President Biden and his wife, Jill, earned $579,514 last year and paid $137,658 in federal income taxes. That equates to a tax rate of 23.8%, more than the average of about 14% for all U.S. households.

The Bidens’ earnings have fallen slightly in three years, after averaging more than $600,000 in 2020 and 2021. The median household income in the US was $69,717 in 2021, according to the US Census Bureau.

The White House released the tax returns of the Bidens and Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff on Tuesday. This once-routine rite of passage for presidents and Oval Office candidates became a source of controversy among Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who refused to release his taxes and finally had six years’ worth of returns released by a House committee last year. .

The Bidens’ income has fallen since 2019, when they made nearly $1 million, mostly from book sales, speeches and their teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Northern Virginia Community College. The former vice president and senator from Delaware often remarks in speeches that he was once the poorest legislator in the Senate, so much so that he couldn’t afford a house in Washington and had to commute by Amtrak.

In a Rose Garden speech on child care on Tuesday, Biden said he couldn’t keep a home in Delaware or afford a home for his family in Washington during his 36 years as a senator.

As president, Biden earned a salary of $400,000. His wife, Jill, received $82,335 for her teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College. They paid state taxes of $29,023 in Delaware and $3,129 in Virginia.

The Bidens gave $20,180 to 20 charities. The largest gift was $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting child abuse named after their son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46. They gave $1,680 to St. Joseph on the Brandywine, the Delaware church the president attends. The Bidens also donated $2,000 to the Fraternal Order of Police Foundation.

The vice president’s and her husband’s tax returns showed they earned $456,918. They paid $93,570 in federal income tax at a rate of 20.5%. They also paid $17,612 in California income taxes, while Harris’s husband paid $9,697 in District of Columbia income taxes for his work at Georgetown University’s law school. They contributed $23,000 to the charity.

Biden campaigned for the transparency of his personal finances and released 22 years of tax returns ahead of the 2020 election. It was a direct challenge to Trump, who for years claimed that a check prevented him from releasing his taxes, even though the IRS had already mandated for more than four decades to audit the tax returns of sitting presidents and vice presidents.

Tuesday was the deadline for most people to pay federal taxes.