WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, earned $579,514 last year and paid $137,658 in federal income taxes. That’s a tax rate of 23.8%, higher than the average of about 14% for all US households.
Biden’s earnings have fallen slightly over the past three years, after averaging more than $600,000 in 2020 and 2021. The median household income in the United States was $69,717 in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The White House released the tax returns of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, on Tuesday. This rite of passage, once routine for presidents and Oval Office hopefuls, became a source of controversy under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who refused to release his taxes and eventually released his income six figures last year by a House committee.
The Bidens’ income has declined since 2019, when they earned nearly $1 million, mostly from book sales, speaking engagements and their teaching duties at the University of Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia Community College. The former vice president and senator from Delaware often notes in speeches that he was once the poorest congressman in the Senate, so much so that he couldn’t afford a house in Washington and had to commute on Amtrak.
In a speech in the Rose Garden on Tuesday about child care, Biden said he could not keep a home in Delaware and also afford a home for his family in Washington during his 36 years as a senator .
As president, Biden earned a salary of $400,000. His wife, Jill, was paid $82,335 for her teaching position at Northern Virginia Community College. They paid $29,023 in state taxes in Delaware and $3,129 in Virginia.
The Bidens donated $20,180 to 20 different charities. The largest gift was $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation, a nonprofit that works to fight child abuse and is named after their son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. They gave $1,680 to St. Joseph on the Brandywine, the church in Delaware that the president attended. The Bidens also donated $2,000 to the Fraternal Order of Police Foundation.
The vice president and her husband’s tax returns showed they earned $456,918. They paid $93,570 in federal income tax at the rate of 20.5%. They also paid $17,612 in California income tax, while Harris’ husband paid $9,697 in District of Columbia income tax for his work at Georgetown University Law School. They contributed $23,000 to charity.
Biden has campaigned for transparency about his personal finances, releasing 22 years of tax returns ahead of the 2020 election. It was a direct challenge to Trump, who has said for years that an audit prevented him from releasing his taxes, although the IRS has mandated for more than four decades that the tax returns of sitting presidents and vice presidents be audited.
Tuesday was the deadline for paying federal taxes.
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