Nine people in this country hold the most secure job in America. Lifetime appointment, no boss, no term limit, and in 2026 a paycheck of $306,600 a year, or $320,700 if you run the place. That salary is the one thing they all have roughly in common. The money gap inside the Supreme Court is enormous, and the man sitting at the top of it is Chief Justice John Roberts, whose 2025 financial disclosure shows holdings somewhere between roughly $17.3 million and $60.9 million after his listed liability. Almost none of that money came from judging.
He Was Already A Millionaire Before The Robe
Roberts made his money the old-fashioned Washington way: he billed for it. He joined the D.C. firm Hogan & Hartson and became a partner in 1987, then built a name in appellate law, the small and expensive corner of the business where lawyers argue cases that have already been lost once. By the time he left the firm in 2003 he was pulling in more than $1 million a year. He argued 39 cases in front of the Supreme Court and won 25 of them.
His 2003 financial report put his net worth at $3.8 million. By 2005, when he became Chief Justice, it was $5.3 million. Taking the bench cost him income. His 2003 judgeship on the D.C. Circuit paid $164,000, which was a fraction of what he had been earning.
The Biggest Earner In The House Was Not The Justice
Jane Sullivan Roberts is a lawyer too, and she spent two decades at the D.C. firm Shaw Pittman, where she made partner. In 2007 she moved into legal recruiting at Major, Lindsey and Africa. From 2007 to 2014, according to firm records a whistleblower made public, she earned $10.3 million in commissions, an average of nearly $1.3 million a year. In 2019 she moved again, to the recruiting firm Macrae, Inc.
Sit with that number. Her commissions over eight years come to more than Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson or Brett Kavanaugh report holding in total, even at the top of their ranges. While he was taking pay cuts to climb the federal bench, she was quietly carrying the household.
One Line On His Form Is Worth Up To $25 Million
The reason nobody can pin down Roberts’ exact wealth is sitting right there in his paperwork. His Wells Fargo bank accounts are listed at a value between $5,000,001 and $25,000,000. That is the range. A twenty million dollar spread on a single entry.
The rest of the portfolio is plain vanilla by rich-person standards: MFS Value I, First Eagle Global, and Vanguard Dividend Growth Fund Investor Shares, each valued between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000. He reported one liability, a Wells Fargo line of credit between $500,001 and $1,000,000. His 2025 form also lists shares in Thermo Fisher Scientific and the chipmaker Lam Research, the only individual stocks reported by any justice who filed.
The Irish Stake Is Worth About As Much As A Used Car
The property list is where it gets strange. The Chevy Chase, Maryland house is 3,200 square feet, bought for $1.2 million and now valued around $2.3 million. In 2006 the couple bought a $475,000 cottage on Hupper Island, Maine, borrowing $375,000 to do it. In 2016 they picked up a second, bigger Hupper Island property, taking out a $1 million mortgage.
Then there is Jane Roberts’ one-eighth share of a family cottage in County Limerick, Ireland. Value: $15,000 or less. The household of the richest member of the highest court in America holds an overseas stake you could cover with a decent trade-in.
The Least Wealthy Justice Is Brett Kavanaugh, And It Is Not Close
Kavanaugh’s disclosed assets land between roughly $100,000 and $265,000. His investments are a Vanguard institutional index fund in a Texas state employees’ 401(k), valued at $15,000 or less, plus Bank of America accounts valued between $100,001 and $250,000. He reported no liabilities. No rental property. No sprawling stock portfolio.
He spent nearly his whole career in public service, which is the entire explanation. He never had the decade at a white-shoe firm that set up Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, who spent a decade in private practice before joining the Justice Department in 2005 and the federal bench in 2006. Kavanaugh tops up his salary with teaching work, like several of his colleagues.
Book Deals Pay Better Than The Bench
Four justices reported a combined $2,418,783.27 in book advances or royalties for 2025 alone. That is more than seven justices earn in salary in a year, and it goes to Ketanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett, Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor.
Jackson reported the single biggest publishing payment: a $1,181,250 advance from Penguin Random House, paid through a limited liability company called KayPac LLC that she says holds only cash. Her very first disclosure after joining the court in 2022 listed investments of roughly $175,000 to $695,000. The Penguin Random House deal for her 2024 memoir “Lovely One” has now paid her about $4.1 million across three years, and it changed her financial picture faster than the job ever could.
Barrett reported $849,071.80 in publication and copyright royalties through Javelin Group LLC, plus $33,285 in teaching income from the University of Notre Dame Law School. Gorsuch reported $300,000 in royalties from HarperCollins Publishers LLC, another $361.47 from Princeton University Press, and $30,379.91 for teaching at George Mason University. Sotomayor reported four royalty payments from Penguin Random House totaling $88,100, net of her literary agent’s cut, tied to her children’s books including “Turning Pages” and “Just Ask!”
None of that book money counts toward the asset rankings. It is income earned during the year, and it may already be spent, saved or reinvested by the time the form is filed.
Concert Tickets, A Painting, And A Chief Justice Who Took Nothing
Sotomayor reported two gifts for the year. One was concert tickets valued at $4,333 from Rimas Entertainment. Her disclosure explained that the record company provided the tickets “for a concert for me and guests while I was on a private trip to Puerto Rico in August 2025.” The other was $598 in airfare to Kansas City, Missouri, from The Coterie Theater for the opening night of a stage version of “Just Ask.”
Jackson reported a $2,500 painting for her chambers, a gift from Paul Branton and Kristen Williams, along with a long list of reimbursed travel for book events and awards. Roberts reported no gifts and no reimbursed travel at all. The richest justice took nothing.
One Justice Did Not File With The Others
Samuel Alito requested a 90-day extension, so his 2025 report was not released with the rest and he is not in the ranking. His finances are the most complicated on the court anyway. He holds dozens of individual stocks, and that tangle has forced him to step aside from cases tied to his holdings, including Johnson and Johnson and Exxon Mobil.
Two Justices Are Landlords And One Owns A Nebraska LLC
Sotomayor’s filing lists a New York rental property valued between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 and a Broward County, Florida rental valued between $100,001 and $250,000, with a mortgage on an investment property between $250,001 and $500,000. Elena Kagan is also a landlord. An analysis of their filings raised that fact in connection with the court’s 2021 ruling striking down the federal eviction moratorium, from which both of them dissented.
Clarence Thomas reported Ginger Holdings LLC in Douglas County, Nebraska, valued between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000, plus a Vanguard Global Equity Fund holding between $500,001 and $1,000,000 and no liabilities. His disclosed total runs roughly $1.9 million to $7.1 million.
Nobody Knows The Real Numbers, And That Is The Design
Federal ethics law requires justices to disclose their investments, but only in wide value ranges instead of real figures. That is why Roberts’ own form can only place him somewhere between $17 million and $61 million.
An analysis of the 2021 filings found at least six justices were multimillionaires, putting them in the top 10 percent of American wealth, with a combined court total of between $24 million and $68 million. That count left out personal residences, which justices are not required to list, and retirement accounts, usually the biggest things a family owns. The Supreme Court had no code of ethics at all until November 2023, and the one it adopted has no enforcement mechanism.
The Retirement Deal Nobody Else Gets
Hit the age and service marks known as the Rule of 80 and a justice can retire and keep collecting their full former salary for the rest of their life. For Roberts that is $320,700 a year for life. For a man whose bank accounts alone may hold $25 million, it is a rounding error. For Kavanaugh, whose disclosed assets top out at $265,000, it is the foundation of his entire financial future.
He Spent His Summers Working In A Steel Plant
Roberts was born January 27, 1955, in Buffalo, New York. When he was ten the family moved to Long Beach, Indiana, where his father managed a steel plant. During his summers home from Harvard, he went back and worked in it. In high school at La Lumiere School he captained the football team and won a regional wrestling championship, then graduated at the top of his class in 1973.
The real surprise on this court is not the name at the top. It is the spread. One line item on the Chief Justice’s form is listed as high as $25,000,000, while the entire disclosed wealth of the justice at the bottom tops out at $265,000. Same building, same bench, same votes. The job did not make any of them rich. Law firms, publishing houses and, in Roberts’ case, a wife with a better commission structure did that.
