How The Bidens Earned $16.7 Million After Leaving The White House

The couple’s haul skyrocketed after Joe Biden’s term as vice president ended.

^Joe Biden and his wife Jill earned $22.5 million from 1998 to 2019, a tidy sum that at first glance works out to just over $1 million per year. Except, that’s not quite how it happened. The Bidens have earned three quarters of that money since Joe left his post as vice president in 2017, according to an analysis of their tax returns.

In the decade before Biden entered the West Wing, he and his wife Jill mostly earned income from three sources. First, Biden brought in about $155,000 a year as a U.S. senator. Second, he had a teaching gig at Widener University on the side, which generated roughly $20,000 annually. Third, Jill earned about $60,000 a year from the State of Delaware. She worked as an English professor at Delaware Technical Community College.

Add it all up, and the couple made about $230,000 in a typical year. In 2005, they got a boost from the literary agency Sterling Lord Literistic, which paid them $81,250. In 2007, they declared $71,000 in royalties, and the next year, another $9,560 in audiobook rights.

The Bidens’ Total Earnings: 1998 – 2019

After leaving the Obama administration, former vice president Joe Biden and his wife Jill made more money in 2017 than in the previous 19 years combined.

* Rounded to the nearest $5K

When Biden became vice president, he got a pay raise. He made about $225,000 a year during his eight years in the White House. Jill got a new job closer to D.C., teaching at Northern Virginia Community College, which paid her an average of $83,000 a year.

In 2009 the Bidens also began collecting real money from social security, as well as pensions and annuities, according to their tax filings. The couple earned about $385,000 in social security benefits between 2009 and 2019. They also collected about $890,000 from pensions and annuities over the same time frame. Biden, who was 66 when he became vice president, had only collected about $6,500 from social security before 2009.   

Other sources of income include a cottage in Wilmington, Delaware, which the Secret Service reportedly rented. Between 2010 and 2016 the Bidens took in about $17,000 of net earnings per year from the property. In 2012, Jill published a children’s book called Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops. The following year, she reported $24,400 of author earnings. 

When Biden left the West Wing, the big money started coming. In 2017, the Bidens declared $11.1 million in total earnings, nearly twice as much in a single year as they had made in the previous 18 years combined. About $10 million of that flowed through two S-corporations called CelticCapri and Giacoppa. The Biden campaign explained in a press release last year that the money in those entities came from speaking engagements and book payments connected to Joe’s memoir Promise Me, Dad and Jill’s memoir Where the Light Enters. Publishers Weekly reported in 2017 that the couple’s book deal with Flatiron Books was valued at $8 million. In February 2017 Joe Biden was also named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a post that earned him a $372,000 salary that year. 

The next year, Biden stayed on at UPenn, earning $405,000. He and Jill also earned $3.7 million from their books and speaking gigs. Depending on where he was speaking, Joe Biden’s payout varied dramatically. He earned $8,000 for a stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, but he received $190,000 for a speech in Madison, New Jersey paid for by Drew University, according to his financial disclosure form. The Bidens’ earnings, which also included payments from pensions and social security, totaled $4.6 million in 2018.

In 2019, the year that Biden launched his bid for president, he and Jill earned about $1 million. Biden took an unpaid leave of absence from UPenn when he started his campaign in April 2019, so his salary from the university dropped to $135,000. Another half a million dollars came from writing and speaking. Biden delivered his final paid speech in Fort Lauderdale on January 28, three months before launching his campaign. By the end of 2019, Biden was a Democratic frontrunner, and a fairly wealthy man, having earned $16.7 million in three years and built up a net worth of roughly $9 million.

The Bidens invested some of that money into real estate, buying a $2.7 million second home by the water in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in June 2017. But they didn’t hoard everything for themselves. After having given about $70,000 from 1998 to 2016 to charity, they donated more than $1 million in 2017, supporting organizations such as the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington and the United Jewish Federation of Chicago. In 2018, they gave another $275,800, and in 2019, they doled out $14,700, according to the tax filings.

Some of the money also went to the U.S. government. Biden has paid about $6.7 million in income taxes since 1998, $5.5 million of it since 2017. The year he left the White House, the former vice president handed over $3.7 million in federal income tax—or about 5,000 times the $750 that President Donald Trump reportedly paid.