Michigan Pays Judges $107 Million a Year. It Has No Way to Know If They Can Do the Job.

The Numbers That Should Anchor This Conversation

When people debate judicial accountability, the conversation tends to stay abstract. Fitness. Competence. Due process. Public confidence. Those frames matter, but they have a way of floating free from what is actually at stake.

So start with the money.

Michigan’s Legislative Service Bureau published a fiscal snapshot in July 2025 documenting exactly what the state spends on judicial compensation. The document covers FY 2024-25 and reflects current salary structures under the Revised Judicature Act of 1961 and subsequent amendments. The numbers are not estimates. They are appropriated figures from the state’s own budget.

Of the $373.4 million gross appropriated for the judiciary in FY 2024-25, $123.4 million, or 33%, goes to judicial compensation including FICA and retirement. Of the general fund portion alone, $120.9 million out of $266.1 million, nearly 45 cents of every general fund dollar in the judiciary budget, pays a judge.

That is not a personnel line item. That is the operating premise of the entire system.

Note the structure. Court of Appeals judges, all 25 of them, earn more than Supreme Court justices. That is not an error in the data. It reflects how the Revised Judicature Act calculates salary progressions. The salary for every court below the Supreme Court is calculated as a percentage of what a justice earned as of December 31, 2015, adjusted upward by civil service executive pay increases since then. The Supreme Court’s own salary is set by the State Officers Compensation Commission and requires a concurrent legislative resolution to take effect. The 7% increase SOCC recommended for 2025 and 2026 did not make it through the legislature before the November 2024 election. So justices stayed at $181,483 while the statutory formula carried Court of Appeals judges above them.

The system produces its own anomalies without anyone deciding to produce them. That is worth noting. It is also, structurally, a different problem than the one this article is here to examine.

What $107 Million Purchases and What It Does Not

The fiscal snapshot explains what the compensation system costs. What it does not explain is what the public receives in return. Not in terms of courtroom output, which is measured through caseload statistics, but in terms of the baseline guarantee the salary structure implies.

In virtually every other publicly funded professional context in Michigan, a salary at this level comes attached to some form of performance infrastructure. State employees are subject to civil service rules, performance evaluations, and progressive discipline processes. Licensed professionals in state-regulated fields face periodic renewal requirements that include continuing education, fitness standards, or demonstrated practice hours. Contractors subject to state procurement are evaluated on deliverable quality and can be terminated for cause.

The distinction matters because the salary structure is not neutral. Michigan pays its district, circuit, and probate court judges $180,741 annually. That is not a stipend. That is a professional salary at the upper tier of public sector compensation in this state. It carries an implicit assumption: the person receiving it is qualified to exercise the authority attached to the role, consistently, across the duration of their term.

The system makes that assumption once, at election. Then it does not check again.

The Salary Structure Is the Argument for the Fit-Bench Act

The Fit-Bench Act is a proposed Michigan statute developed from the Hartig investigation and the Clutch Justice judicial misconduct database. The full framework and draft statutory language are published at clutchjustice.com/fitbench-act. The short version is this: Michigan currently operates on a binary judicial fitness model. A judge is either licensed or removed. Nothing between those two endpoints exists in statute.

No early detection mechanism. No structured pathway for temporary relief from the bench while a concern is being evaluated. No confidential review process that allows a judge to voluntarily step back without it constituting an admission triggering a formal JTC proceeding. The choices are: keep judging, or be formally removed.

The Fit-Bench Act addresses this with a three-layer confidential assessment structure. The first layer is a baseline fitness evaluation at entry, establishing a documented starting point. The second is ongoing performance data capture using court systems that already exist and already track case timelines, continuance patterns, reversal rates, and procedural anomalies. The third is a triggered confidential review mechanism: when performance data crosses defined statistical thresholds, a confidential review process initiates, separate from and prior to any formal JTC complaint.

Crucially, the assessment process is confidential at every layer until and unless it produces a finding that requires formal action. A judge who participates in a triggered review and is found fit returns to the bench with no public record created. A judge who is found to need support gets structured options: temporary relief, modified assignment, voluntary transition. Only the cases that cannot be resolved at those earlier layers escalate to the JTC process that currently exists as the only option.

Who Pays and Who Benefits

The funding structure in the fiscal snapshot is more specific than the headline number suggests. Supreme Court justices, all 25 Court of Appeals judges, and all 232 district court judges are paid 100% from the general fund. Circuit and probate court judges are paid primarily from the general fund with a portion drawn from the state-restricted Court Fee Fund, which is itself funded by filing fees paid by litigants.

That means the people who pay to use the court system are also directly funding a portion of the salary of the judge assigned to their case. Circuit court litigants, probate court parties, and the general taxpayers who fund everything else are the financial stakeholders in a system that has no fitness floor other than the election that put the judge in place.

The SOCC’s recommended 7% salary increase for 2025 and 2026 did not clear the legislature in time. That procedural outcome means justices remain at $181,483 while the underlying question of what the public receives in exchange for that compensation sits unresolved. The salary debate and the fitness debate are not the same debate. But they are operating in the same institutional space, against the same public fund, and without any statutory accountability infrastructure tying the one to the other.

That is the gap the record shows. The Fit-Bench Act is the proposal that fills it.