Pennsylvania legislators’ base salaries will crack the $110,000 mark for the first time starting next month due to inflation-based cost-of-living adjustments.
Rank-and-file members of the state House of Representatives and Senate will receive annual salaries of $110,015.54 starting Dec. 1, according to soon-to-be published pay tables. Lawmakers receive their salaries in monthly payments.
Current pay is $106,422.33, with the 3.38% raise coinciding with October’s year-over-year Consumer Price Index increase for the mid-Atlantic metro region that includes Pennsylvania.
Under a 1995 amendment to Pennsylvania’s compensation law, pay for judges, legislators and most state-level officials is tied to regional CPI inflation. Lawmakers’ automatic raises are based on the October CPI data that is published in November, with the raises kicking in Dec. 1.
Lawmakers who hold leadership positions within the House and Senate receive additional compensation that also rises with the CPI.
The president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House will have salaries of $171,741.28 as of next month. The four floor leaders – both parties in both chambers – will see their pay rise to $159,398.47, with each caucus’ officers receiving slightly smaller premiums over base lawmaker pay.
Pennsylvania’s legislature is one of the largest and highest-paid in the nation, with 203 members of the House and 50 state Senators. Only New York and California have higher base pay for lawmakers, according to tracking by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
By contrast, many other states have much smaller legislatures that do not meet year-round, as Pennsylvania’s does. Maryland, for instance, pays legislators $54,437 for a session that is limited to 90 days from January to April, according to the NCSL.
The commonwealth’s automatic salary-setting has its supporters and detractors. The main argument in favor of the law is that it saves legislators from spending time and political capital debating their own pay every year, and guarantees that lawmakers who aren’t independently wealthy will be able to continue to serve despite rising costs-of-living.
Critics have said the raises are often excessive; when the pay amendment passed in 1995, legislative salaries were just $47,000. Several legislators have long told PennLive that they return their raises to the state treasury or give the amount to charity.
In 2020, the legislature passed a law to cancel its own pay increases amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. But the freeze was one-year-only and had limited impact given that inflation was low during the COVID recession. Lawmakers then received large raises in December of 2021 and 2022 amidst large CPI increases.
The legislature’s automatic cost-of-living adjustments also stand in contrast to some sectors of Pennsylvania’s public workforce, whose raises have been sporadic at best.
In 2001, the state overhauled the benefit scales for public school teachers’ pensions – but those teachers who retired prior to 2001 have seen stagnant retirement pay for over two decades, and the legislature has thus far failed to reach a deal to rectify this.
