The Election Is Over. Now the New Offices Have to Be Built.
The campaigns are over.
For the incoming House class, another kind of race is beginning.
New Members now have to turn campaign organizations and transition teams into functioning congressional offices.
They need to hire staff.
Set salaries.
Build Washington and district operations.
Establish constituent services.
Assign legislative portfolios.
Create communications and scheduling systems.
And decide how to use limited staffing capacity before the 120th Congress begins.
HillClimbers data suggests many of those offices will start with a familiar disadvantage:
about two fewer people.
Earlier this year, HillClimbers found that new House Members consistently start with smaller teams.
The expanded data now pushes that analysis back to 2011, covering eight first sessions of Congress.
And it adds another dimension:
real staff compensation.
The longer history makes the staffing finding stronger.
Freshman offices employed fewer staff than established offices in every first session examined.
They also paid their teams less on average in every one.
But those two gaps have moved very differently.
The staffing gap barely changed. The pay gap moved much more dramatically, and its movement appears to track the House budget environment.
The real-pay gap nearly disappeared.
The staffing gap barely moves. The pay gap appears to move with the budget environment.
For the incoming House class, that is the finding worth paying attention to.
Eight First Sessions. Eight Staffing Gaps.
New House Members Have 2 Fewer Staff in Year One
For each first session from 2011 through 2025, HillClimbers compared offices led by Members in their first year of congressional service with offices led by Members with two or more years of experience.
The result is unusually consistent.
In 2011, freshman offices averaged 16.0 non-intern staff per day.
Established offices averaged 17.7.
Gap:
1.7 staff.
In 2025, freshman offices averaged 15.1.
Established offices averaged 16.8.
Gap:
1.8 staff.
Fourteen years separate those observations.
The gap is almost identical.
The years between them reinforce the pattern:
2013: 1.8 fewer staff
2015: 1.5
2017: 1.0
2019: 1.6
2021: 2.0
2023: 1.9
2025: 1.8
The precise number changes.
The direction never does.
New offices start smaller.
That substantially strengthens the conclusion of HillClimbers’ original analysis of the freshman staffing gap.
What initially looked like a persistent recent pattern now extends across eight Congresses and very different political, budgetary, and workforce environments.
The Pay Gap Tells a Very Different Story
Staffing is only one part of office capacity.
Pay matters too.
The HillClimbers Index treats staffing scale and compensation competitiveness as foundational elements of an office’s Capacity.
Historically, freshman offices faced disadvantages on both.
In 2011, average real staff compensation was approximately:
$48,364 in freshman offices
versus
$54,121 in established offices.
Gap:
$5,757.
Freshman offices paid about 10.6% less on average.
By 2025, the comparison had changed dramatically.
Freshman offices averaged approximately:
$79,324
versus
$80,035 in established offices.
Gap:
$711.
Less than 1%.
From 2011 to 2025, the real-pay gap narrowed approximately 88%.
Because these figures are inflation-adjusted, that is not simply nominal salaries rising over fourteen years.
The compensation disadvantage really did become much smaller.
But the Pay Gap Did Not Shrink in a Straight Line
This is where the budget history becomes important.
The freshman real-pay gaps were:
2011: $5,757
2013: $2,022
2015: $3,121
2017: $2,958
2019: $1,590
2021: $1,127
2023: $2,606
2025: $711
The long-run direction is clearly downward.
But there is a conspicuous interruption.
The gap narrowed substantially through 2021.
Then it more than doubled in 2023.
Then it collapsed to its lowest point in the series in 2025.
That timing lines up with a major change in the House budget environment.
The MRA Cycle May Help Explain the Shape of the Pay Gap
For much of the period between 2011 and 2021, Member office budgets were constrained.
Congress then provided substantial budget relief in 2022 and additional resources in 2023.
HillClimbers has previously shown how congressional staffing rises and falls with the resources Congress invests in itself.
The freshman compensation data now raises a related possibility.
During the long period of tighter budgets, the pay gap between freshman and established offices generally compressed.
Then, after the large budget increases of 2022 and 2023, the gap widened again:
from $1,127 in 2021
to
$2,606 in 2023.
One plausible interpretation is that additional budget capacity gave established offices more room to differentiate compensation.
An established office already knows its workforce.
It knows which employees it is trying to retain.
It knows which positions require more competitive salaries.
It has experienced managers, existing compensation structures, promotion histories, and employees whose institutional value is already known.
A freshman office is still building that system.
Budget relief may therefore be easier for an established organization to deploy quickly into retention, raises, promotions, and experienced hires.
That could help explain why the pay gap widened again in 2023.
But then the environment changed again.
Member office budgets flattened.
Flat Budgets May Be Compressing the Pay Gap Again
The sharp narrowing from 2023 to 2025 coincides with renewed budget pressure.
The real-pay gap dropped from:
$2,606
to
$711.
With offices operating under essentially flat nominal budgets while costs continued to rise, established offices may have had less room to maintain a compensation advantage over freshman offices.
In other words, a tighter budget ceiling may compress differences between offices.
That interpretation is consistent with other HillClimbers research showing that flat budgets are now putting pressure on House salaries.
It also fits HillClimbers’ broader finding that flat budgets do not produce flat workforce outcomes.
When office resources stop growing, offices still have to absorb rising salary expectations, district costs, travel, technology, communications, and other operating expenses.
Something has to give.
The freshman pay data suggests one thing that may give is the compensation premium previously maintained by more established offices.
The timing is compelling.
But it is not proof of causation.
The pay gap had already been narrowing before the 2022 and 2023 budget increases, and many other workforce factors changed over these fourteen years.
What we can say is that the compensation-gap pattern appears remarkably consistent with the broader budget cycle:
long-term constraint, narrowing gap
budget relief, wider gap
renewed flat-budget pressure, compressed gap
That deserves further study.
Budget relief may give established offices more room to differentiate pay. Budget pressure may compress those differences. Neither has eliminated the freshman staffing gap.
The Staffing Gap Did Not Follow the Same Pattern
This is what makes the new analysis especially interesting.
The compensation gap moved dramatically.
The staffing gap did not.
Compare the endpoints.
2011
Staffing gap: 1.7 staff
Real-pay gap: $5,757
2025
Staffing gap: 1.8 staff
Real-pay gap: $711
Fourteen years of changing budgets, compensation policies, labor markets, congressional majorities, and office practices substantially changed the pay relationship.
They barely changed the staffing relationship.
New offices have become much more competitive on pay. They still have not caught up on people.
That suggests the freshman staffing gap is not simply the result of new offices being unable to pay competitive salaries.
Something else is happening.
Are Offices Preserving Pay by Giving Up Headcount?
There is another possibility worth considering.
A Member office operates inside one budget.
If salary expectations rise faster than the MRA, offices cannot indefinitely preserve both compensation and headcount.
The arithmetic eventually forces tradeoffs.
That may help explain how the House can simultaneously have:
much greater pay parity between freshman and established offices
and
a persistent freshman headcount gap.
New offices may increasingly recognize that they need to pay competitive salaries to attract experienced people.
But competitive salaries consume more of the same finite budget.
That can leave less room for additional positions.
This would be particularly consequential for freshman Members.
A new office needs experience badly.
A strong Chief of Staff can bring management systems and institutional knowledge immediately.
An experienced Legislative Director can establish a policy operation.
A seasoned District Director can build district and constituent-facing systems.
Paying competitively for that experience may be a rational choice.
But if the budget does not expand with compensation costs, the tradeoff may be fewer total people.
The current analysis cannot establish that this is what individual offices are doing.
But it is a plausible mechanism worth testing.
Bigger Freshman Classes Do Not Explain the Gap
Another obvious explanation is class size.
A large freshman class means many new offices are hiring simultaneously.
They compete for experienced congressional talent at the same time.
That could theoretically produce larger staffing gaps.
The historical data does not show a strong relationship.
Freshman classes in this analysis ranged from 57 offices in 2017 to 93 in 2011.
The staffing gaps ranged from approximately 1.0 to 2.0 staff.
But the biggest class did not produce the biggest gap.
The 93-office freshman class in 2011 had a 1.7-staff gap.
The largest staffing gap occurred in 2021:
2.0 fewer staff
with only 63 freshman offices.
In 2019, a much larger class of 89 offices had a smaller 1.6-staff gap.
Across the eight sessions, the relationship between class size and staffing gap is weak.
With only eight first-session observations, that should not be overread.
But the historical evidence does not support a simple explanation that larger freshman classes create larger staffing gaps.
The gap appears more persistent than any one election wave.
Two Fewer People Is a Big Difference in a Member Office
A difference of 1.8 staff may not sound large.
Inside a Member office, it is.
HillClimbers’ guide to how congressional staffing works shows how many functions a relatively small congressional team has to cover.
Legislation.
Constituent services.
Communications.
District operations.
Scheduling.
Administration.
Financial management.
Technology.
Outreach.
Office leadership.
HillClimbers tracks these functions across its Member Office Roles.
A smaller team does not face a smaller workload.
The work has to go somewhere.
That can mean fewer specialists.
Broader portfolios.
Less redundancy.
More responsibilities concentrated among individual employees.
More reliance on junior staff.
More staff wearing multiple hats.
Or greater dependence on interns and other temporary capacity.
A smaller team does not face a smaller congressional workload. The work is redistributed across fewer people.
That is why staffing is not merely an employment statistic.
It is a congressional-capacity measure.
New Offices Are Also Entering a Smaller House Workforce
The freshman gap exists inside a broader contraction.
HillClimbers found that House Member offices were operating with 13% fewer non-intern staff in 2026 than in 2010.
The long-term decline has not been continuous.
Staffing contracted sharply in the early 2010s, stabilized, then expanded after Congress increased office resources.
Once budgets flattened again, staffing began retreating.
That broader pattern reinforces the central point:
flat budgets do not produce flat outcomes.
Offices are constantly choosing among salaries, vacancies, headcount, promotions, district operations, travel, technology, communications, and every other expense paid from the same finite resources.
Freshman offices make those choices without the organizational history established offices already possess.
Competitive Pay Matters More for New Offices
The narrowing compensation gap is still very good news.
New offices need to be able to compete for experienced congressional staff.
HillClimbers has found that lower-paying congressional offices experience higher staff turnover.
And experienced staff matter particularly when the Member is new.
A freshman Member arrives without years of House institutional knowledge.
Their staff can bring it with them.
HillClimbers has separately found that institutional knowledge in Congress is increasingly held by staff.
Experienced employees know how committees work.
They know House procedure.
They know how to structure constituent services.
They know the rhythms of appropriations, scheduling, legislative correspondence, casework, and district operations.
They know which problems a new office is about to encounter before the office encounters them.
So narrowing the freshman pay gap matters.
It makes experienced talent easier to recruit.
But that creates an important distinction.
Pay parity is not capacity parity.
A new office can pay its employees nearly as much as an established office and still have fewer employees doing the work.
This Is the Starting Line of the Six-Year Learning Curve
The staffing finding also connects directly to another recent HillClimbers analysis.
HillClimbers found that new Member offices take about six years to reach the HCI range of established offices.
First-year offices average 306th in HCI rank.
By year seven, at the beginning of a Member’s fourth Congress, the average reaches approximately 206th.
Established offices from years seven through twenty average approximately 201st.
The HCI evaluates three dimensions of the Member office workforce:
Capacity
Stability
Structure
The freshman staffing analysis tells us something important about where that six-year climb begins.
New offices do not start with the same staffing resources as established offices.
They begin with fewer people.
Then they spend several Congresses developing workforce experience, continuity, specialization, organizational structure, and staffing capacity.
The two analyses do not prove the staffing gap causes the six-year learning curve.
But together they describe a remarkably coherent office lifecycle:
Start smaller. Build. Restructure. Specialize. Stabilize.
Interns May Be Absorbing Some of the Missing Capacity
There is another piece of this workforce story.
As non-intern staffing capacity has tightened, HillClimbers has found that interns are increasingly becoming part of congressional office infrastructure.
The staffing measure in this analysis excludes interns.
So a freshman office with 1.8 fewer non-intern staff does not necessarily have exactly 1.8 fewer people performing work.
Some offices may compensate through paid interns or other temporary arrangements.
But interns are not substitutes for experienced congressional staff.
They add capacity differently.
That raises another question worth testing when the 120th Congress begins:
Do freshman offices rely more heavily on interns because they start with fewer non-intern staff?
If so, headcount alone could understate how differently new and established offices structure their workforces.
What History Suggests for 2027
The next Congress gives us a natural test.
Across the eight first sessions from 2011 through 2025, the freshman staffing gaps were:
1.7, 1.8, 1.5, 1.0, 1.6, 2.0, 1.9, and 1.8 staff.
The average is approximately:
1.66 staff.
The median is approximately:
1.72.
Across the four most recent first sessions:
1.81.
Those measures point to roughly the same range.
So the useful historical benchmark for 2027 is:
roughly 1.5 to 2 fewer non-intern staff.
That is not a precise forecast.
The incoming Congress will operate under its own budget, labor-market, transition, and hiring conditions.
But if freshman offices begin 2027 roughly two staff below established offices again, it would represent the ninth consecutive first session in this historical series with a freshman staffing gap.
The compensation side is harder to forecast.
The budget history gives us a reason to expect continued pressure.
But the pay gap has moved enough from Congress to Congress that forecasting an exact number would overstate what eight observations can tell us.
The better question is:
Can freshman offices maintain near-parity in pay while finally narrowing the headcount gap?
The Incoming Class Should Know the Benchmark Before It Starts Hiring
Every new Member office now has to make workforce decisions quickly.
How many people should we hire?
What should we pay?
How much House experience do we need?
How should we divide staff between Washington and the district?
Which functions need specialists?
Which jobs can reasonably be combined?
How much budget should we reserve for later hiring?
How do our staffing and compensation plans compare with established offices?
Those decisions have traditionally been informed by personal experience, networks, transition support, informal advice, and trial and error.
But Congress now has years of workforce history to draw from.
HillClimbers’ Congressional Staffing benchmarks allow offices to understand staffing and compensation patterns across the House.
The Congressional Staffing Dataset provides a longer historical view across staffing levels, compensation, turnover, experience, roles, retention, and office structure.
And the public All House Staff data provides a current benchmark for the workforce as a whole.
None of that tells a Member exactly how to organize an office.
Nor should it.
Districts differ.
Members differ.
Priorities differ.
There is no single ideal congressional organization.
But there is a difference between intentionally building a different model and simply not knowing the baseline.
New Members should be free to build different offices. They should not have to build them without knowing what years of House workforce data says about the offices that came before them.
The Freshman Capacity Problem Is Becoming Clearer
The original finding was simple:
new Members start with smaller teams.
The expanded data makes the story much more interesting.
The staffing gap extends back to at least 2011.
It appears in every first session examined.
It persists across freshman classes of very different sizes.
It remains nearly as large in 2025 as it was fourteen years earlier.
The compensation story is different.
The freshman real-pay disadvantage narrowed dramatically through the long period of budget constraint.
It widened when Congress provided substantial budget relief.
Then it collapsed again as office budgets flattened.
That does not prove the MRA cycle caused the compensation gap.
But the timing suggests office resources may help shape how much compensation differentiation established offices can sustain.
Meanwhile, the staffing gap remains.
And separate HillClimbers research shows that the average new office then spends roughly three Congresses moving toward the Capacity, Stability, and Structure range of established offices.
Put those findings together and the challenge facing new Member offices becomes more specific.
It is increasingly less about whether they can compete on average pay.
They largely can.
It is about whether they can assemble enough workforce capacity quickly enough, while paying competitively inside a fixed budget.
Congressional capacity is staff capacity.
For the incoming 120th Congress, we now have a clear benchmark to watch.
Do new offices start two staff short again?
Or does this freshman class finally begin to close a staffing gap that has persisted for fourteen years?
Methodology
This analysis compares House Member offices during the first session of each Congress from Legislative Year 2011 through Legislative Year 2025.
A freshman office is an office led by a Member in year one of congressional service.
An established office is an office led by a Member with two or more years of congressional service.
The staffing gap is calculated as:
Established Office Average Daily Staffing − Freshman Office Average Daily Staffing
Average Daily Staffing is the average number of paid, non-intern staff working in a Member office on each active day during the legislative year. It is a time-averaged headcount measure, not an FTE measure.
The compensation gap is calculated as:
Established Office Average Real Staffer Compensation − Freshman Office Average Real Staffer Compensation
Average Real Staffer Compensation is the mean annualized compensation among paid non-intern staff in an office during the legislative year. Compensation is adjusted for inflation into constant dollars before comparison.
The budget discussion in this article is contextual and descriptive. The timing of changes in the freshman compensation gap is compared with the broader MRA funding environment. The analysis does not establish that changes in Member office budgets caused changes in the freshman compensation gap.
Similarly, the 2027 staffing range is a historical benchmark based on prior first-session gaps, not a formal prediction.
FAQ
Do new House Members have fewer staff than established Members?
Historically, yes. Freshman offices employed fewer non-intern staff than established offices in every first session examined from 2011 through 2025.
How large is the freshman House staffing gap?
The gap has generally been around 1.5 to 2 staff. In 2025, freshman offices averaged 15.1 staff compared with 16.8 in established offices, a gap of approximately 1.8 staff.
Do freshman congressional offices pay their staffs less?
On average, they have in every first session examined. But the difference has narrowed dramatically.
The real-pay gap fell from $5,757 in 2011 to $711 in 2025.
How much has the freshman-office pay gap narrowed?
Approximately 88% between 2011 and 2025.
Relative to established-office average compensation, the gap declined from roughly 10.6% to less than 1%.
What does “real pay” mean?
HillClimbers adjusts compensation for inflation into constant dollars. This allows compensation across different legislative years to be compared in purchasing-power terms rather than simply comparing nominal salary amounts.
Does a larger freshman class create a larger staffing gap?
The eight historical first sessions do not show a strong relationship.
The correlation between class size and staffing gap is approximately 0.30, and some smaller freshman classes experienced larger gaps than much larger classes.
How many fewer staff could freshman offices have in 2027?
A reasonable historical benchmark is roughly 1.5 to 2 fewer non-intern staff per freshman office than established offices.
That is not a precise forecast.
Why might new offices start with fewer staff?
Possible explanations include slower hiring, compressed transition timelines, uncertainty about long-term staffing needs, deliberate decisions to start lean, different MRA spending choices, and less-developed hiring networks.
The current analysis does not determine which mechanism drives the gap.
Why does a two-person staffing gap matter?
Member offices are small organizations responsible for legislation, constituent services, communications, scheduling, district operations, administration, and management.
Fewer staff can mean less specialization and more work distributed across each employee.
How does this relate to the six-year House office learning curve?
HillClimbers separately found that first-year offices average substantially lower HCI rankings and take roughly three Congresses to reach the Capacity, Stability, and Structure range of established offices.
The freshman staffing-gap analysis shows that new offices begin that organizational development period with fewer non-intern staff on average.
Suggested Reading
Why New House Members Still Start With Smaller Teams
It Takes New Member Offices About Six Years to “Hit the Ground Running”
The House Is Running With 1,020 Fewer Staff Than It Did in 2010
2026 House Staff Pay and Workforce Capacity Report
Institutional Knowledge in Congress Is Increasingly Held by Staff
Low-Paying Congressional Offices Experience the Highest Staff Turnover
House Staffing Is More Top-Heavy: Leaders Rose From 22% to 31% of Staff
When Interns Become Infrastructure
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