Salaries and Retirement Benefits of U.S. Presidents and other Federal Government Employees

Example Questions That Can Be Answered Using This FARQ

• What is the current salary of the U.S. President?
• What is the pension amount given to former Presidents and Vice Presidents?
• How much does a (cabinet member, senator, representative, federal judge) make now? After they retire?

Especially during the transition from one U.S. Presidential administration to another, we receive a lot of questions about the salaries, retirement benefits and pensions of elected federal officials. In particular, we get asked about Bill Clinton's pension, as well as the other former presidents.

Salary Info

The compensation of the President is controlled by law, specifically 3 USC 102. The most recent salary increase, from $200,000/year to $400,000/year took effect when George W. Bush became President. The President also receives a $50,000 non-taxable expense account. The University of Michigan's Document Center has also created this page which summarizes Presidential and Vice Presidential Salaries from 1789 to the present. President George Washington, for example, was offered a salary of $25,000/year. (http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/fedprssal.html)

Other federal officials, such as the Vice President, Cabinet members, and members of Congress do not have fixed salaries, but rather ones that can increase annually. You can track most of these changes annually by visiting the Office of Personnel Management's Compensation Policy Memoranda page, which will usually have a link to the most recent pay adjustment information. (http://www.opm.gov/oca/compmemo/index.htm). For example, the January 2002 Pay Adjustments page has a link to this text document, showing the following salary information: Vice President - $192,600; Speaker of the House - $192,600; Majority & Minority Leaders of the Senate & House - $166,700; Senators & Representatives - $150,000; Cabinet members (Executive Schedule, Level 1) - $166,700; etc. (http://www.opm.gov/oca/compmemo/2001/2001-15A1.txt) . For a historical look at Congressional salaries, see this Congressional Pay Rates page from CongressLink. (http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_pay.htm)

Pension Info

The retirement benefits received by former Presidents include a pension, Secret Service protection, and reimbursements for staff, travel, mail, and office expenses. The Presidential pension is not a fixed amount, rather it matches the current salary of Cabinet members - $166,700/year as of January, 2002 (but see "Salary Info" section above for advice on how to track increases in this figure.) If you are interested in more information on presidential pensions, there are some good sites to check. The first is a press release from the National Taxpayers Union titled Presidential Pension Payouts Could be Record , which compares the predicted lifetime pension payouts of former President Clinton and Vice President Gore to the payouts of other former Presidents (http://www.ntu.org/news_room/press_releases/pr_011101.php3). The second is a MSNBC article titled Too rich a deal for ex-presidents? (http://www.msnbc.com/news/525609.asp) and the last is an article from a business publication called Asset International Online (http://www.assetpub.com/psnov98/upfront2.html).

As with salaries, the rules governing the retirement benefits of the Vice President, Cabinet members, members of Congress and other federal officials are different than those that apply to the President, with benefits laid-out in the rules of the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) and the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). Thus, their retirement benefits (including pensions) will vary from individual to individual, depending on factors such as years of service. Also, former Vice Presidents (unlike former Presidents) do not receve Secret Service protection. Information on rules governing the retirement benefits of members of the federal judicial system can be found here in 28 USC Sec. 627, and info on FERS in 5 USC CHAPTER 84. If you find the pages from the U.S. Code a little dense, try these Office of Personnel Management pages: Federal Employees Retirement System (http://www.opm.gov/retire/html/retirement/fers.html) and the Civil Service Retirement System (http://www.opm.gov/retire/html/retirement/csrs.html).

And if you're interested in finding information on the pension of a particular elected official, contact the National Taxpayers Union, who describe themselves as "the only organization with a comprehensive database of pension estimates for Members of Congress." (http://www.ntu.org)