Where Does Your Representative's Budget Go?
Every House member receives ~$2 million a year in taxpayer money to run their office. How they spend it tells you what they value.
Two terms used throughout this dashboard
- Office budget — the ~$2 million each House member receives every year to run their office (formally called the Members' Representational Allowance or MRA). Pays for staff, district offices, travel, mailings, and ads. Separate from the member's campaign account.
- Taxpayer-funded mail / franked mail — mailings a member can send to constituents using their office budget. Must be informational (not campaign advocacy), and members can't send any in the 60 days before an election they are running in.
Two ways a House office talks to constituents
Every office gets the same ~$2 million budget. Some offices spend it broadcasting at constituents — printed mailers, ads, postcards. Others spend it on people — paying caseworkers and constituent-service staff who answer phones, navigate Social Security, fix VA paperwork. Most offices do both. The mix tells you a lot.
Each dot is one House office. Sherman is always highlighted (CA-32 incumbent). Use the filters to change the comparison set, switch to per-year or peak-year mail, or compare against any other House member by name.
Sherman's median CS staff pay: $50,500 — 508 pay theirs more (94.2%); 31 pay theirs less.
Sherman's mail spending (cumulative 2016–2025): $1,884,026 — only 10 of his colleagues spend more (top 1.9%).
How to read this chart
- X axis — outbound mail and ads (postage, mass mailers, advertising) per the active mail window. Cumulative is the most extreme; per-year average normalizes for tenure; peak year is each member's biggest single year.
- Y axis — what the office's constituent-services staff get paid. Median CS staff is the typical full-year career CS staffer's salary. Lowest-paid CS staffer is more robust to office-churn distortion (some offices have only 1-2 full-year career CS staff so their median is fragile).
- Cohort — switching to "Currently in Congress" restricts the comparison to the 435 voting House seats with 2025 payroll data, dropping non-voting delegates and historical members. Apples-to-apples 2025 numbers.
- Color — party affiliation from the public @unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset (CC0).
- Right-only error bars on X — the upper bound assumes our unclassified vendor spend could all turn out to be mail/ads in the same proportion as the classified portion. The Y axis has no equivalent error bar because constituent-service staff salaries are keyed by job title and don't depend on vendor classification.
- Dashed quadrant lines — median X and median Y across the current comparison set.
- Sharing — the URL encodes the active filters and highlights, so any view can be linked to and reproduced.
- Default view shows 540 offices observed in 4+ years; the cohort filter changes this set.
Source data — download the raw CSVs (40 quarters)
Every quarterly CSV the dashboard is built from. Download any quarter to verify the numbers yourself by hand — the methodology page documents every filter and aggregation in enough detail to re-derive each headline figure in a spreadsheet.
These files are the unedited House Statement of Disbursements quarterly Detail tables, mirrored at https://mra-sod-archive.marenalinforcongress.com for stable access. The originals live at house.gov.
The complete manifest with download URLs is also available as JSON: manifest.json.