The Wyoming Rule Would Add 138 House Seats

Wyoming had 577,719 people in the 2020 census. California's average congressional district had roughly 760,000. That gap is what the Wyoming Rule is designed to close: divide the national apportionment population by the population of the smallest state, and let that quotient set the size of the U.S. House.

Run the arithmetic on 2020 numbers — 331,108,434 ÷ 577,719 — and you get 573 seats. That is 138 more than the 435 the House has had since the Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped it. Wyoming would still have one representative; the extra seats would mostly go to the largest states, allocated by the same equal-proportions method already used after each census.

The cap itself is a statute, not a constitutional rule. The original Constitution called for one representative per 30,000 inhabitants and the chamber grew with the country until 1911, when Congress set it at 435. After the 1920 census revealed a politically inconvenient urban-rural shift, Congress simply refused to reapportion at all. The 1929 Act made the freeze permanent and handed the recalculation job to the Census Bureau.

The Wyoming Rule has been introduced in Congress repeatedly without passing. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences endorsed enlarging the House in its 2020 Our Common Purpose report, citing the same numbers. Whether 573 representatives would actually function as a deliberative body is a separate question — and the one critics keep pointing at.