Congress Pays Its Chief of Staff More Than the Member. The Entry-Level Aide Earns Less Than D.C.'s Living Wage.

Congress writes the rules other employers live under — minimum wage floors, overtime thresholds, wage-theft penalties.▸ It does not apply anything like a living-wage floor to itself. The office that hires you to answer constituent mail, the first rung on the ladder to nearly every senior job on Capitol Hill, pays a median salary that falls short of what it costs to live in the city where the job is located. Two rungs up, the person who runs that same office can out-earn the member of Congress whose name is on the door.

The bill that funds Congress's own operations — the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act — is not a large one by federal standards.▸ For FY2026 it totals $7.258 billion, enacted as part of P.L. 119-37, which President Trump signed on November 12, 2025, ending a 42-day funding lapse. Of that, $2.083 billion runs the House of Representatives — a 10.9% increase, +$204.7 million, over FY2025 — and $1.467 billion runs the Senate. The rest funds the Capitol Police, the Library of Congress, the Architect of the Capitol, GAO, CBO, and the Government Publishing Office.

Most of the House's share doesn't go to a central payroll office — it's distributed as a lump sum to each of the 435 individual offices as the Members' Representational Allowance, which averaged $1,928,107 per office in 2025, ranging from about $1.85 million to $2.09 million depending on district size, distance from Washington, and mail volume.▸ Each member then decides, within that lump sum, how to split pay among as many as 18 permanent staff — subject to one hard ceiling. No single aide, in the House or the Senate, can be paid more than the annual rate for Level II of the Executive Schedule, which rose to $228,000 for 2026 under the standard federal pay adjustment. There's a ceiling. There is no floor.

CRS tracks what members actually pay, position by position, using the House's own Statement of Disbursements, as collated by LegiStorm.▸ The 2024 medians, reported in constant 2025 dollars, trace a steep climb from the entry-level job to the top of a member's office.

A Staff Assistant — the job description is answering phones, greeting visitors, and routing mail, usually the first job a Hill staffer ever holds — earned a median $58,920 in 2024.▸ MIT's Living Wage Calculator puts the income a single adult needs to cover basic expenses in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area at $60,347 a year — $1,427 more than what the median Staff Assistant is paid to do the job in the city where it's located. A Legislative Correspondent, one rung up, earned $66,866; a Legislative Assistant, $78,605. By the time an office reaches Chief of Staff, median pay was $192,456 — above the member's own $174,000 salary, a figure Congress has declined to adjust every year since 2009. The employee runs the office; on paper, in the median case, the employee also outearns the boss.

The year-over-year swings in CRS's data point to the same instability from a different angle.▸ Between 2023 and 2024, in constant dollars, pay for Constituent Services Director fell 10.3%, Senior Legislative Assistant fell 6.5%, and Communications Director fell 6.6% — while Legislative Assistant rose 6.2% and Legislative Director rose 4.0%. Those aren't across-the-board raises or cuts; they're what happens when offices with wide discretion and no floor set pay job by job, year by year, inside a fixed and often shrinking real-dollar budget.

Pay figures are House-only medians for selected position titles, drawn from CRS's analysis of the Statement of Disbursements; Senate staff pay is tracked separately by CRS and isn't included here. The living-wage figure covers a single adult with no dependents in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area and will differ for other household sizes.