Resource Results of the 2021 NCSL Census

Legislatures rely on a variety of staff roles and expertise to run smoothly. Staff are the backbone of the legislature, so any changes in staffing help inform us about the changing nature of the institution.

As state legislatures evolved from part-time to full-time in the 1970s and 1980s, legislatures went on a hiring spree, increasing the number of staff and creating specialized staff roles to better serve their members.

To quantify staffing changes over time, NCSL began surveying legislatures at regular intervals to learn about the number of staff employed in every state legislature. The first legislative staff census was conducted in 1979 and the most recent one in 2021. NCSL’s latest survey includes reported numbers from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories: Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

As reflected in the chart below, overall staff sizes grew through the 1980s and 1990s. After peaking in 1996, staff numbers have been on the decline. The reasons are complex and intertwined. In this century alone, the country has experienced three recessions and a public health emergency, all of which have affected hiring and overall staff sizes in the legislature. Legislative staff are not an outlier, but are a part of a larger picture of a declining labor force over the past few decades. And in the current labor market where job openings are outpacing job applicants, states are contending with the private sector, some of which may be able to offer higher wages and more robust benefits.

Today, more than 33,000 staff work in the legislatures of the United States and its territories.

Chart 1 displays state legislative staff data in these categories:

1. Permanent, year-round employees
2. Session-only employees 
3. Total employees when legislature is in session 

While the total number of staff is only 1% lower than in 2015, the chart reveals a steady decline in session-only hires from 37% of all staff to 15% since the first NCSL census in 1979. Even those states that traditionally rely on large number of session-only staff reported fewer session hires than in previous years. In addition to increasing session length in many legislatures and busier interim schedules in most, many more session-only positions were converted to full-time roles than in earlier survey years. We also have anecdotal evidence that supports this observation. Several chambers that employ session-only staff indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in hiring fewer employees for the session, whether because of the need for fewer onsite employees during periods of remote work and/or virtual meetings or because of the resulting “economic fallout, budget cuts and restrictions,” as one chamber reported.

Table 1 below shows total staff for each legislature when it is in session. This represents the full complement of staff working for members and for the institution when it is operating at peak demand. The table lists legislative staff sizes in order of greatest to least number of staff and highlights the wide range in employment levels depending on whether a state has a full-time or part-time legislature, plus several other factors including state demographics, overall size of state government and tradition. New York and California—both full-time legislatures—employ the most staff and South Dakota and the territory of Northern Mariana Islands the fewest. Another territory, Puerto Rico, ranks as the sixth largest. In the latest census, 29 states reported a decrease in overall staff size.

Census respondents were also asked about the number of partisan staff. The overall number of partisan staff has remained stable among reporting states. The percentage of reported partisan staff rose in 17 states and fell in 22.

The table also shows that the three legislatures with the largest staff employ nearly one-quarter of the nation’s state legislative staff. The top 23 legislatures (those with at least 500 staff) employ nearly three-quarters of the nation’s legislative staff.

Overall, the latest census reveals little change in legislative staff sizes, particularly when compared to the dramatic growth in the earliest surveys NCSL conducted. The next census will reveal whether staff sizes change post-pandemic and whether permanent and session-only staff sizes continue their opposing trajectories.

The number of staff at the U.S. House of Representatives also increased between the 1970s and early 1990s, followed by another period of steady growth from 2001-2008. But the size of staff is now back to the same level it was 30 years ago, approximately 9,000.

U.S. Senate staff levels, on the other hand, have increased since they were first reported in the mid-1980s to approximately 5,700 in 2020. Total congressional staff hovers around 15,000.