DC's lone delegate to Congress is 89 years old. That's not a typo, and it's not an outlier buried in a spreadsheet, it's the single oldest average delegation age in the entire dataset. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico's sole representative is 35. That's a 54 year gap between the oldest and youngest delegations in the country, and it depends entirely on which zip code you happen to live in. Where you're from shouldn't determine whether the person representing you in Washington is closer in age to your grandkid or your grandparent. But right now, it does. Keep that gap in your head as you read the rest of this, because it's the whole story.
Here's the oldest end of the list. DC tops it with an average age of 89 across just 1 member. American Samoa comes in next at 78, also with 1 member. Then Vermont, averaging 74 across its 3 members, tied with Idaho, also at 74 but spread across 4 members. Wyoming rounds out the top five at 69 across 3 members.
Now flip it around. Puerto Rico has the youngest delegation in the country, with its 1 member averaging just 35 years old. Next is the Northern Mariana Islands at 51, also a single seat. Then things get interesting: Arizona and Colorado, two states with real multi-member delegations, average 52 years old across 11 and 10 members respectively. New Mexico follows close behind at 53 across 5 members.
Notice what's different between the two lists. Most of the oldest delegations are tiny, just 1, 3, or 4 members, so a single lawmaker's age can swing the whole average hard in one direction. The youngest list has that same effect at the very top, with Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands each represented by just one person. But Arizona and Colorado break that pattern. They prove you can have a sizable delegation, double digits even, and still keep the average age under 55. Size isn't destiny. It's a choice voters and parties make, seat by seat, election by election, year after year.
An average age isn't just a number to skim past, it's a signal about whose life experience is actually shaping the laws you live under. When a delegation's average age sits near 90, you're looking at representation shaped overwhelmingly by decades that, for most Americans, are a distant memory. When it sits in the 30s or 50s, you're looking at something closer to the age of the workforce actually paying into the system those lawmakers are legislating over, funding programs, and living with the long-term consequences of whatever gets passed this year.
Use this ranking as a starting point, not a verdict. A small delegation with one very old or very young member can post an extreme average that doesn't reflect a broader trend, it reflects one person's birth certificate. That's exactly why we show you the member count next to every average: 1 member tells a very different story than 11. Before you draw conclusions about your own state's delegation, look at both numbers side by side. Then go look up who those individual members actually are on our site. The average is the hook that gets your attention. The individual profiles are where the real accountability happens, because ultimately you're not voting for an average, you're voting for a person.
We pull the current age of every sitting member of Congress, from every state and territory delegation, directly from our live roster. For each state or territory, we average the ages of all members currently serving in that delegation, whether that's a single at-large seat or a dozen House members plus senators. Nothing here is estimated or rounded beyond what the dataset produces. These averages update as our underlying member data updates, so the rankings you see today reflect who's actually serving right now, not who was serving last year or who might run in some future cycle. If a member leaves office or a new one is sworn in, the math changes immediately, no manual cleanup required.
Want the full picture of how we track age across every seat in Congress, and how we keep the data current? Head over to toodamnold.com/data for the complete methodology behind every number on this site.