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Bernie Sanders has had a good decade. Since 2009, the socialist senator has pulled in nearly $5 million in income, according to a Forbes analysis of 10 years of Sanders’ tax returns.
For that, he can largely thank his 2016 presidential campaign—and the lucrative book deals that followed. Sanders and his wife, Jane, earned between $200,000 and $330,000 from 2009 through 2015, before his fiery bid for the White House. Then, around the time he conceded the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, he inked two deals with publisher Macmillan.
The Sanders’ income, listed on tax returns they file jointly, increased dramatically. In 2016, they pulled in nearly $1.1 million—more than quadruple their previous year’s earnings of about $250,000. Around $800,000 of it came from the advance Sanders got for writing the hit Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. Royalties from the bestseller flowed in 2017, and Sanders kept writing. He released a second book and signed a deal with Macmillan for a third, which helped push the couple’s earnings beyond the $1.1 million mark ($960,000 of it from the book deals). Last year, the couple made about $575,000, some $380,000 of it coming from Sanders’ side gig as an author.
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too,” Sanders recently told the New York Times.
He has earned millions from the government as well. Between 2009 and 2018, Sanders and his wife took in around $2.1 million in wages, mostly from Sanders’ $174,000 congressional salary. The couple’s tax returns show they have also collected about $400,000 in Social Security over the past decade. Another $135,000 came from pensions and annuities, including a city pension from Sanders’ stint as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s. The couple has also collected some $60,000 in dividends, capital gains and other miscellaneous income.
While the sums might be modest relative to some of the wealthiest officials in Washington, they’re substantial in comparison to the average American. In fact, Sanders now appears to be a member of the 1%. “These tax returns show that our family has been fortunate,” Sanders said in a press release. “I am very grateful for that, as I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck and I know the stress of economic insecurity.”
Those days are long behind the senator, who Forbes estimates to have a net worth of $2.5 million. And more high-earning years look to be ahead for the Sanders family. As the press release notes, Jane Sanders is working on a book of her own.
