Bernie Sanders's Houses in Burlington, DC, and North Hero

Bernie Sanders has three homes: a 1981 Colonial in Burlington's New North End, the house he says he lives in; an 1890 brick row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, bought a month after he joined the Senate; and a log cabin-style summer camp on Lake Champlain in North Hero, Vermont, bought in 2016. None of the three has been reported sold.

He has summed them up himself. When Michael Bloomberg mocked him at a February 2020 presidential debate as a millionaire with three houses, Sanders answered that he works in Washington and lives in Burlington, and that “like thousands of other Vermonters, I do have a summer camp,” as Fox Business and Seven Days reported. Seven Days went and counted: about 17,000 seasonal homes in the state. What the public records show, house by house, is below.

We do not print the street address of any of the three. The Burlington house, with its record and the map, is on Bernie Sanders's Burlington home profile.

Burlington: the Colonial in the New North End

The City of Burlington assessor, the office that values every property in the city for tax, records a two-story, wood-frame Colonial built in 1981.

Bernie and Jane Sanders bought it in 2009 for about $405,000, the figure PolitiFact took from The Wall Street Journal. That is a press figure. The city's public assessor data does not print an owner's name, and no sale of the house has been reported since. Before 2009 the couple lived for years in a smaller house in the same part of the city, VTDigger reported. A photograph of a $3 million Vermont estate that circulated online as his house in 2020 is not his, PolitiFact found.

The house has had its moments. On June 12, 2016, Sanders spent hours inside with nearly two dozen supporters planning his campaign's next steps while reporters waited across the sidewalk, according to Seven Days. In April 2019, with Sanders campaigning in Texas, a car registered to him was ticketed during street sweeping and hooked to a tow truck out front. Seven Days reported the car was released before it left, for $75 plus a $35 tow fee.

Washington: an 1890 row house on Capitol Hill

DC's property tax roll dates the Washington house to 1890: a two-story brick row house. Sanders and Jane bought it in February 2007 for $489,000, a month after he was sworn in as a senator. The roll, Washingtonian and Fox Business all give that price. The DC Office of Tax and Revenue still names Bernard and Jane Sanders as the owners and marks their purchase as the last sale on the house.

Before them, it changed hands three times between 2000 and 2005. They have now kept it for nearly 20 years.

The house stands inside the Capitol Hill Historic District, which DC protected in 1973 and the National Register added in 1976. In practice, protection means any change to the outside of the house goes to the city's Historic Preservation Review Board first, according to the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. The record and the map are on his Washington home profile.

North Hero: the camp on the lake

In early August 2016 the couple closed on a log cabin-style seasonal home on North Hero, an island in Lake Champlain. Seven Days' first report said nearly $600,000. VTDigger, the Associated Press and Fox News gave $575,000, the figure Jane Sanders used herself.

They paid cash. VTDigger found no mortgage recorded with the deed, and Jane Sanders told the Associated Press the money came from selling her share of a family lake house in Maine to her brother for $150,000, plus her retirement savings and an advance on a book her husband was writing. Her family had owned the Maine place since 1900. “We finally let go of it and that enabled us to buy a place in the islands,” she told Seven Days.

The town's 2025 grand list, the yearly roll Vermont towns tax from, still carries the property in a trust dated August 2, 2016, with Bernard and Jane Sanders as its trustees, which is to say the couple hold the house through a family trust rather than in their own names. It classes the place as a camp, and no homestead declaration is on file. Vermont asks owners to file that declaration for the one house that is their primary home, which then pays the homestead school-tax rate, and the state tax department names a second home, camp or summer cottage as property that does not qualify. Camp is the town's word for what Sanders called a summer camp.

His North Hero home profile has the record and the map.

What we corrected from the 2020 version

This page first ran in June 2020 as a roundup of Sanders's money, cars and biography, with the houses somewhere in the middle. This version keeps the houses and checks each one against its record. The land figure we printed for Burlington did not match the city's record, and the value estimates we quoted from real-estate sites sit below the current Burlington and Washington assessments. The record figures are on each home profile. We also called the North Hero house a restored 1910 house. No source we could find supports that, so it is gone.

How we decide what to print about a house someone lives in is set out on our celebrity addresses page.