They made a lot of noise over their own paychecks.
City Council members voted by a wide margin Thursday to approve an 18% salary increase for themselves, reviving a controversial push for higher pay after months of stalled efforts to advance a sizable raise.
The measure passed in a veto-proof 42-6 vote, lifting council salaries to $175,500. It also raises Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s annual pay to $305,800, with the increases applied retroactively to January — the beginning of the new terms and, for some elected officials, their first day in office.
Opposition came entirely from Republicans and conservative Democrats, including Councilman Phil Wong (D-Queens), who said he has been pushing for restraint in what he described as an endlessly swollen city budget.
“In my district, there are so, so many constituents that are living paycheck to paycheck and having problems making ends meet,” he said.
“So, I cannot vote onto a bill to increase salaries for myself.”
The City Council pay raise arrives shortly after lawmakers signed off on a historic $126 billion municipal budget — and after a late-year attempt to quietly advance a smaller 16% salary bump before 2025 came to a close.
That year-end maneuver fizzled, prompting one of the effort’s leading advocates, Councilwoman Nantasha Williams (D-Queens), to bring the proposal back — this time backed by a three-member “Quadrennial Commission.”
The commission released a 127-page study in June recommending a 18.2% raise to restore the “lost purchasing power” in elected officials’ supposedly skimpy salaries because of inflation and cost of living increases.
The study also recommended automatic pay hikes of at least 2% every year in the future.
But council members ultimately jettisoned the automatic raises in the bill’s final version, opting instead to reconvene the pay commission every three years.
The bill approved by council members set the following raises:
- Mayor’s salary increase from $258,750 to $305,800
Council Speaker Julie Menin, a millionaire, was the sole abstention in the final vote. She said she won’t accept the raise.
The speaker said before the vote that lawmakers wanted to give middle-income city workers inflation-related raises, but blamed Mamdani for them seemingly going nowhere.
“Let me just be clear: we pushed for the wages for the EMS workers. We pushed for the FDNY. We pushed really hard for that,” she said. “The administration did not want to do either.”
Mamdani, a socialist who was elected as mayor by running on an affordability platform, said Thursday during an unrelated event that he’d prefer his raise go into the “pockets of those who are struggling in this city.”
“I will not accept a pay raise,” he said.
“I haven’t knocked on anyone’s door in New York City and they said their concern is that the mayor makes too little. So, that’s not my concern either.”
Council Minority Leader David Carr (R-Staten Island) said the whole process of lawmakers giving themselves raises is unseemly.
“I just don’t think elected officials should vote on their own pay,” he said.
“Make raises pegged to the city’s managerial employee increases, which are based on the collective bargaining process, or make them automatic cost-of-living increases like Congress does, but don’t make it political.”
