of Congress made about twice the pretax income of professionals in general. Now congressional salary is only about a third higher.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was first elected to Congress in 2018, she observed that she couldn’t afford to move to Washington until her congressional salary kicked in. Many members of Congress have been known to simply live in their congressional offices since they can’t afford housing in the city. These are real constraints that clearly have more of an effect on people who aren’t already wealthy. It’s much less of a strain for someone rich to be elected to Congress than it is for a member of the lower or middle class: less of a strain to afford transit, to afford housing — even less of a strain, it seems safe to assume, to find peers willing to write big checks for your campaign.
Put another way, coming to Congress won’t make you rich. But being rich will make it easier for you to come to Congress.
