The City Council approved an 18.2% pay raise for themselves and other city elected officials in a vote on Thursday.
The raise, representing the first pay increase since 2016, passed 42-6, with Speaker Julie Menin abstaining.
Mayor Mamdani has said he would not take the pay raise, which would bump his pay up from $258,750 to $305,800.
“I haven’t knocked on anyone’s door in New York City, and they said that their concern is that the mayor makes too little,” Mamdani said of his decision at a Thursday morning press conference, adding that he’d rather see the money going into “the pockets of those who are struggling in the city.”
The bill would increase the council speaker’s salary from $164,500 to $194,400, and councilmembers’ pay from $148,500 up to $175,500. It’d also give raises to the comptroller and the public advocate, as well as the city’s borough presidents and district attorneys.
The changes would take effect 45 days after the bill becomes law and include retroactive pay to the start of this year.
The pay raises were recommended by a commission appointed by Mamdani earlier this year, in accordance with a City Charter requirement that’s been ignored for years.
The bill also would require the mayor to convene one of those commissions in the third year of their term, instead of the first, with any pay hike taking effect after the following election, when politicians start a fresh term. That would prevent mayors from more directly making a grab for a high salary.
“The focus has always been on ensuring these decisions are made in a regular, transparent process that strengthens public trust,” Councilmember Nantasha Williams, the bill’s sponsor, said at a press conference ahead of the vote.
A plan to ram in the pay raise at the end of the year last year was aborted after councilmembers ran into a local law banning the chamber from increasing salaries during the lame duck period in a local election year.
The so-called Quadrennial Commission was brought together after ex-Mayors de Blasio and Adams failed to convene them. The commission recommended the raise of 18.2% based on the estimated cost-of-living increase since 2022.
Speaker Julie Menin said she, like the mayor, would not take the pay raise. Asked about the optics of voting for a significant wage increase as other New Yorkers face slow wage growth and rising inflation and cost of living, the speaker replied that the Council is looking at “many different ways” to increase wages across the city, citing her college savings program and move to give paraprofessionals a one-time payment of $10,000 as examples.