The 27th Amendment blocks Congress from giving itself an immediate pay change. Any law that raises or lowers the salary of Senators and Representatives cannot take effect until after the next election for the House of Representatives, giving voters a chance to respond before the new pay kicks in.
What the Text Says
The amendment is a single sentence: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”1Congress.gov. Twenty-Seventh Amendment
Congress can still vote to change its own pay at any time. The change simply waits on the shelf until after the next general House election. Because those elections happen every two years, the delay is at most about two years and at least however long remains before the next cycle.
“Varying” covers both directions. A cut has to wait the same way a raise does. Public attention has always focused on raises, but the rule is symmetrical.
Why Madison Wrote It
Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution says members of Congress “shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law.”2Cornell Law School. Compensation of Members of Congress In other words, Congress sets its own paycheck. James Madison saw the conflict of interest, but he also didn’t want to hand the job to the President, which would give the executive branch leverage over the legislature.
His fix was an election buffer. If voters disliked a generous raise, they could remove the lawmakers who passed it before the raise ever took effect. The amendment doesn’t take away Congress’s power over its own pay. It forces a cooling-off period with the voters in between.
How It Works With Today’s Pay
Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate currently earn $174,000 a year, with higher figures for leadership.3Congress.gov. Congressional Salaries and Allowances: In Brief That number has been frozen for well over a decade because Congress keeps blocking its own automatic cost-of-living adjustment through annual spending bills.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 2 USC 4501 – Compensation of Members of Congress
The COLA itself was created by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, which raised an obvious question under the 27th Amendment: if pay rises every year without a new vote, is that constitutional? Congressman John Boehner challenged the mechanism, and in Boehner v. Anderson (1994) the D.C. Circuit said yes. The court held that the “law” for 27th Amendment purposes was the 1989 Act itself, not each annual adjustment it produced. Because the Act didn’t take effect until a new Congress was seated in January 1991, an election had intervened, and the requirement was met.5Cornell Law School. Scope of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment
The Supreme Court has never ruled on a 27th Amendment case, so the outer limits of what Congress could do with creative pay structures remain untested.
Who and What It Does Not Cover
The amendment applies only to Senators and Representatives. It doesn’t reach the President’s salary, federal judges’ pay, or the compensation of other federal workers.6Cornell Law School. Amendment XXVII – Congressional Compensation Presidential pay is handled by Article II, which prevents changes during a sitting president’s term. Judges are protected by Article III, which forbids reducing their pay while they serve.
The amendment is also silent on benefits like health insurance, pensions, and office budgets. Courts have read “compensation for services” as salary. Whether non-salary perks could ever trigger 27th Amendment scrutiny is an open question.
The 202-Year Ratification Story
Madison proposed this amendment in 1789 as part of a package of twelve sent to the states. Ten became the Bill of Rights almost immediately. This one stalled. Only six states ratified during the founding era, and it was largely forgotten for nearly two centuries.
Its revival came from a college paper. In 1982, a University of Texas sophomore named Gregory Watson found the unratified amendment while researching a government assignment. He argued it was still legally alive because Congress had never attached a ratification deadline. His teaching assistant gave him a C. Watson then spent the next decade lobbying state legislatures to ratify it, and one by one they did.
On May 7, 1992, the Archivist of the United States certified that enough states had ratified the amendment for it to become part of the Constitution, and Congress confirmed the ratification by formal vote on May 20, 1992. Some scholars argued the amendment had gone stale after so long a wait. Neither Congress nor the courts agreed.