Washington, DC's lone delegate to Congress is 89 years old. Puerto Rico's is 35. That's a 54-year gap between two territories that each get exactly one non-voting voice in the House. Sit with that for a second, because it's the cleanest snapshot we have of just how wildly the age of your representation depends on where you happen to live. This isn't about one cranky outlier skewing things. When you zoom out and look at entire state delegations, House and Senate combined, the pattern holds up: some states are sending retirees' retirees to Washington while others are sending people who could still plausibly run a marathon without a doctor's note. Where you live shapes not just who represents you, but how old that person is likely to be, and that's exactly the kind of thing a nonpartisan accountability project should be tracking in plain numbers.
Here's the full picture, straight from the data. On the oldest end, DC tops the list at an average age of 89, though that's based on just 1 member, so treat it as a single data point rather than a trend. American Samoa comes in next at 78 across its 1 member. Then we get into delegations with more than one seat, where the average actually reflects a real pattern rather than one person's birth year: Vermont averages 74 across 3 members, Idaho averages 74 across 4 members, and Connecticut rounds out the top five at 69 across 7 members. Flip to the youngest end and the gap is just as stark. Puerto Rico's single delegate averages 35 years old. The Northern Mariana Islands' lone member averages 51. Then come three delegations with double-digit member counts, which makes their youth more statistically meaningful than a one-person snapshot: Arizona averages 52 across 11 members, Colorado averages 52 across 10 members, and New Mexico averages 53 across 5 members. Compare Connecticut's 69 average across 7 members to Colorado's 52 average across 10 members, and you're looking at a 17-year difference in whose generation is dominating the room, in delegations that are both plenty big enough to trust.
Averages hide individuals, and delegation size matters more than it looks at first glance. A place with just 1 member, like DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, or the Northern Mariana Islands, will always show a more extreme average because there's nobody else to balance it out. One person's age is the whole story there. That's worth remembering before you draw big conclusions from a single-member territory's number. But when a pattern shows up in a delegation with 7, 10, or 11 members, like Connecticut's 69 or Arizona's 52, that's not a fluke, that's a real signal about how a state's entire congressional bench is trending. That's exactly the kind of thing this site exists to help you dig into. Look up your own state. Compare it to these lists. Ask why your delegation's average sits where it does, and whether that reflects the choices voters have actually been offered or the structural advantages that make incumbency so sticky once someone gets a seat and never leaves it. The point isn't to shame any individual member for their age. It's to hand you a clear, honest picture of the age structure of Congress, state by state and territory by territory, so you can decide for yourself whether it looks like the country it represents.
The average delegation age for each state or territory is calculated by taking the current ages of all sitting members of Congress from that place, House and Senate combined where applicable, and averaging them. For places with only one member, like DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, that single member's age is the average by definition. No estimating, no dramatic rounding, no smoothing over small sample sizes to make the numbers look tidier than they are. We show you the member count right alongside every average specifically so you can judge for yourself how much weight a given number deserves before you draw conclusions from it.
This is one slice of a much bigger dataset we track continuously on every member of Congress. If you want the full breakdown of how we source ages, calculate averages, and keep this data current, head to toodamnold.com/data for the complete methodology.