Lowest net worth

You’re looking at the Lowest net worthtab. Every figure here comes from the same source as the profile pages: yearly financial disclosures filed with the House, Senate, or Office of Government Ethics. On these forms, people report what they own as dollar brackets, not exact figures. We take the midpoint of each bracket and rank people against each other using that estimate. It’s a blunt tool by design; a bracket running from $1,001 to $50,000 can hide a lot of movement inside it.

The gainers and decliners lists compare a person’s earliest filing on record to their latest one. Someone who has filed only once won’t appear on either list. A jump from an inheritance looks identical on this list to a jump from a good trade; a bracket alone can’t distinguish the two. None of that makes a high rank suspicious or a low one admirable. It’s simply where the filed numbers happen to land this cycle.

Switch to the fundraising tab for a different kind of figure: money raised for a campaign, reported to the Federal Election Commission, rather than personal wealth. That tab measures who is raising money, not who already has it. Gaps and ties appear on both lists because officials don’t all file on the same schedule. A missing filing year can move someone’s spot on this ranking more than any real change in their finances ever would.