The U.S. president hasn’t been given a increase in additional than 20 years.
Meaning Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will earn the identical wage as their predecessor: $400,000 a yr, as laid out in Title 3 of the U.S. Code, paid month-to-month. The president additionally will get a further $50,000 for bills (non-taxable), a $100,000 journey account and a $19,000 leisure finances.
After all, the nation’s commander in chief can be entitled to different advantages, not least of which is a paid-for mansion often called the White Home, as a residence.
Between 1969 and 2001, the final time Congress boosted the chief govt’s pay, the president earned $200,000 yearly. In a 1999 listening to on the proposed pay increase, it was famous that compensation for “one of the tough, demanding and vital jobs on the face of the earth” had not risen in three a long time, whereas the salaries of private-sector chief govt officers had been hovering.
Authorities reform skilled Paul C. Mild testified that he supported a presidential wage enhance “if solely to sign that the American political system values its chief govt sufficient to sometimes increase the bottom wage.”
How a lot did U.S. presidents earn prior to now?
Traditionally, the president’s annual wage was price much more when taking inflation under consideration.
Here is what presidents made per yr throughout earlier historic durations, in line with the College of Michigan, citing Congressional Quarterly’s “Information to the Presidency.” How a lot that pay is price in right now’s {dollars}, after adjusting for inflation and primarily based on calculations from Officialdata.org, is famous in parentheses:
1789: $25,000 ($895,741)
1873: $50,000 ($1.3 million)
1909: $75,000 ($2.6 million)
1949: $100,000 (plus $50,000 taxable expense account) ($1.3 million)
1969: $200,000 (plus $50,000 taxable expense account) ($1.7 million)
More cash in memoirs
It is price noting that presidents stay on the federal authorities’s payroll after leaving The White Home too. Since 1958, former presidents have earned an annual pension, which now quantities to greater than $200,000. Additionally they get workplace house in a spot of their selecting and journey bills, in line with the Former Presidents Act of 1958.
U.S. presidents additionally usually earn rather more cash after they depart workplace by e book gross sales, talking engagements, media offers and different profitable endeavors.
Ulysses S. Grant was the primary U.S. president to put in writing a memoir, which he famously completed solely days earlier than his demise in 1885. Nearly each fashionable president, except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, each of whom died whereas in workplace, has written a memoir.
“It is the place some huge cash comes from after they’ve been president,” Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral Historical past Program on the Miller Middle on the College of Virginia, instructed CBS MoneyWatch. “Written memoirs have earned them hundreds of thousands.”
