The data outlined on this page comes from OpenSecrets. They obtained the data from personal financial disclosure data that each senator and representative is required to provide for public record. Below are average net worth numbers for first year freshman members for each recent session of Congress.
Every year members of congress are required by law to disclose certain financial information regarding personal assets and liabilities.
That data, currently available for the years to , is listed in part below in the section Individual data. Congressional financial disclosure forms use value ranges, rather than precise amounts, when reporting assets and liabilities.
OpenSecrets gathers this information to build a range of potential values. OpenSecrets combines all assets and liability to form a total potential range of values, and then provides an average value as the best guess of each individual's net worth. Ballotpedia staff took OpenSecrets predicted net worth averages for all reported members of congress and using statistical software calculated yearly averages and changes for various congressional subsets.
OpenSecrets notes some important limitations to the data: [5]. Disclaimer: All data relating to the average net worth of individual members of congress from OpenSecrets.
All other content, including data analysis of net worth change, is posted under Ballotpedia's standard content license. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion.
Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. Changes in Net Worth of U. Categories : Unique congress pages One-off pages, mothballed. Hidden category: Pages with reference errors. Rounding out this list are Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, heir apparent to a multistate industrial real estate empire; fellow Republican Francis Rooney of Florida, who inherited the family construction business; and California Democrat Ro Khanna , who made the roster because his wife, Ritu, has benefited from the killing her father made as a distributor of auto transmission replacement parts.
Khanna is the only one of the group who did not invest significant amounts of family money in his own campaign. Altogether, Republicans have 64 percent of all the wealth in the th Congress even though they hold only 54 percent of the seats. Skip to Content. Lawmakers are richer than ever — and their wealth has outpaced most voters and the markets.
Illustration by Cristina Byvik. Facebook Twitter Email Reddit. By David Hawkings. Loading the player Line of succession Three Republicans and nine Democrats, five women and seven men, mainly have spouses to thank for their impressive wealth. Paul V. So while just 1 percent of Americans are millionaires, 66 percent of senators are millionaires, as are 41 percent of House members. The median net worth of freshman House members is more than half a million dollars, according the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based, non-partisan research group that tracks the effect of money on elections and public policy.
Multiple factors contribute to this picture. It begins with campaigns that have become increasingly costly to run, making it all the more difficult for a person of modest income to run for office. National parties, looking for ways to bring down their own costs, actively recruit wealthy candidates. Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector.
And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further. The average estimated personal wealth of congressional members far exceeds the average American's wealth, according to Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. The Center regularly goes through the time-consuming process of reviewing congressional financial disclosure reports -- which are only filed on paper -- and publishing the information in a reader-friendly online format.
Their work has shown that, besides a slight dip between and , Congress' personal wealth has continued to rise. At the same time that Congress has become more of a millionaires' club, running a congressional campaign has become increasingly costly. There's no empirical evidence to suggest the two are related, but any political operative will tell you that not everyone can afford to run a campaign. As a congressional candidate, "every waking minute of every day is devoted to that campaign," said Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
When you've got a mortgage to pay and college tuition and braces to pay for, those kinds of day-to-day, real-life expenses come before putting six months into a campaign.
The amount of money a candidate needs gets larger with each election cycle. Factors like incumbency play a huge role in the outcome of elections, but so does money: Since the election, candidates who spent more money in open seat House races won 86 percent of the time, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
If a candidate doesn't put up the money himself, it's up to the political party backing him to do so. That gives the party organizations big incentive to recruit wealthy candidates.
Heye points out that money goes farther when it comes from the candidate directly, rather than through fundraisers.
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