Every member of Congress files a personal financial disclosure each year under the Ethics in Government Act. House members file with the Clerk of the House, which publishes each report as a PDF; senators file with the Secretary of the Senate, whose electronic disclosure site publishes them as web pages. Who Funds My Rep? reads Schedule A (assets and income) and Schedule D (liabilities) from the House PDF, Part 3 and Part 7 from the Senate report, and links every figure to the original filing.
From bands to a range
Every asset and liability on the filing is reported as a value band ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000 … $5,000,001–$25,000,000), never an exact figure.
Low end of net worth = the bottom of every asset band added together, minus the top of every liability band.
High end = the top of every asset band, minus the bottom of every liability band.
The estimate is the midpoint of that range. It is a central guess, not a measurement.
The home rule: a member must report a mortgage on their own home but need not list the home unless it earns rent. When a filing lists no real property at all, its mortgages and home-equity loans are shown but not subtracted, since the home they are secured by is not counted either. A filing that lists any property keeps all its debts.
A spouse's or child's asset reported only as "over $1,000,000" is carried as $1,000,001–$5,000,000; an asset reported as "over $50,000,000" is carried at $50,000,000 for both ends. Both caps understate the richest filers.
Assets marked "undetermined" (pensions, book contracts, some trusts) are counted but left out of the range.
"None" in the value column means under $1,001 and is carried as $0–$1,000.
Spouse and dependent-child holdings are included, as the law requires them to be reported.
A negative low end is common and is not a parsing error: mortgages and margin loans are reported at their full band while the property behind them may sit in a lower band, or, for a home that earns no rent, be left off entirely.
What the law lets a member leave out
A personal residence that produces no rental income (listing it is optional).
Personal property such as cars, furniture, art and jewelry.
Federal salary ($174,000 for most members) and federal retirement benefits.
Assets worth $1,000 or less, and income under $200 per source.
Liabilities under $10,000, and some vehicle, family and tax debts.
Anything inside a qualified blind trust approved by the Ethics Committee.
Why other sites show different figures
The same filing can support very different headline numbers. Ours is deliberately conservative and checkable line by line against the filing; it is not a market-value estimate. The usual reasons for a gap:
Debts are subtracted. We subtract the liabilities on the filing, margin loans and mortgages on listed property included. Estimates that leave debts out, Quiver Quantitative's for one, come out higher, sometimes by tens of millions of dollars. The one debt we do not subtract is a mortgage on a home the filing does not list (the home rule), because the home itself is not counted.
Value bands, not market prices. The filing reports each asset as a value band ($5,000,001–$25,000,000), never a price, and we use the midpoint of the resulting range. Trackers that estimate current market value from stock trades and share prices will differ, most of all for members with large stock holdings near the top of their bands.
The date. Our figure is as of December 31 of the reporting year, the date the filing describes. Sites that move with the markets reflect any gains or losses since then.
What the filing leaves out. A home that earns no rent, cars, art and other personal property need not be listed. Some outlets add their own estimates for these; we count only what is on the filing.
Open-ended bands and older data. Spouse assets reported only as "over $1,000,000" and assets "over $50,000,000" have no top, so every method has to pick a value for them. Older databases (OpenSecrets' member profiles still show 2018 figures) and news reports that quote the top of a range will disagree as well.
Each member's page ends with the same section and works through their own numbers: how much debt is subtracted, and what the assets alone come to.
Timing, corrections and use
Figures are as of December 31 of the reporting year; amendments replace the original report. About 93% of House members and 98 of 100 senators file electronically and parse cleanly. The rest file on paper, published only as scanned images; Who Funds My Rep? transcribes those from the scans (long printed grids with a script that reads which value box is ticked, checked against pages read by eye), sums the smaller holdings of a long grid per account without changing the totals, and labels each such page "transcribed from a paper filing". Corrections: contact@whofundsmyrep.com. Financial disclosure reports are public records; federal law (5 U.S.C. § 13107) bars their use for commercial purposes other than news and communications media disseminating them to the public, for credit decisions, or for soliciting money. This site publishes them for public information only and does not sell or license the data.