Fourth-quarter bonuses to House staffers in 2015 increased their quarterly pay by an average of 14.1 percent over previous quarters.
Every year, representatives have a set allowance for their office's expenses, which includes staff salaries. As the year winds down, unused money — which would otherwise be returned to the U.S. Treasury — often gets disbursed to staffers in the form of bonuses.
The House requires members to publicly report what they pay their staffers. However, there is no requirement that bonus information be disclosed, and no requirement that clearly delineates what was a bonus and what was part of a staffer's salary. Therefore, to determine what bonuses were awarded, LegiStorm takes the average salary numbers of the first three quarters and compares them to the salary number of the last quarter.
Using this method, LegiStorm has determined that, for the fourth year running, bonuses given by Republican representatives were higher than those given by Democrats — 15.4 percent to 12.8 percent, respectively.
House bonuses of 10 percent to 17 percent have been the norm since 2010. Between 2010 and 2000, when LegiStorm first started keeping records of staff salaries in the House, annual bonuses were typically in the range of 16 percent to 22 percent. Their lowest mark was 2013, when fourth-quarter pay increases were 10.6 percent above the average staffer's regular salary.
