Texas is home to more than 30 million people and a state budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, yet its legislature meets in regular session for just 140 days — and only once every two years. It's one of the clearest examples in the country of a state whose sheer size has nothing to do with how professionalized its legislature actually is.
The Basics: Size and Structure
The Texas Legislature is bicameral: a 150-member House of Representatives and a 31-member Senate, for 181 total lawmakers. The House is presided over by a Speaker elected from among its own members; the Senate is presided over by the Lieutenant Governor, who — unlike in most states — is elected independently and wields substantial power over which bills even get a Senate vote.
Session Length: Biennial, and Capped by the Constitution
Texas is one of only four states — alongside Montana, Nevada, and North Dakota — where the legislature meets in regular session just once every two years, rather than annually. The regular session convenes on the second Tuesday in January of every odd-numbered year and is capped at exactly 140 days by the Texas Constitution. There is no regular session at all in even-numbered years.
Outside that window, the only way the legislature can meet is if the governor calls a special session — and even then, a special session is capped at 30 days and limited strictly to whatever topics the governor chooses to put on the agenda. Some Texas governors have called several special sessions in a single year when major issues remain unresolved after the regular session ends; other years pass with none at all.
Pay: Modest Salary, Meaningful Per Diem
Texas legislators earn a $7,200 annual salary — $600 a month — a figure that has been fixed since 1975 and, like New Hampshire's, is set in the state constitution rather than adjustable by a simple statute. On top of that base salary, legislators receive a per diem of $221 for every day the legislature is actually in session, whether that's a regular or special session. Over a full 140-day regular session, that per diem alone adds roughly $30,000 — meaning total compensation for a session year substantially exceeds the base salary, even though the headline number looks small.
How a Bill Actually Moves
The path a bill takes through the Texas Legislature is shaped heavily by the tight 140-day window:
- Filing. Bills can be filed beginning the Monday after the general election — well before the session even starts — through the 60th day of the session. After that cutoff, introducing genuinely new legislation becomes far harder, which pushes a lot of legislative activity into the opening weeks.
- Committee review. Each chamber's committees hold hearings and vote on whether to advance a bill. With a hard 140-day ceiling, committees have to move through an enormous volume of filed bills — often well over a thousand per session — in a fraction of the time a full-time legislature would have.
- Floor debate and vote. A bill that clears committee moves to a floor vote in its chamber of origin.
- The second chamber. The bill then repeats the process in the other chamber, and any differences between the House and Senate versions typically get worked out in a conference committee.
- The Governor. Bills passed by both chambers go to the governor, who can sign, veto, or let a bill become law without a signature. Texas also gives its governor a full line-item veto over the budget — the power to strike individual spending items without vetoing the entire bill, a tool the President doesn't have at the federal level.
Why It's Built This Way
The 140-day, once-every-two-years structure traces directly back to the Texas Constitution's origins as a document written with deep suspicion of concentrated government power. The idea, explicitly, was to make it structurally difficult for the legislature to pass too many laws or expand its own authority — a citizen-legislator model, on paper, similar in spirit to New Hampshire's, even though Texas is one of the largest and most economically significant states in the country.
Critics argue the compressed calendar creates genuine problems: major, complex legislation gets rushed through in the final days before the constitutional deadline, with less time for public input than a longer session would allow, and issues that arise in year two of the biennium sometimes have to wait more than a year for the legislature to even be in a position to address them absent a special session.
What This Means If You Live There
Timing matters enormously if you're trying to reach a Texas state legislator about a specific bill. Outside of a regular or special session, there's no floor to bring a bill to at all — legislators are still in office and still working, but the formal lawmaking machinery is simply not running. If you want to influence a specific piece of legislation, the odd-numbered-year window is when it actually counts; waiting until the even-numbered "off year" to weigh in means waiting for the next session to even have a chance.
Next Steps
Look up your specific Texas state senator and representative at SearchMyRep's state legislator lookup to see who represents your district and how to reach them directly.