Life as a State House employee just got a little better.

Most of the roughly 145 full-time State House workers will see an increase in their next paycheck, after a legislative committee voted yesterday to overhaul the salary scale for the Legislature's employees. By closing the divide between State House salaries and the money employees could earn elsewhere, the pay increases will help the Legislature retain and attract workers, Democratic leaders said.

"It was time to recognize we had an inefficient and inequitable system," said Senate President Sylvia Larsen, a Concord Democrat. "It really was a fairness issue."

Lawmakers last reviewed compensation for all State House workers two decades ago. The changes - which in most cases amount to an annual raise of between several hundred dollars and several thousand dollars - go into effect today, lawmakers said. Aside from simply raising salaries, the increases take into account the duties and responsibilities that come with each position and the qualifications required to perform each job.

The increases will cost about $274,000 this year, excluding the added cost of benefits, according figures from the National Conference of State Legislatures. The state will pay for the increase by transferring extra money from the Office of the Legislative Budget Assistant.

As of today, the House and Senate chiefs of staff will be among the highest State House earners: Each will make nearly $95,000 annually, which means that one of the chiefs of staff will receive a raise of more than $18,000. Only the manager of the Legislature's information systems will make more, taking home more than $96,000, according to figures from the National Conference of State Legislatures, which conducted the salary review and recommended the changes. In contrast, Gov. John Lynch earns nearly $109,000 and the health commissioner garners roughly $212,000.

Yesterday's vote by the Joint Legislative Facilities Committee, which includes members of the House and Senate, exposed a partisan split, with Republicans voting against the pay increases. The matter ought to have been discussed by the full Legislature, rather than simply a legislative committee, said Republican House Leader Mike Whalley of Alton Bay.

"The perception is going to be that we're taking care of our own, putting our own employees ahead of others in state government and we're putting that burden on the taxpayers," Whalley said. "We're going to have attorneys in the bill drafting process that may be making more money than an attorney . . . investigating homicides in the attorney general's office."

But Democrats emphasized the nonpartisan, outsider status of the group that reviewed the salary scale and argued that the changes were long overdue. Employees at the National Conference of State Legislatures have reviewed compensation in legislatures throughout the nation, and they recommended conducting a new review at least once a decade. NCSL staff reviewed salaries in other legislatures and in the private sector.

Over the years, a number of inconsistencies occurred. The Senate and the House each had money to spend on staff, and they could choose to spend that money differently, said Rep. Marjorie Smith, chairwoman of the House Finance Committee and a Durham Democrat. As a result, there were sometimes dramatic discrepancies in the amount someone earned working for one chamber rather than the other. Before the change, for example, one chief of staff earned $76,000, while the other earned nearly $89,000.

Earlier this year, House Speaker Terie Norelli, a Portsmouth Democrat, addressed the disparity between salaries for staff in the minority and majority offices, she said.

In two cases, the NCSL reviewers recommended decreasing pay. The individuals currently holding those positions won't see any change in their salaries; the change will only occur after they leave.

The overall changes are "designed very well to encourage retention, which is actually what I would put first," Smith said. "So people can see that if they perform well, there's a progression."

In addition to the pay increases, lawmakers decided yesterday to change the so-called pay steps and grades, which deal with raises and the salary range for each position. The changes were partly designed to remedy what the NCSL report called a "very uncommon practice" of forcing longtime employees to wait for multiple years in order to win merit pay increases.

Compared with other legislatures, the State House salary system had relatively few pay "levels," each of which had a minimum and maximum salary that employees within that level could earn, according to the report. Each level included seven "steps," and employees could move up a step (earning a pay increase) based on merit or based on continued acceptable performance.

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