Here’s How Much Kamala Harris Is Worth
by Kyle Khan-Mullins · ForbesThe vice president has plenty of money, but she could be even richer if she had invested wisely.
By Kyle Khan-Mullins, Forbes Staff
Update (Nov. 4, 2024): Since Forbes first published this article on May 26, the country’s political landscape has been transformed. Kamala Harris, riding a wave of concern within the Democratic party regarding Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness in early July, replaced the President on the ballot in mere days. The move had no impact on her net worth; an updated financial disclosure released in September showed few changes to her personal finances in the intervening months. But this week, America will decide whether she gets the promotion she seeks. It would come with a raise—a bump from her $235,000 annual salary as vice president to $400,000 as commander-in-chief—and a move from the VP’s residence to the White House, which is certainly an upgrade. Plus, a win would likely boost her future earnings potential in the form of higher speaking fees and book advances. Whether she wins the presidency or is beat by multibillionaire Donald Trump, this year’s developments ensure that her millions in personal wealth will earn more scrutiny than ever before.
Thanks to her decades in government and a wealthy husband, Kamala Harris has built quite a nest egg—and she’s only gotten richer since becoming vice president. Forbes estimates her net worth, along with second gentleman Doug Emhoff, at about $8 million, up from $7 million in 2021. That’s roughly 20 times the median net worth of Americans in their age bracket.
One heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world, Harris (and Emhoff) own a multimillion dollar home in Los Angeles. The rest of their assets mostly consist of cash, index funds, bonds and pensions, which the 59-year-old Harris will soon be able to access. The second couple would be even richer if they had made some different choices in recent years. Their net worth increase comes almost entirely from a jump in the value of that L.A. home, and the duo’s liquid investments do not appear to have grown significantly, despite the soaring stock market.
Harris was born in Oakland, California in October 1964 to two well-educated immigrants. Her father, originally from Jamaica, worked as an economics professor at Stanford; her mother, from southern India, researched breast cancer. The pair met at the University of California, Berkeley and, after marrying, had Kamala and her sister, Maya. “We weren’t rich in financial terms,” Harris writes in her 2019 memoir, “but the values we internalized provided a different kind of wealth.”
From an early age, Harris showed an interest in law. She moved across the country in 1982 to attend the historically Black Howard University, where she debated, protested South African apartheid, got one job at the Federal Trade Commission and another as an intern for California Senator Alan Cranston, a Democrat whose seat she would later fill. Harris graduated in 1986 and returned to the West Coast, earning a law degree from UC Hastings in 1989. She passed the bar exam on her second try in 1990.
Out of school, Harris joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office. The longer she stayed, the more serious crimes she handled, including homicide and sexual abuse cases. In the mid-1990s, Harris also briefly dated Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California State Assembly, who appointed her to two state commissions. In 1998, she skipped across the Bay to join the San Francisco district attorney’s office, buying an apartment in the city for $299,000.
She quickly left the DA’s office, which she describes in her memoir as “a mess” and dysfunctional, for a stint in city government, but she couldn’t stay away for long. In 2003, Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney, hoping to clean up her old office, and won, beating a two-term incumbent.
Harris initially made about $140,000 as San Francisco’s DA, a figure that climbed to more than $200,000 in 2010. That year, she won a narrow victory to become the attorney general of California, which offered more prestige but less money, cutting her salary to $159,000. At least the retirement benefits were generous: Her time in local and state offices earned her two pensions that Forbes estimates are worth just under $1 million today.
The early 2010s shaped her finances in other ways. In 2012, following their mother’s death, Harris and her sister sold her Oakland condo for $710,000, local real estate agent Jerry Beverly confirmed. Two years later, Harris married Doug Emhoff, a Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer whom she met through a friend. Then a managing partner at Venable LLP, he brought to the table both additional income and a well-funded IRA with dozens of stakes of individual stocks.
In 2016, Harris ran for the U.S. Senate. Despite winning in a landslide, she remembers election night as a gloomy affair, as Donald Trump flipped state after state on his way to the presidency. “Each of us was trying to cope in our own way,” she writes in her memoir. “I sat down on the couch with Doug and ate an entire family-sized bag of classic Doritos.”
As a new senator, Harris received a small pay bump to $174,000 a year. Upon her swearing in, she had between $250,000 and $500,000 in a savings account and a similar amount of investments in retirement accounts, plus her pensions. The rest of the assets on her disclosure all came from Emhoff. The couple soon bought a two-bedroom apartment in D.C. for just under $1.8 million, borrowing $1.35 million. Harris, however, had her sights set on a more prominent home.
She announced a run for the White House in 2019. As a candidate, Forbes valued her net worth at $6 million—a figure boosted by Emhoff, who was raking in upwards of a million dollars a year as a lawyer. Ultimately, Harris failed to catch fire and dropped out before Iowa, but got the ultimate consolation prize when Joe Biden picked her as his running mate in 2020. They beat Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and in January 2021, Harris got another raise to $235,000 as vice president. Emhoff, for his part, stopped his lucrative legal work and began teaching law at Georgetown University.
The second couple moved into the vice presidential residence at One Observatory Circle in D.C. and started liquidating assets. Harris sold her San Francisco apartment in March 2021 for $860,000, $560,000 more than she paid for it 23 years earlier. Next went the D.C. apartment for $1.85 million, a hair above its 2017 purchase price. Harris has also raked in more than $500,000 from books she published before taking office.
Where all that cash went is not clear. Harris’ financial disclosures do not suggest a surge in liquid holdings, even though the stock market is up 37% since she took office. One possible explanation: Harris and Emhoff keep a big chunk of their holdings in low-yield cash accounts. Another: maybe they got used to more income than they’re now bringing in, so they’re putting less away than they once did.
Their overall fortune has inched up anyway thanks to the Los Angeles home, which Emhoff bought in 2012 and transferred into a trust both of them manage after their marriage. Since 2021, the value of the house has jumped about $1 million to an estimated $4.4 million. The property has a $2 million mortgage, taken out in 2020, with a rider that allows them to pay only interest until 2030 and locks in their low interest rates until 2027. Harris once described such mortgages as ticking time bombs, but it’s keeping her housing costs low at the moment.
She’ll have more money soon. Harris, 59, will begin receiving an estimated $8,200 in monthly payouts from her California pensions later this year, and her federal pension payments will likely begin in 2026. So even if Harris has to vacate the vice presidential mansion come 2025, her finances are secure—and she could always augment them, like her predecessor Mike Pence, with more books, consulting and speaking gigs.
Money does not tend to be the primary driver for lawyers who go into public service, anyway. Early on in her prosecutorial career, Harris recalls in her memoir, a young woman was mistakenly swept up in a drug bust but unable to pay bail on a Friday afternoon—meaning she would spend the weekend in jail away from her children at home. Harris helped secure the woman’s release, she writes, “and I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and who I wanted to serve.”