Record wave of departures leaves Congress with its steepest turnover since 1992

The 2026 primary season has closed with a record share of Congress heading for the exits. Ninety-nine seats — 83 in the House and 16 in the Senate — are now guaranteed to open with a new occupant when the next Congress convenes in January 2027, according to an NPR analysis of the outgoing 119th Congress published Wednesday. That means close to one in five members who were sworn in at the start of this Congress will not be back, a rate of turnover driven by early and voluntary retirements, a wave of primary defeats and an unusually high number of deaths in office.

The count is not final. Several incumbents in competitive districts still face voters in November, and any additional deaths, resignations or losses before Election Day would push the total higher. But with primary voting now complete in nearly every state, the shape of the next Congress' membership churn is largely set.

The numbers

Of the 99 seats changing hands, 73 lawmakers — 60 in the House and 13 in the Senate — chose not to seek reelection, instead retiring outright or running for another office such as governor or a Senate seat. Sixteen members across both chambers died or resigned before finishing their terms, and 13 incumbents lost their own primaries, an unusually high figure for a group that ordinarily enjoys strong reelection odds.

Six of this Congress' members did not survive to see the election: Democratic Representatives Sylvester Turner of Texas, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Gerry Connolly of Virginia and David Scott of Georgia, Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa of California, and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Those and other vacancies are logged in real time on the House Clerk's official roll of vacancies, the chamber's authoritative record of seats between occupants.

Separate reporting earlier this year showed the scale of the retirement wave building month by month. By March, NBC News tallied 53 House members who had announced they would not seek reelection — already the second-highest total in nearly a century of recordkeeping, split 32 Republicans to 21 Democrats — plus ten senators, the most from both chambers combined in a single cycle since the turn of the millennium. That number has since grown as more members announced plans through the summer.

How the exodus took shape

According to the Brookings Institution's Vital Statistics on Congress, only one election cycle in the last hundred years produced more voluntary departures: 1992, when 65 House members and nine senators declined to seek another term amid redistricting upheaval and a wave of banking and check-writing scandals that soured the public on the institution. This cycle's 73 lawmakers not seeking reelection sits just behind that mark.

The current wave has different roots. Brookings' own review of the retiring class found that 56 House members had announced they would not return — the highest number in more than 30 years — and that 63 percent of them are Republicans, representing roughly one in six members of the House GOP conference. That group includes 18 subcommittee chairs and three full committee chairs, meaning the next Congress will lose a significant slice of its institutional leadership regardless of who wins in November. Retiring Republicans in the analysis averaged just five terms in office, the lowest average tenure for departing majority-party members in four decades, while retiring Democrats averaged nearly ten terms — evidence, analysts wrote, that Republicans in marginal or newly redrawn districts are leaving earlier in their careers rather than fight it out.

Some of that dynamic is generational rather than partisan. Several long-serving Democrats were ousted in primaries by younger challengers this year, including Colorado's Diana DeGette, Michigan's Shri Thanedar and Connecticut's John Larson, part of what NPR's analysis described as a "concerted push by Democratic voters" to move a new generation into safe seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. On the Republican side, incumbents were tested from a different direction: Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw became the cycle's first incumbent ousted in a primary, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy lost his May primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger, and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie was defeated after a primary fight in which President Trump backed his opponent.

Who is leaving, and what happens next

The list of voluntary retirements includes two of the most consequential figures in recent congressional history. California's Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as speaker and a fixture in the House since 1987, announced in November that she would not seek a 21st term, closing out a career that spanned four decades and four speakerships. In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, the Senate's longest-serving party leader, announced on his 83rd birthday in February that his current term would be his last.

"Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last."

That was McConnell, speaking from the Senate floor. Brookings' review of departure statements from lawmakers who are leaving found a recurring set of complaints beyond simple electoral math: several described a "toxic partisan atmosphere," and others cited the grind of perpetual fundraising, legislative gridlock and, in a number of cases, concerns about rising political violence directed at members of Congress and their families.

The practical effects will be felt well beyond the individual districts and states involved. A near-record number of open seats — those without an incumbent on the ballot — tend to draw more competitive, better-funded races and more unpredictable outcomes than incumbent-held contests, and both parties are already recalibrating spending plans around them. Inside the Capitol, the loss of 18 subcommittee chairs and three full committee chairs from the retiring Republican class alone means committee leadership in the next Congress will be reshuffled regardless of which party holds the majority, with seniority-based claims to gavels resetting for dozens of panels.

None of this year's departures directly affects a chamber's political control, but the sheer volume — same order of magnitude as the last cycle to trigger major turnover in 1992 — has election analysts watching for a similar effect this time: unfamiliar names, thinner incumbency advantages, and a Congress reconvening in January 2027 with a noticeably different membership than the one voters sent to Washington at the start of the 119th Congress. The tally is not expected to stay fixed at 99 through Election Day; competitive incumbents still on the ballot in November could add to a list that is already, by historical standards, extraordinary.