How Wealthy Are the Supreme Court Justices? Their Net Worths' Ranked

Financial disclosures released earlier this month gave Americans an insight into the net worths of the Supreme Court justices and how they earn their money.

The judges are limited by federal ethics rules to “outside earned income” of no more than $30,000 per year, but income from book-writing doesn’t fall into that category, and Amy Coney Barrett certainly made a pretty penny last year for her forthcoming book.

According to The Washington Post, Barrett’s literary agency paid her $425,000 last year for a book deal — a deal reportedly made with Penguin Random House — that will eventually pay her a total of $2 million, as Politico previously reported.

So, what fortunes have Barrett and her Supreme Court colleagues accrued? Celebrity Net Worth has information for seven of the nine justices, and we’re ranking those reported net worths below.

According to the Supreme Court website, Kavanaugh is a Yale Law grad who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy early in his career. He served in a variety of positions for former President George W. Bush, and he joined the Supreme Court in 2018.

Thomas is also a Yale Law alumnus, and after graduating from that school, he became an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri. After a stint with the Monsanto Company, Thomas re-entered public service and eventually became Chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He joined the Supreme Court in 1991.

Like Kavanaugh, Kagan also clerked for a former Supreme Court justice: In her case, her boss was former Justice Thurgood Marshall. Kagan later became a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School, her alma mater. She took her seat on the Supreme Court in 2010.

Barrett joined the Supreme Court in 2020, but had she done so five years earlier, she would have overlapped with her former boss Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice for whom she clerked in 1998. She too taught law, serving as a law professor at Notre Dame Law School, her alma mater.

And let's not forget about the multi-million dollar deal for her upcoming book.

After clerking for Kennedy, Gorsuch practiced law in private practice between 1995 and 2005 and later served as Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General and then Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, among other jobs. The Harvard Law grad became a Supreme Court Justice in 2017.

Sotomayor earned her law degree from Yale Law and even edited the Yale Law Journal. She then spent half a decade as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office before litigating international commercial matters for a New York City firm. She became a judge in 1991 and joined the Supreme Court in 2009.

After graduating from Harvard Law, Roberts clerked for former Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist. He later became a counsel for former President Ronald Reagan. And after stints at the U.S. Department of Justice and in private practice, he became an appeals judge in 2003 and a Supreme Court justice in 2005.

Celebrity Net Worth doesn’t have net worths listed for Samuel Alito Jr. and Stephen Breyer, but we do have an indication of the salary that these two men and the other justices on the Supreme Court earn.

CNBC reports that associate justices make $255,300 and the chief justice makes $267,000 and the judges typically get a pay bump of $2,000-$3,000 each year. Alito has been on the court since 2006, and Breyer has been on the court since 1994 but will retire this year.