A special committee on Thursday approved a plan raising base legislative pay to $43,000 a year, hoping that it will make public service more open to Kansans who now might not be able to afford to serve in the Legislature.
The compensation plan approved Thursday, which totals about $57,000 once daily expenses are added in, will start in 2025 unless the Legislature decides next year to set aside the report approved by the committee.
The Legislature could reject the compensation plan by adopting a concurrent resolution no later than 30 days after the start of the 2024 session immediately following the submission of the compensation report.
The independent commission was created last session in an effort to keep legislators out of the politically sensitive task of setting their own salaries.
The base pay for lawmakers is now $88.66 a day ($7,979 a year) plus $157 per day for subsistence or daily expenses ($14,130 a year).
They also received $354.15 for an allowance every two weeks for 20 pay periods, totaling about $7,083 a year.
The entire current compensation package totals roughly $29,000 a year overall.
The new compensation plan includes $43,000 for base pay plus the $14,130 for subsistence – or per diem – that would be set in the future by the Department of Administration. The $7,083 allowance will be discontinued in 2025.
The total package, including base pay and per diem, would now be worth about $57,000 a year compared to the roughly $29,000 lawmakers now receive.
The commission agreed to index that salary based on a rolling three-year average for all Kansas employees based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The new base salary is predicated on a quarter of what members of Congress are now paid.
The panel also agreed on setting salaries for top leadership positions in the Legislature as well. The salaries would be based on a percentage of the base $43,000 salary.
For instance:
- The Senate president and the House speaker would get premium payment of 64% beyond the $43,000 base salary. Their salary would be $70,520 a year not counting the per diem payments.
- The Senate vice president, House speaker pro tem, assistant majority and minority leaders would get a premium payment of 33% above the $43,000 base. Their salary would be $57,190 not counting the per diem payments.
- The Senate and House majority and minority leaders would get premium payment of 58% beyond the $43,000 base salary. Their salary would be $67,940 a year not counting the per diem payments.
- Chairs of the Senate Ways & Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee would get a premium payment of 50% of the base salary. Their salaries would be $64,500 not counting the per diem payments.
The committee’s plan also pays about $286 a day for special sessions and interim committee hearings.
“The primary reason this commission was created to look at the compensation of legislators was to create a system that attracted a wider breadth of citizen legislators,” said former state Rep. Mark Hutton of Wichita, chair of the commission.
“We tried to make it clear that what we’re trying to do here is develop a compensation package that would be not incentivize, but support people from our citizenry that wanted to serve in Legislature and not punish them for doing it,” Hutton said.
The compensation package would be less than the average annual wages of $57,644 for a state employee, according to federal labor data presented to the committee.
It also would be less than the median real income of $73,040 for a Kansas household last year, according to the data.
By comparison, the average wages of a public school teacher in Kansas was $65,147 in 2021-22, the federal data shows.
House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Senate President Ty Masterson urged the panel to show restraint in deciding how much legislative pay should be increased but still enhance the public’s ability to serve.
“We need to posture in a way that gives us the biggest bandwidth of the public to be able to serve,” Masterson told the committee at its first meeting.
“The truth is for years now, it’s been a hurdle for large segments of our population to even attempt to represent their neighbors,” he said.
That said, Masterson added this caveat.
“I also don’t believe it should be a career,” Masterson said. “Public service at some level does have sacrifice to it, and I think that should exist.”
“There should be balance,” he said.
Hawkins, too, said he didn’t want anyone to consider the Legislature their “main job.”
“We need to go back home and go to work.”
On Thursday, Hawkins and Masterson issued statements that stopped short of embracing the plan that was approved Thursday
“The Senate President respects the work of the compensation commission and looks forward to reviewing the proposal in detail and discussing it with his Senate colleagues,” Masterson’s spokesperson, Mike Pirner, said in a statement.
Hawkins shared a similar view.
“The intention of the legislative compensation committee is to act independently of the legislature to ensure fairness so I respect whatever they present as a final result of their work,” Hawkins said in a statement.
“I appreciate the time and effort the committee members have dedicated to ensuring this process is done appropriately.”
A new compensation commission will be appointed in 2026 and will have until Dec. 1, 2027, to set a new compensation rate for the next four-year period starting in 2029.
