Full list: State Senate and Assembly attendance in 2026

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Welcome to the week! It’s Dan. I’m back after a week-long trip to London. With your support, we can launch CapCon UK. Just kidding.

I have a real treat for you in today’s edition. Neither chamber of the state Legislature publish attendance records for their members. You have to request them and, at least for the Senate, pay to view them.

So I did that for you and have compiled spreadsheets that show each member’s attendance on every day of this year’s legislative session.

Read on to find out who missed the most days in both the state Senate and Assembly — including multiple members who missed half or more of them — and who scored perfect attendance.

Later, we’ll get into a bill that seeks to push back on tactics by AI companies to scrape news websites for information without their permission. It passed both chambers this year.

And Hochul had three bills on her desk. I’m glad to be back!

If you’ve ever been curious about the attendance records for members of New York’s state Legislature, you might already know they’re not available online.

They exist. But neither the state Senate nor the Assembly publish those records anywhere online, making it difficult to know whether members are showing up to session or not.

I reported last year on how Assemblyman David McDonough, a Republican from Long Island, didn’t step foot in the Assembly chamber once during the six months of the 2025 legislative session. Absent that story, McDonough’s absence may have gone unnoticed.

There are really only three ways to find out who attended each day of the legislative session in either chamber.

The first two don’t offer a definitive result. Observers could physically visit the state Capitol and perform a headcount but that wouldn’t include members participating in session remotely. 

They could watch the livestream of each day’s session. The Assembly scrolls the names of members participating remotely on its livestream but doesn’t list those who are excused from that day’s session altogether.

That means neither of those methods will give you the full result of attendance in either chamber. The only way to obtain those records is through a request under the Freedom of Information Law.

To their credit, both chambers are able to turn around requests for those records relatively fast. I asked both chambers for their attendance records for each day of this year’s legislative session and received them within days.

There is a catch; while the state Assembly provides those records at no cost, the state Senate charges a fee for them. That’s allowed under the Freedom of Information Law.

I spent the day pouring through those records and compiling the attendance for each member of both chambers to see who missed the most days and who gets a gold star for perfect attendance.

Here’s who had the worst and best attendance in both chambers of the state Legislature.

The Assembly separates its attendance into three categories: members who are present, those who are participating virtually and those who have been excused.

There was one member of the state Assembly who was excused every day of this year’s legislative session but he had a good reason.

Assemblyman Brian Maher, a Republican from the Hudson Valley, was called to active duty last year as part of the Navy Reserve. He was deployed overseas for nine months, taking him out of this year’s legislative session entirely.

The chamber’s other top offenders didn’t have that excuse during the 64 recorded days the state Assembly was in session this year.