Inside JD Vance’s wealth: From hillbilly beginnings to a bestselling writer with three houses and tens of millions in belongings

The Marine Corps, Ohio State and Yale Law School grad cut his teeth at law firms, investment banks, and venture-capital firms. But he truly rose to prominence when he penned his life story. According to Forbes, Vance is worth an estimated $10 million, mostly owing to the blockbuster sales of his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which has sold over 1.6 million copies to date and was produced as a film by Netflix. By 2022, the book alone had earned Vance nearly $350,000 in royalties. 

Per August 2024 disclosures from the Federal Election Commission, the Ohio senator has somewhere between $4 and $11 million in assets—including three homes, a hefty brokerage account, and a stake in two businesses—and between $750,000 and $1.5 million in liabilities—mostly his mortgage. 

Per a Forbes estimation, Vance’s main residence in Virginia is worth just under $2 million, and  the total value of his real-estate holdings total about $4 million.

The bulk of Vance’s investments are in stocks and bonds, CNN reported, though he also has several hundreds of thousands’ worth of bitcoin. His congressional salary will come out to $174,000 this year. 

The Washington Post also pegs Vance’s wealth at $10 million. According to the Post’s calculations, the total reported assets for both Vance and his wife Usha Vance comes out to between $4.1 million and $11.8 million. Last year, their joint income on their investments fell between $201,801 and $1.2 million.

That’s a fine position for a 40-year-old father of three (he also has 529 accounts for each of his children). Especially because the average household net worth for an American in Vance’s age bracket is just shy of $550,000.