Inside Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff’s net worth

On By Littum

The vice president has plenty of money, but she could be even richer if she invested wisely.

By Kyle Khan-MullinsForbes staff

Update (November 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 health in early July, replaced the president on the ballot within days. The move had no impact on her net worth; an updated financial disclosure released in September showed little change in her personal finances in the intervening months. But this week, America will determine if she gets the promotion she seeks. That 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 increase her future earning potential in the form of higher speaking fees and book advances. Whether she wins the presidency or is beaten by multibillionaire Donald Trump, this year’s developments ensure that her millions in personal wealth will earn more scrutiny than ever before.

Tthanks to her decades in government and a wealthy husband, Kamala Harris has built a nice nest egg—and she’s only gotten richer since becoming vice president. Forbes estimates her net worth, along with fellow gentleman Doug Emhoff, at about $8 million, up from $7 million in 2021. That’s about 20 times the median net worth of Americans in their age group.

A heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world, Harris (and Emhoff) own a multi-million dollar house in Los Angeles. The rest of their assets consist mostly of cash, index funds, bonds and pensions, which the 59-year-old Harris will soon have access to. The other couple would be even richer if they had made some different choices in recent years. Their increase in net worth comes almost entirely from a jump in the value of that LA house, and the duo’s liquid investments don’t 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 couple 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 his 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 historically black Howard University, where she debated, protested South African apartheid, landed a job at the Federal Trade Commission and another as an intern for California Sen. Alan Cranston, a Democrat whose seat she later would 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 attempt in 1990.

Out of school, Harris joined the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. The longer she stayed, the more serious crimes she dealt with, including murder and sexual assault. 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 jumped the bay to join the San Francisco district attorney’s office and bought an apartment in the city for $299,000.

She quickly left the DA’s office, which she describes in her memoir as “messy 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 earned about $140,000 as San Francisco’s DA, a figure that rose to more than $200,000 in 2010. That year, she narrowly won to become California’s attorney general, which offered more prestige but less money and cut her salary to $159,000. At least the pension benefits were generous: Her time in local and state office earned her two pensions there Forbes estimates are worth just under $1 million today.

The early 2010s affected her finances in other ways. In 2012, after their mother’s death, Harris and her sister sold her Oakland apartment for $710,000, local realtor Jerry Beverly confirmed. Two years later, Harris married Doug Emhoff, a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney whom she met through a friend. When he was managing partner at Venable LLP, he brought both extra income and a well-funded IRA with dozens of stakes of individual stocks to the table.

In 2016, Harris ran for the US Senate. Despite winning in a landslide, she remembers election night as a somber affair as Donald Trump flipped state after state on his way to the presidency. “Each of us tried to cope in our own way,” she writes in her memoirs. “I sat on the couch with Doug and ate an entire bag of family-sized classic Doritos.”

As a new senator, Harris received a small salary increase to $174,000 a year. When she was sworn in, she had between $250,000 and $500,000 in a savings account and a similar amount invested 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 DC for just under $1.8 million and borrowed $1.35 million. Harris, however, had his sights set on a more prominent home.

phe announced a run for the White House in 2019. As a candidate, Forbes estimated his net worth at $6 million — a figure boosted by Emhoff, who earned upwards of $1 million 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, quit his lucrative legal career and began teaching law at Georgetown University.

The other couple moved into the vice president’s residence at One Observatory Circle in DC and began 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, the DC apartment went for $1.85 million, a hair above the purchase price in 2017. Harris has also raked in more than $500,000 from books she published before taking office.

Where all that money went is not clear. Harris’ financial disclosures do not indicate an increase in cash holdings, even though the stock market is up 37% since she took office. One possible explanation: Harris and Emhoff keep a large portion of their holdings in low-yield cash accounts. Another: maybe they’ve gotten used to more income than they’re bringing in now, so they’re spending less than they once did.

Their combined wealth has increased, however, thanks to the Los Angeles home that Emhoff bought in 2012 and transferred to a trust that they both manage after their marriage. Since 2021, the value of the house has increased 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 interest only until 2030 and locks in their low interest rates until 2027. Harris once described such mortgages as ticking time bombs, but it preserves her home. low costs at the moment.

She will soon have more money. Harris, 59, will begin receiving an estimated $8,200 in monthly payments from her California pensions later this year, and her federal pension payments will likely begin in 2026. So even if Harris has to leave the vice presidential mansion in 2025, her finances are secured—and she could always expand on them, like his predecessor Mike Pence, with more books, consulting and speaking gigs.

Money is not usually the primary driving force for lawyers entering public service anyway. Early in her prosecutorial career, Harris recalls in her memoir that a young woman was mistakenly swept up in a drug bust but was unable to post bail on a Friday afternoon—meaning she would spend the weekend in jail away from his children at home. Harris helped secure the woman’s release, she writes, “and I knew what kind of work I wanted to do and who I wanted to serve.”

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