The Twenty-seventh Amendment (Amendment XXVII, also known as the Congressional Compensation Act of 1789[1]) to the United States Constitution states that any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of Congress may only take effect after the next election of the House of Representatives has occurred. It is the most recently adopted amendment but was one of the first proposed.

The 1st Congress submitted the amendment to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789, along with 11 other proposed amendments (Articles I–XII). The last ten Articles were ratified in 1791 to become the Bill of Rights, but the first two, the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the proposed Congressional Apportionment Amendment, were not ratified by enough states to come into force with them.

The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[2][3] The amendment eventually became part of the United States Constitution, effective May 5, 1992,[4] completing a record-setting ratification period of 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days, beating the previous record set by the Twenty-second Amendment of 3 years and 343 days.[5]

The idea behind this amendment is to reduce corruption in the legislative branch by requiring an election before a congressperson’s salary increase takes effect. The public can thus remove members of Congress from office before their salaries increase.[6] It is unclear if the amendment produced any change in congressional behavior.[7]

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No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.[8]