Bill Clinton Net Worth: Bill Clinton is a US politician with a net worth of $120 million. That is a combined net worth with his wife Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001, a total of two terms. When they left the White House, the Clintons were technically in debt due to Bill’s legal expenditures. Over the next 10 years, Bill earned $100+ million in speaking engagement fees alone.

What is Bill Clinton’s net worth?

In 2001 he was paid the largest book advance of all time, $15 million, for what became the best-selling “My Life.” To date, Bill and Hillary have earned more than $250 million from speaking engagements, book advances/royalties, investment income, and consulting fees perhaps as much as $300 million. In recent years, the couple has earned $10 – $30 million per year.

As part of her failed 2016 Presidential campaign, Hillary released eight years of income tax returns. These returns reflected that in 2014, the couple earned $28 million, largely from speaking fees. In 2015, they earned $10.6 million, of which $6 million was speaking fees. Bill, being a former President, is entitled to a yearly pension of $200,000.

Clinton Income History

When they left the White House, the Clintons were, for all intents and purposes, in debt from Bill’s legal expenditures and settlement payments from the various sexual harassment allegations against him. In the decades since the couple left the White House, Bill and Hillary have pulled in more than $250 million from speaking engagements, book advances/royalties, consulting engagements and investment income. If one assumes they earned at least $10 million in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, they’ve earned roughly $280 million since leaving the White House, as you’ll see in our chart below.

Before arriving in the White House, Bill Clinton never made more than $35,000 a year in salary as Attorney General and Governor of Arkansas. At the time, Hillary was the breadwinner, taking home about $110,000 in base salary as a partner at a Little Rock law firm. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, before arriving in the White House, she also generally pulled in about $60,000 a year from corporate board fees, for an overall income of about $180,000.

At the start of Bill’s presidency, Hillary’s income went to zero, while he earned $200,000 of base Presidential salary. Their income jumped to $1 million in 1996 thanks to royalties from the release of Hillary’s book “It Takes a Village.”

Below is a table showing the gross annual income for the couple each year from 1991 to 2015; the couple has not released any tax records since 2016:

Bill and Hillary Clinton Annual Income

Year Gross Income
1991 $200,000
1992 $290,000
1993 $293,000
1994 $263,000
1995 $316,000
1996 $1,065,000
1997 $569,000
1998 $569,000
1999 $504,000
2000 $416,000
2001 $16,000,000
2002 $9,000,000
2003 $8,000,000
2004 $20,000,000
2005 $18,000,000
2006\t$16,000,000
2007 $21,000,000
2008 $5,000,000
2009 $10,000,000
2010 $13,000,000
2011 $15,000,000
2012 $20,000,000
2013 $27,000,000
2014 $28,000,000

2015 $11,000,000

Total:\t$241,485,000

Clinton Income History

Early Life

Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His father died unexpectedly in an automobile accident three months before his birth. His mother, Virginia Dell Cassidy, moved to New Orleans to study nursing shortly after his birth, and he was raised in Hope by his maternal grandparents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy. His mother returned in 1950 and married Roger Clinton Sr. The family then moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Bill grew up. Clinton almost immediately started using his stepfather’s surname and legally changed his name at the age of 15. In 1956, Roger Sr. and Virginia had a son named Roger Clinton, Jr.

In 1963, Bill visited the White House to meet then-President John F. Kennedy as a Boys Nation Senator. This moment, along with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, inspired a young Clinton to want to become a public official. Bill would go on to attend Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he graduated with a degree in Foreign Service. After graduating, he received a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford. From Oxford, Clinton went to Yale Law School. It was here where he met fellow law school student Hillary Rodham, who he would later marry. While at Georgetown, Bill won elections for class president in 1964 and 1965. He also interned and clerked in the office of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.

Bill married Hillary Rodham on October 11, 1975. Their only child, daughter Chelsea, was born on February 27, 1980. Bill is a grandfather to Chelsea’s three children. Today, the Clintons live in Chappaqua, New York, in a home they bought in 2016 for $1.6 million.

Political Career

After law school, Clinton returned to his home state and became a law professor at the University of Arkansas. In 1974, he ran for the House of Representatives but lost by a small margin to incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. Clinton ran for the position of attorney general in Arkansas in 1976; facing no opposition in the general election, he gained the office. He then went on to become, two years later, the youngest governor in the country by defeating Republican candidate Lynn Lowe at age 31 and taking office at the age of 32.

With his main focus being on education and healthcare reform, Clinton caught the eye of the nation. He was even looked upon to run for President in the 1988 election. By 1992, he was ready to run. He won the 1992 presidential election and was elected into office over the incumbent, President George Herbert Walker Bush, along with his Vice President Al Gore. He served his first term from 1993 to 1997 and won his re-election campaign in the 1996 presidential campaign. He served his second presidential term from 1997 to 2001. During his time in office, he signed The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the Brady Bill, and he expanded the earned income tax credit. He also appointed two justices to the Supreme Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 and Stephen Breyer in 1994. He left the White House with the highest approval rating of any President since World War II, at 66%.

However, his time in the White House was not without its turbulent periods. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998. The House had voted 228-206 to impeach him on charges of perjury to a grand jury, and he was impeached a second time 221-212 for obstruction of justice. The impeachment proceedings against him were based on grounds that Bill had attempted to cover up and illegally obscure his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Eventually, the Senate acquitted Clinton of both charges. He is the second US president ever to be impeached, the first being Andrew Johnson and the third being Donald Trump.

(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images) Post-Presidency Earnings and Philanthropy Bill and Hillary would later acknowledge that they had a negative net worth when they left the White House, having incurred millions of dollars in legal fees as part of Bill’s impeachment defense and sexual assault settlements. The minute they could, the Clintons hit the road to earn as much money as possible. One of the first ways the Clintons cashed in was through a book advance to Bill for his memoir. He received a $15 million advance for the rights to his memoir, smashing the record for the biggest book advance of all time. After adjusting for inflation, $15 million in 2001 is the same as around $21 million today, which technically makes it the largest book advance of all time, still slightly edging out the $20 million Barack Obama earned in 2017 for his advance. Bill’s book “My Life” was released in 2004.

Since leaving the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton has been a highly sought-after and well-compensated public speaker. He earns between $150,000 and $700,000 per speech. His average fee is roughly $200,000. Between 2001 and 2013 alone, Bill Clinton earned $106 million in speaking engagement fees. In 2012, he earned $17 million off 73 speeches delivered around the world. Many of his earnings came from speeches that were delivered internationally, including one in Lagos, Nigeria, for which he earned a record $700,000. Add that to Hillary’s income, and the couple pulled in roughly $280 million in the twenty years since leaving the White House in debt. Bill stays in the public eye with humanitarian work, which he runs primarily through The Clinton Global Initiative. He has focused mostly on issues such as HIV/AIDS and global warming. He has also been assigned numerous diplomatic missions since the end of his presidency, including being named the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti in 2009, and partnering with former President George W.

Bush, under the then-Obama administration, in order to coordinate fundraising efforts for Haiti following the devastating earthquake that occurred there in 2010. In addition to that, he also hit the campaign trail for the 2008 presidential election when he supported and campaigned for his wife Hillary. She contested against Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary, where she lost the nomination. The Clintons came back for the 2016 presidential elections with Hillary contesting against a Republication presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who eventually took the spot from her.