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.
Your Tax Dollars
Your representative's office budget isn't a number on a press release — it's your money. Each congressional district has roughly 760,000 residents and around 400,000 federal income tax filers. The math below estimates your individual share of one representative's office, broken out by category.
Where your share goes
| Category | % of office | Your share |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel Compensation | 58.2% | $2.81 |
| Printing & Reproduction | 17.4% | $0.84 |
| Constituent mail (franked) | 9.8% | $0.47 |
| Rent, Communications, Utilities | 8.3% | $0.40 |
| Other Services | 2.3% | $0.11 |
| Supplies & Materials | 2.2% | $0.11 |
| Equipment | 1.3% | $0.06 |
| Travel | 0.5% | $0.02 |
Estimate methodology: total office budget spent in 2025 divided by the approximate number of federal income tax filers in the district. This is a rough proxy — the actual incidence of federal funding includes corporate, payroll, and other taxes too, but per-filer is the most intuitive frame.
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.