The congressional pay raises amendment — the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — prevents any change in the salaries of senators and representatives from taking effect until after the next election of the House. Congress can still vote to raise or cut its own pay, but no member can collect the new amount until voters have had a chance to weigh in at the ballot box. The base salary set under this framework has been $174,000 since 2009.1U.S. Senate. U.S. Senate: Senate Salaries (1789 to Present)
What the Amendment Says
The operative text is a single sentence: no law changing the compensation of senators and representatives takes effect until an election of representatives has intervened.2Congress.gov. Twenty-Seventh Amendment The word “varying” is doing the work. It covers changes in either direction. Congress cannot vote itself an immediate raise, and it cannot slash its own pay mid-term either.
The restriction reaches only the salary attached to holding office. It does not touch office budgets, travel reimbursements, staff pay, or benefits, and it does not apply to the broader congressional workforce. The text speaks to compensation for “Senators and Representatives,” and that is where its force stops.
How the Intervening Election Requirement Works
The enforcement mechanism is the House election cycle. Every member of the House faces voters every two years, and the amendment requires at least one of those elections to fall between a pay-change vote and the day any paycheck actually changes. If Congress approved a salary increase during the current session, the new rate could not take effect until after the next House election and the seating of a new Congress in January.
The timing is the point. A member who votes for an unpopular raise has to defend that vote in a campaign before ever seeing the money. Voters can replace that member first. The framers built the rule as a structural check rather than an outright ban on self-dealing: Congress can still adjust its own compensation, it just cannot benefit right away from doing so.
Current Salary Levels
Most members of Congress earn $174,000 per year, the same figure that has held since 2009.1U.S. Senate. U.S. Senate: Senate Salaries (1789 to Present) Leadership makes more. The Speaker of the House is paid $223,500. The Senate President Pro Tempore and the Majority and Minority Leaders of both chambers each earn $193,400. Those leadership differentials sit within the same statutory framework as rank-and-file pay, so the intervening-election requirement applies to them the same way, and they have been frozen alongside the base rate for over a decade.
Automatic Cost-of-Living Adjustments
The Ethics Reform Act of 1989 created a formula for automatic annual pay adjustments tied to the Employment Cost Index, a Bureau of Labor Statistics measure of private-sector wages and salaries.3U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Cost Index Under 2 U.S.C. § 4501, the yearly adjustment equals the twelve-month percentage change in the ECI minus half a percentage point, rounded to the nearest $100, and it cannot exceed the General Schedule raise given to federal employees that year.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 2 USC 4501 Compensation of Members of Congress
The formula runs on its own unless Congress affirmatively blocks it. That raised an obvious question after ratification: does each annual bump trigger the 27th Amendment’s intervening-election requirement?
Boehner v. Anderson
In 1994, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said no. Several members of Congress argued that each annual cost-of-living increase was itself a “law varying compensation.” The court disagreed. In Boehner v. Anderson, it held that the relevant law was the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, not each downstream adjustment produced by its formula.5Justia. Boehner v Anderson Because the Ethics Reform Act did not deliver its first adjustment until after the 1990 election and the seating of a new Congress, the amendment’s requirements had been satisfied.6Legal Information Institute. Scope of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment
The practical effect is that Congress does not have to vote again each year for the formula to keep working. As long as the original statute was enacted with a proper intervening election, the raises it generates are constitutional. The amendment blocks only a new, affirmative legislative decision to change pay.
Why Congressional Pay Has Been Frozen Since 2009
The automatic formula is constitutional, but it has not been running. Congress has blocked its own cost-of-living adjustment every year since 2009. It does this by inserting language into appropriations legislation stating that no funds may be used to implement the scheduled adjustment.7EveryCRSReport.com. Salaries of Members of Congress: Recent Actions and Historical Tables The debate typically plays out during consideration of the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill or the Legislative Branch appropriations bill, though the underlying salary authorization sits in 2 U.S.C. § 4501 rather than in annual spending bills.8EveryCRSReport.com. Salaries of Members of Congress: Congressional Votes, 1990-2025
The freeze is not something the 27th Amendment requires. Congress imposes it voluntarily under political pressure. The result is that members have taken a real-pay cut over the past seventeen years as inflation has eroded the purchasing power of $174,000.
What the Amendment Does Not Cover
The 27th Amendment’s language is limited to “compensation for the services of Senators and Representatives.” A range of financial benefits sits outside it. Members participate in the Federal Employees Retirement System and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program on the same terms as other federal workers, and changes to those programs do not trigger the intervening-election rule because they are not direct pay.
Office budgets, franking privileges for official mail, travel allowances, per diem payments, and staff salaries all fall outside the amendment’s scope. Congress can adjust these at any time through ordinary appropriations. If you are following a debate about how much members “make,” the amendment controls the salary line, not the full package of resources that come with the job.
Enforcement and Legal Standing
The amendment has no built-in enforcement mechanism, which raises a practical question about who can challenge a violation. Federal courts require plaintiffs to show a concrete, personal injury traceable to the challenged conduct. A generic complaint that Congress raised its own pay too quickly would likely be dismissed as a “generalized grievance” that does not meet the standing threshold.
Boehner v. Anderson is a useful example. The plaintiffs there were sitting members of Congress with a direct stake in how their own salaries were calculated, and the court reached the merits on that basis. Whether an ordinary taxpayer could bring the same challenge is far less certain. Federal courts have historically rejected taxpayer standing in most contexts, though at least 36 states recognize some form of taxpayer standing in their own court systems.
The strongest enforcement tool is political. The rule was designed so voters could punish members who vote for unpopular raises before those raises arrive. That is why it took the shape it did in the first place, and it is why the freeze since 2009 has held even though the automatic formula is legally free to run.
A Two-Century Delay
James Madison proposed this measure in 1789 as one of twelve amendments sent to the states alongside what became the Bill of Rights. Only six of the fourteen existing states had ratified it by the end of 1791, well short of the threshold.9Congress.gov. Amdt27.2.5 Ratification of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment It sat unratified for nearly two centuries. The required number of state ratifications was finally reached on May 7, 1992, and the Archivist of the United States certified it eleven days later.10National Archives. The National Archives Role in Amending the Constitution Some members of Congress questioned whether a proposal that old could still be valid, but Article V imposes no time limit unless one is written into the amendment itself, and Congress passed resolutions affirming the ratification.