Tag Archives: Congressional retirements

House retirements in 2026

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Lots of turnover, but mostly in safe seats and across the ideological spectrum

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As of 2026-03-11 there have been 56 members of the House of Representatives who have announced they will not seek reelection in 2026. That is well above recent years. At this time in 2024 42 had announced they would not seek reelection, as had 45 in 2022, 34 in 2020 and 46 in 2018.

Quite a few of these are seeking other offices. Sixteen are seeking a Senate seat, 11 are running for governor and 1 is a candidate for state attorney general. A total of 28 are retiring from politics.

While a large number of retirements (including those seeking other office) might seem to signal large seat changes in November, that is too hasty a conclusion to reach. It certainly speaks to the desirability of a House career (or lack of desirability) but most of these members are from pretty safe seats. Of the 35 retiring Republicans, only 4 won by 10 percentage points or less in 2024, and of the 21 retiring Democrats only 2 won by 10 points or less. (These are based on their 2024 districts, not new 2026 districts in those states that have redistricted in the last year.) So if most of these seats are likely to stay in the hands of the current party the greater number of Republican than Democratic retirements is unlikely to result in a significant gain of Democratic seats. A swing at the ballot box in November can certainly shift the party balance, but that will come predominantly among the closely contested seats, not from these more secure retirement seats.

There is a lot of ideological diversity in the retirements as well. Republican retirees range from the 3rd most moderate to the 2nd most conservative members of the GOP caucus and are spread pretty evenly across the Republican ideological spectrum. The same holds for Democratic retirees who range from the most moderate to not quite the most liberal. In neither party is ideological location nor 2024 vote margin significantly related to retirement, nor is age.

In short, retirements are all over the place and higher than in recent years but they aren’t coming from especially vulnerable seats or from members ideologically out of step with their party.

The chart shows all House members with retirees highlighted by solid dots. Along the horizontal axis is 2024 election margin from most Democratic to most Republican. The vertical axis shows ideology from most liberal at the bottom to most conservative at the top, based on analysis of roll call voting by each member.

The retirements do guarantee one thing about the House in 2027: regardless of election defeats in November there will be a lot of new faces next January. Change in the party and ideological balance, though, will come more from the ballot box than from retirements.

House Retirements and Targeted Districts

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While a substantial number of members of the House of Representatives are retiring, don’t expect these retirements to produce many flipped seats or shifts in the ideological makeup of either party.

As of January 13, 47 members of the House have announced their retirement, 21 Democrats and 26 Republicans. (I’m not counting resignations by Majorie Taylor Greene and Mikie Sherrill whose seats will be filled with special elections this year.)

The retirement rate has been running a bit ahead of recent cycles as of this date, which were 42, 34, 41, and 40 from 2018 to 2024. Still, I don’t think we are seeing extraordinarily high levels of retirements, as some commentary suggests. In the end those previous four cycles produced totals of 52, 36, 49 and 45 retirements, suggesting we may end up in the mid-to-upper 50s this year. Past retirements are from Ballotpedia.org.

The main point I want to make here is that the retirements are spread pretty widely throughout both Republican and Democratic caucuses by ideology and 2024 vote margin. The solid dots are retiring members. These are not endangered incumbents who barely scraped by in 2024, nor are they ideological outliers relative to their caucuses.

The figure shows all House members by vote margin and by left-right ideology, using Nokken-Poole dimension 1 ideology scores from VoteView.com. These scores are based on roll call votes by the members. Nokken-Poole is a variant of the widely used Nominate scores. Nokken-Poole scores range from -0.848 for the most liberal member to 0.986 for the most conservative member. Vote margin is the percentage for the Republican candidate minus the percentage for the Democrat, so negative margins are Democratic wins and positive ones are Republican victories.

Among Republicans, the median 2024 vote margin is 28.2 percentage points, and the median for retiring Republicans is 26.1 points. On ideology, the median Nokken-Poole score is 0.542 (higher scores are more conservative.) Among retiring Republicans the median is 0.581

Democratic retirees have somewhat larger vote margins, -36.8 percentage points, than their caucus as a whole, -27.0 points. On ideology, the retiring Democrats are also more liberal, -0.461, than the full Democratic caucus, -0.394. These are modest differences, however, and the figure makes clear retirements are well scattered throughout both caucuses.

The upshot of this distribution of retirements is that it does not open up many opportunities for turnover as most retirees enjoyed reasonably secure margins in 2024. Nor are retirements likely to significantly shift the ideological balance in the House given that retirees are ideologically pretty representative of their caucuses. While open races are less predictable than incumbent ones, the strong partisan lean of most of these districts means we should expect no more than a handful of these seats to potentially flip.

DCCC and NRCC target districts

Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committe (DCCC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) have released lists of districts being targeted as pick up opportunities. Compare this figure with the retirements above. The targeted districts are, as you would expect, far more concentrated in races that were narrowly decided in 2024. (These lists were released by the NRCC on March 17, and by the DCCC on April 8. They do not include changes or additions after some states redistricted in 2025. These are the members’ districts in the 119th congress.)

Republicans on the DCCC list have a median vote margin of 6.8 percentage points, much closer than the caucus median of 28.2 points. They are also less conservative, 0.384, than the full caucus, 0.542.

Democrats on the NRCC list also had much closer 2024 races, with a median of -3.2 percentage points compared to -27.0 for the full caucus. These Democrats are also less liberal than the caucus, with a median Nokken-Poole score of -0.221 compared to the caucus median of -0.394.

If you are looking for change in the House, look at the districts each of the parties are focusing on. They have a much greater chance of flipping than the seats of retiring members, and would be more likely to remove relatively moderate members of either party. The latter fact will also contribute to polarization in the House. Rather than target ideologically extreme members of the opposition party, both Democats and Republicans target close races, which also happen to be where the most relatively moderate members are.