How We Calculated Federal Lawmakers’ Wealth

Every year, members of Congress are required to file personal financial disclosures detailing certain assets, liabilities, transactions and other financial information from the previous calendar year. These disclosures are posted by the Senate Office of Public Records and the Office of the Clerk of the House on publicly accessible websites.

To calculate someone’s net worth, you add up their assets, then subtract their liabilities. But federal law allows members of Congress to report the values of their assets and liabilities in broad ranges, making it inherently impossible to calculate a lawmaker’s exact net worth, as their true net worth likely falls somewhere in the middle of the range provided.

Therefore, NOTUS used the median of the low and high ends of their net worth as reported in their financial disclosure. The low limit is set by subtracting the maximum value of a lawmaker’s liabilities from the minimum value of their assets, while subtracting the maximum value of all assets from the minimum value of all liabilities sets the upper limit.

The way lawmakers report their financial data also makes it impossible to definitively calculate a lawmaker’s absolute minimum and maximum net worth.

For example, for assets of an indeterminate value range, with no clear minimum or maximum, NOTUS assigned those values standardized ranges to facilitate comparisons among lawmakers.

Take a lawmaker who valued an asset at “none (or less than $1,001).” NOTUS valued the asset with a range of zero dollars to $1,000. And when a lawmaker valued a spouse or dependent’s asset at “over $1 million,” NOTUS valued the asset with a range of $1,000,001 to $5 million, the standard value range for lawmakers that may nevertheless impose an artificial cap. Similarly, if a lawmaker valued an asset at “over $50 million,” NOTUS valued the asset at $50 million for both the minimum and maximum values, even though the asset could be worth many millions of dollars more.

Lawmakers are also allowed to disclose the value of certain assets — pension plans, futures contracts and intellectual property — as “undetermined.” When this occurred, NOTUS left the value for those assets blank.

Members of Congress are required to disclose the value of assets and liabilities owned jointly or by spouses or dependent children. NOTUS included these assets and liabilities in the net worth calculations of lawmakers.

Under ethics laws, members of Congress are not required to disclose certain personal assets and liabilities. But sometimes they do, and when they did, NOTUS included their values in the net worth estimates.

Examples of potentially excluded assets include personal residences that don’t generate rental income; personal property such as cars, jewelry and art; health savings and flexible spending accounts; and debts owed by close family members.

Lawmakers are also allowed to exclude certain liabilities, including vehicle loans that do not exceed the vehicle’s purchase price, loans from close family members and taxes owed to federal, state or local governments.