House members are set to receive roughly $91,051 in salary each, or about $39.6 million collectively, for the 191 days they will not have been in session at the House between January and November 8, 2026. House Republican leaders canceled the chamber's final scheduled voting day this week, meaning lawmakers will not sit for any votes in Washington for nearly seven weeks before the November 3 midterm elections and not return until November 9. According to the official House days-in-session calendar, the chamber had been scheduled to meet for about 121 days between January and November 8, 2026, around 39 percent of the 312 calendar days during that period.
Speaker Mike Johnson argued this week that the House has completed its work for now and that members should return to their districts, while critics say Congress is abandoning unfinished business. The GOP announced that they were cutting short the final legislative week before the midterm elections on Wednesday, allowing lawmakers to head home early to hit the campaign trail ahead of midterms. The early finish also means that lawmakers will not have to take a vote on impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth before the November elections.
Speaker Mike Johnson canceled the last two weeks of the September session, saying: “Right now, it almost feels like a pointless exercise for us to continue sending and stacking legislation over there, when members could be in their districts campaigning in this very fateful moment.” There are 535 voting members of Congress. These include 435 voting members of the House of Representatives who are apportioned by state population, and 100 Senators, with two for each state. There are also six additional non-voting delegates representing the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.
The decision to leave the House early was not well received by some lawmakers. South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman said in a statement on Wednesday that lawmakers “still have work to do.” He wrote: “Canceling yet another day of votes is unacceptable. The House has now canceled at least 63 scheduled voting days this Congress, including nine days this month alone, and now we're leaving Washington until after the election.
The Founders did not envision taking this much time off and still getting paid. If Members of Congress want to go home and campaign instead of doing the job taxpayers sent us here to do, then their campaigns ought to be paying them, NOT the American taxpayer.” Representative Jim McGovern, from Massachusetts, shared this frustration, writing on X: “We’ve only had 72 days in session this year. Under Republican leadership, this is the laziest & least effective Congress in American history.” Meanwhile, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Tuesday, said that he believed the reason for leaving the House early was to avoid the impeachment vote.
It’s because they want to avoid voting on my Epstein legislation and the impeachment of Hegseth,” Massie wrote. Newsweek reached out to Speaker Mike Johnson and Reps. Massie, McGovern and Norman for comment.
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