When the current Congress was convened in January, there were nearly 120 members who were 70 or older — 86 in the House, including nonvoting delegates, and 33 in the Senate. This number, which is unmatched in modern history, included 14 octogenarians in the House, five in the Senate, and 91-year-old Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.
Number of members 70 years or older in each chamber of Congress
In the House, 86 members were 70 or older at the start of the current Congress, a majority of them Democrats.
Seniority and longevity have long been rewarded, both at the polls and internally within the two major parties. Even so, some of the country’s oldest lawmakers have faced scrutiny in recent years over age and fitness to serve after very public episodes of what looked to be disorientation or decline.
The 70-and-older cohort makes up more than a fifth of the members of Congress. By the time the legislative body adjourns in January of 2027, if every current member stays in office, there will be closer to 140 members aged 70 years or older across both chambers.
The contentious matter of age is particularly acute among Democrats in the House, who had nearly double the members 70 or older that the Republicans did at the beginning of this term. The gap between the Democratic and the Republican Parties is smaller when looking at median age, which is around 57 years for both parties. In the Senate, the median age is 64 for Republicans and 66 for Democrats.
Median age of members in each chamber of Congress
In the House, the median age at the start of the 119th Congress was around 57 years. In the Senate, it was around 64.
Three House Democrats have died in the past three months, including Sylvester Turner of Texas, who died at 70. Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona, who died at 77, and Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, who died at 75, both disclosed last year that they had cancer and would not seek re-election in 2026. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, lost to Mr. Connolly late last year in a race to lead her party on the Oversight Committee.
Lawmakers under 45 — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s cohort — used to be much better represented in Congress. In 1981, when the median age was at its lowest since at least 1951, some 37 percent of House and Senate members were younger than 45. In the current Congress, it’s only 16 percent.
Age distribution in Congress
The younger cohort of legislators has shrunk over the past four decades.
97th Congress (convened in 1981)
119th Congress (convened in 2025)
The country’s state governors are even older, on average, than the current Congress, at 61 years compared with 54 years. Both age extremes — Gen Z and the Silent Generation — are less represented among state executives.
Governors are even older than the current Congress
There is a singular Gen Z member of Congress: Maxwell Frost, 28-year-old Democratic representative of Florida’s 10th congressional district.
Methodology
Data on legislators’ terms and their birth dates was compiled by the @unitedstates project on GitHub. Generational groups are based on definitions from the Pew Research Center. The list of governors used for the analysis is as of May 29, 2025.
The ages of Congress members were calculated based on the day that a particular Congress convened, typically in early January of odd-numbered years. Only members that were actively serving terms on the first day were included in the analysis. So, for example, the numbers for the 119th Congress includes members that later died in office, and members that resigned in order to work in President Trump’s cabinet. It does not include those members who later filled those vacancies.
Minor party members were included in party totals based on the party they caucused with. If no information on caucus was available, those members were excluded from the party-level analysis but still included in the totals.
