Methodology

Every member of Congress, senior executive-branch official, and federal judge must file an annual financial disclosure. Crucially, these forms do not ask for exact dollar amounts. Instead, each asset and liability is reported as falling within a value bracket— for example, “$1,000,001 – $5,000,000.”

Because of this, any net-worth figure — ours, OpenSecrets’, or a newspaper’s — is an estimate derived from ranges. We never present a single number as if it were precise.

Why some figures are negative. Disclosures require officials to report mortgages and loans as liabilities, but they exclude personal residences and other non-income-producing personal assets from the asset schedule. An official whose main asset is their home will show the mortgage as debt with no offsetting asset — so their disclosednet worth can be negative even though they are not actually underwater. We surface this caveat on any profile with a negative estimate rather than implying the person is millions in debt.

For each filing we:

1. Convert every asset and liability bracket to a [low, high] dollar range.
2. Sum the lows and the highs separately to get a total asset range and a total debt range.
3. Compute net worth as a range: net low = assets low − debts high, net high = assets high − debts low.
4. Report a single midpoint estimateas the headline number — the sum of each item’s bracket midpoint. This is the standard approach used across the field.

On charts, the shaded band is the disclosed range and the line is the midpoint. The spread between them is the irreducible uncertainty baked into the source data.

Judicial disclosures (AO-10) use these gross-value codes, which we map as follows:

† The top bracket is open-ended. When a holding falls in it, the high end is a floor — the true value may be higher — and we flag the estimate accordingly.

Each estimate carries a confidence level based on how completely we could parse a filing. When many line items lack a readable value code, the estimate is marked low confidence and likely understates the total.

Donation figures come directly from the Federal Election Commission and are precise, not estimated. Note two things: only elected officials (Congress, and presidential/vice-presidential candidates) have FEC records — appointed officials and Supreme Court justices do not. And contributions of $200 or less are not itemized by the FEC, so small-dollar donors appear only in aggregate.

On each profile we plot the official’s government salaryfor every year in office, derived from published US federal pay tables by role (rank-and-file member of Congress, President, Vice President, Associate/Chief Justice, Cabinet Level I). Salary figures are exact for known years and approximate where interpolated; they reflect base pay and don’t include leadership differentials.

We also show a hypothetical retirement benchmark: what an account would hold if the person invested 20%of each year’s salary, compounding at an assumed 7%annual return, from their first year in office. It is a deliberately simple “disciplined saver” yardstick to compare against actual disclosed net worth — nota claim about anyone’s real savings, and it ignores taxes, spending, outside income, and market variation.

This is a living record built source by source. Digitized disclosure coverage varies by branch (House from ~2008, Senate from ~2012, judicial via CourtListener through ~2021, executive filings are recent and shallow). Where a record has not yet been ingested, we say so plainly rather than implying zero. Corrections are welcome.