The New York City Council just approved a $126 billion budget, looked at all that money, and apparently thought: yes, but what about us? Days later, council members moved to vote themselves an 18% pay raise, retroactive to January 1, with automatic 2% increases every year after that. No, this is not a bit.
The Numbers Are Insulting on Purpose
According to the New York Post, the proposed raise would push council member salaries to $175,500 a year. That is more than twice New York City's median household income of $81,228. The people voting on this represent constituents who, statistically, earn less than half of what their representatives are about to pocket.
The $27,000 increase is not small money anywhere on earth, but it is especially rich coming from a legislative body that just signed off on a $126 billion city budget. The sequencing here is not accidental. Pass the giant budget first, then sneak in your personal windfall while everyone is still recovering from the sticker shock. Classic.
They Are Breaking Their Own Rules to Do This
Here is where it goes from embarrassing to genuinely corrupt. The New York Post reports that the City Charter has an explicit process for council pay increases: a pay panel convenes every four years, specifically during the third year of a mayoral term, specifically to prevent the council from just voting itself raises whenever the mood strikes. The conflict-of-interest guardrail is baked into the city's foundational legal document.
The council is not in the third year of a mayoral term right now. They are just doing it anyway, betting nobody will make a stink loud enough to stop them. That is not a loophole. That is a deliberate end-run around voter protections, dressed up in parliamentary procedure and dared to be called out.
This Has Happened Before and Changed Nothing
If you are wondering whether massive raises actually attract better, more competent public servants to these seats, the New York Post has a useful data point: the council gave itself $30,000 raises back in 2016. By any observable measure, the quality of governance did not noticeably improve afterward. That is ten years of evidence that higher salaries and higher caliber of leadership are not the same transaction.
The Post also points out that Los Angeles and Chicago both pay their council members more than New York currently does. It then notes, dryly, that those cities are in worse shape than New York. The good-government groups cheerleading for this raise as a recruitment tool might want to sit with that comparison for a minute.
Where Are Mamdani and Menin?
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Council Speaker Julie Menin are the two people with the clearest authority to kill this before it becomes an embarrassment that follows both of them for years. The New York Post calls on Mamdani to direct the City Charter Commission to close the procedural loophole that allowed this in the first place, putting the question directly to voters.
For Menin, the Post argues that announcing she personally won't take the raise is not nearly enough. She runs the floor. She can refuse to bring this to a vote. If she lets it through anyway while loudly declining her own check, she gets credit for the optics and none of the accountability. That is not leadership. That is cover.
The Private Sector Does Not Work This Way
One of the more quietly damning points the Post raises: private-sector workers do not get automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments. Regular city workers don't get them either. The council is proposing to write itself permanent, automatic, compounding raises that essentially no one else in the workforce they represent actually receives.
The argument for this, apparently, is that council members deserve it. Which is the kind of reasoning that works perfectly if you are the one doing both the asking and the voting.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what this is. This is elected officials, days after rubber-stamping the largest city budget most New Yorkers will ever see, quietly scheduling a vote to give themselves $27,000 more per year in violation of the charter designed specifically to stop them from doing exactly this. The timing is not a coincidence. The retroactive January 1 start date is not a coincidence. The whole thing is engineered to be fait accompli before anyone organizes to stop it.
The rhetorical defense being floated, that higher pay attracts better candidates, would carry more weight if it had worked the last time the council tried it in 2016. It did not. What attracts good public servants is not a salary that clears $175,000 a year in a city where the median family earns less than half that. What attracts people to public service is, historically, the service part.
Mamdani ran on being different. Menin talks a good game about accountability. Here is the test. Stop the vote, close the loophole, and let the charter process work the way it was written. If they can't manage that, they have told you everything you need to know about how seriously they take the people who elected them.
