Analysis · October 21, 2026

House and Senate: how the two chambers compare

Senators vote more often and write twice as many bills as House members. Why the two chambers look so different on paper, and how the grades keep them comparable.

The House and Senate pass the same laws, but on paper their members look very different. The typical senator has sponsored more than twice as many bills as the typical representative, and the Senate has held hundreds more roll-call votes. This article compares the two chambers in the 119th Congress and explains how Congress Report Card keeps their grades on the same scale.

Size and terms

The House has 435 voting members, elected every two years from districts of roughly equal population, plus six non-voting delegates. The Senate has 100 members, two from each state, who serve six-year terms, with a third of them up for election every two years. Those structural differences shape almost every number on the report cards.

A senator represents a whole state, often several million people, and sits on more committees than a typical House member. Senators also serve longer terms and are less often in campaign mode. A House member represents about 760,000 people and is always less than two years from the next election.

Votes

The Senate votes more because it confirms the President's nominees, and many of those confirmations require a recorded vote. The first year of a new administration brings an especially heavy load of cabinet, sub-cabinet and judicial nominations. The House has no role in confirmations, so its votes are almost all on legislation and procedure.

Attendance is similar in the two chambers. The share of members who rarely miss a vote is a bit higher in the House, but so is the share who miss a lot. About 5% of House members have missed more than 10% of votes, compared with 3% of senators.

Bills

Senators sponsor more bills each, which makes sense given their larger constituencies, longer terms and broader committee assignments. The House, with more than four times as many members, still produces about twice as many bills in total.

House members cosponsor more. One likely reason is the sheer number of House bills: with more than 10,000 bills in circulation, there are simply more chances to sign on. House members also tend to join large caucus-wide cosponsor lists more often.

A senator is about twice as likely as a House member to have sponsored a bill that became law. With only 100 members sharing the Senate's legislative output, each senator gets a larger share.

How the grades keep the chambers comparable

If senators and representatives were graded on raw bill counts, senators would nearly all score higher simply for being senators. Congress Report Card avoids that by ranking each member's bill activity only against their own chamber. A senator's "bills written" score reflects where they stand among the 100 senators; a representative's reflects where they stand in the House. The top member in each chamber scores 100, the median scores 75 and the lowest scores 50.

Attendance doesn't need that adjustment because it is already a rate: a senator who voted on 97% of their roll calls and a representative who voted on 97% of theirs get the same score.

The result is that a B in the Senate and a B in the House mean the same thing: a member who is above the middle of their own chamber on bills and shows up reliably. You can compare your senators and your representative side by side on your state page.

How the grades are spread in each chamber

The House figures include the six delegates. The Senate is more concentrated in the middle, with 44% of senators in the C range. That reflects the smaller number of senators with very high or very low attendance. The House has more members at both ends: more A grades from members who rarely miss a vote and write many bills, and more F grades driven by heavy absence.

The highest-scoring senator is Rick Scott of Florida, with 97.5. Scott has sponsored 157 bills, the most in the Senate, and rarely misses a vote. The highest-scoring House member is Joe Neguse of Colorado, with 98.7, who has missed one vote this Congress and is among the most active bill writers in the House.

What doesn't show up

Some of the most important differences between the chambers don't appear in these numbers. The Senate's filibuster means most legislation needs 60 votes to advance, which gives the minority more leverage than in the House. The Senate also shares treaty and confirmation powers that the House doesn't have. The House originates all revenue bills, and by custom it also starts the annual appropriations bills. None of those powers can be captured in attendance and bill counts, which is one reason the report card should be read as one view of a member's record, not the whole of it.

For a closer look at either chamber, see House members who miss the most votes and Senators who miss the most votes.

Figures are from the Congress Report Card data as of October 21, 2026. Grades change as Congress votes, so the numbers on member pages may have moved since. How grades are calculated.