Every member of the US House and Senate has a page here. You can find yours by zip code, or search directly by name or state above. What you'll get is a compact accountability snapshot: who represents you, how long they've served, what they cost, and how the public has reacted to them — all pulled from the same public-domain congressional dataset used across this site.
Finding Your Representative
The zip code lookup uses the Google Civic Information API to match your zip code to a congressional district, then falls back to the Zippopotam.us geocoding service if that lookup fails. Because House districts don't follow zip code boundaries exactly — a single zip code can occasionally straddle two districts, particularly in dense urban areas — the tool is a convenience, not a legal determination of who represents you. If you want to be certain, your state's Secretary of State website or house.gov's own "Find Your Representative" tool (which uses your full address) is the authoritative source. Your zip code isn't stored anywhere; the lookup happens client-side against the public API and nothing is logged on our end.
Reading the Scorecard and Timeline
The scorecard summarizes a member's basic facts: chamber, party, state, and current salary. The service timeline shows how long they've held office, which matters more than it might first appear — seniority in Congress translates fairly directly into committee assignments, subcommittee chairs, and influence over which bills even get a vote. A freshman representative and a 20-year incumbent have very different amounts of practical power, regardless of party. None of that is a judgment about whether long tenure is good or bad; it's simply useful context for understanding what a given member can and can't actually do.
What "Cost in Context" Actually Shows
The "Cost in Context" section translates a member's $174,000 base salary (unchanged since 2009 — see our Congress overview for why) into everyday comparisons and multiplies it by years served to produce an estimated lifetime salary figure. That estimate is a simple back-of-envelope calculation, not an audited payroll record: it assumes a flat $174,000 for every year served, when in practice salary levels have varied slightly over a career, and it does not include the far larger costs of running a congressional office — staff (a House office typically employs 15-22 people funded through the Members' Representational Allowance, often exceeding $1 million a year), district and D.C. office rent, travel, franked mail, and pension and health benefits. Salary alone significantly understates what a congressional office costs taxpayers; treat these figures as an illustrative floor, not a ceiling.
Public Opinion Reactions and Comparisons
The reaction buttons let visitors register how they feel about a given member — Outrageous, Wasteful, Reasonable, or Can't Be Serious. These are anonymous, unmoderated, and entirely unscientific: there's no verification that a reaction came from a constituent, no limit preventing repeat visits from skewing a count, and no connection whatsoever to any official poll, election, or government record. Treat the numbers the way you'd treat any open internet comment section — a rough temperature reading, not evidence. The side-by-side comparison tool, by contrast, only uses hard data (salary, tenure, age, state) and is meant for straightforward like-for-like comparisons between two members, such as your own senators or your representative versus a predecessor.
Limits of This Data
This page deliberately does not attempt to score legislative performance, bill sponsorship, voting record, or committee effectiveness — that's a much harder, more contestable kind of analysis than tenure and cost, and outside this site's non-partisan, purely fiscal scope. For a member's actual voting record, committee work, and sponsored legislation, congress.gov and GovTrack.us are authoritative, purpose-built sources. What you'll find here is narrower and more objective by design: how long someone has served, what that service costs in salary terms, and how the public — anonymously and informally — has reacted.