How Marjorie Taylor Greene Locked In Her Taxpayer-Funded Pension For Life

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has rarely shied away from speaking her mind. First rising onto the political scene as MAGA’s QAnon conspiracy-spouting congressional candidate, she quickly established herself as a Donald Trump loyalist and right-wing bomb-thrower once in office. Even after breaking with Trump, most prominently regarding the release of the Epstein files—Greene, 51, was one of four Republican representatives who bucked their party to get a bill to do so to a vote—she announced her resignation from Congress with a hand grenade of a statement. “It’s all so absurd and completely unserious,” she said. “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

The fiery rhetoric might lead one to assume that her resignation is effective immediately. In fact, her last day in office will be January 5, 2026, over a month away. One potential reason she is hanging on for a bit longer, enduring the president’s ire and the possible threats to personal safety that sometimes follow: It ensures that she will be in office for more than five years, locking in a bare minimum congressional pension. Taxpayers will pay Greene $725 per month or about $8,700 annually starting in 2036, Forbes estimates, which translates to a present value of a bit over $40,000. (Not that she needs the money—see below.) Her payout will be adjusted each year for inflation. The National Taxpayers Union, which published numbers similar to Forbes’, estimates that her lifetime payout from the pension will likely be upwards of $260,000. But if she decides to leave office just three days earlier, on January 2, she’ll get zero, zilch, nada.

Here’s how the calculation works: In addition to having access to a 401(k)-style savings account, members of Congress earn defined-benefit pensions, a retirement perk unavailable to most private-sector employees. After paying into FERS, the Federal Employees Retirement System, during their time in office, a congressperson’s monthly benefit, which begins paying out at age 62, is determined by multiplying together their length of service, their highest-paid years while serving and an accrual rate that differs depending on when they joined the system. When she officially resigns, Greene will have been in office for almost exactly five years—the minimum to qualify for the pension—and will have been paid $174,000 all five of those years, as Congressional salaries haven’t increased since 2009. Her accrual rate is 1%. Multiply it out to get $725 per month.

It’s far from the most generous pension former members of Congress can lock in. If Senate minority leader and New York Senator Chuck Schumer, age 74, retired tomorrow, he’d get an estimated $9,300 per month thanks to 44 years of service and a higher salary as a member of leadership. South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the 64-year-old Senate majority leader, would get around $6,400.

Even without a pension, Greene is perfectly financially comfortable. She and her now-ex-husband purchased a construction business, Taylor Commercial, from her father in 2002. Since then it has grown enormously. On her most recent financial disclosure, which only requires a politician to declare values for their assets in ranges, Greene said her 51% stake was worth between $5 million and $25 million and that she received between $1 million and $5 million in ownership distributions in 2024. Another business that appears to rent out office space, PMLTD Inc, is worth between $1 million and $5 million and generates income of between $50,000 and $100,000 annually.

Greene has a condo in Washington D.C. in addition to her home in Georgia (though ownership of the latter is murky, and at any rate, members of Congress don’t have to declare personal residences on disclosures). And she’s liquid, holding between $3.1 million and $8.3 million in cash and investments. Most of that is in a credit union account worth between $1 million and $5 million, but she also owns a portfolio of blue-chip stocks like Berkshire Hathaway, Caterpillar, JP Morgan and Hershey. And she’s an active trader, filing 22 “periodic transaction reports” indicating that she’d bought or sold securities in 2025 alone.

Greene has backed away from the most bizarre rhetoric in her past. She told the hosts of The View earlier this month why she no longer believes QAnon theories, for example: “I was a victim, just like you were, of media lies and stuff you read on social media,” she said. During the shutdown, she loudly broke with her party in demanding that Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies be extended. She gave no hints in her resignation statement as to her future plans, noting only that she is looking forward “to a new path ahead,” which could mean anything from starting a podcast to making a run at higher office. But unless another far-right politician picks up her mantle, her legislative priorities—anything from extending those subsidies to establishing English as the national language, eliminating H1-B visas for highly skilled immigrants and making it a felony to provide gender-affirming care for minors—are likely to stay on the back burner.