DC's congressional delegation has an average age of 89. That is a single member, so the number is really just one person's age standing in for an entire jurisdiction. On the other end, Puerto Rico's delegation averages 35, also a single member. Between those two extremes sits the rest of the country, delegations of varying size, varying age, and varying distance from either pole. This post walks through the current oldest and youngest state delegations by average member age, and explains how to read that number without misreading it. The gap between 89 and 35 is 54 years, roughly two full generations separating the oldest delegation average from the youngest, and that gap alone tells you why average age is worth tracking at all.
Five oldest average delegation ages: DC at 89 across 1 member. American Samoa at 78 across 1 member. Vermont at 74 across 3 members. Idaho at 74 across 4 members. Wyoming at 69 across 3 members.
Five youngest average delegation ages: Puerto Rico at 35 across 1 member. Northern Mariana Islands at 51 across 1 member. Arizona at 52 across 11 members. Colorado at 52 across 10 members. New Mexico at 53 across 5 members.
Notice the pattern in delegation size. Four of the five oldest delegations are built on 1, 3, or 4 members. Three of the five youngest delegations, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, are built on 5 to 11 members. Small delegations produce averages that swing hard on a single person. Large delegations smooth things out, since one younger or older member has less pull on the total.
Vermont and Idaho land at the exact same average, 74, despite having different member counts, 3 versus 4. That is a reminder that identical averages can be built from entirely different underlying groups. Arizona and Colorado show the same thing at the younger end, both averaging 52 but with 11 and 10 members respectively. The average is a summary, not a full picture, and the member count next to it is what turns a bare number into something you can actually reason about.
An average is only as informative as the sample behind it. A delegation of one member does not have an average age, it has that member's age, dressed up in statistical language. DC's 89 and Puerto Rico's 35 are both real numbers, both accurate, and both essentially single data points wearing a delegation's name tag.
This matters for how you use the Too Damn Old dataset. When you compare states, check the member count sitting next to the average before drawing conclusions about a state's political culture, voter preferences, or anything else. A delegation of 10 or 11, like Arizona or Colorado, tells you something about a broader body of representatives, an average built from enough people that no single office skews the total. A delegation of 1, like DC, American Samoa, or Puerto Rico, tells you about one office and whoever currently holds it. Both numbers are worth knowing. They are not worth treating the same way.
This distinction becomes especially important if you are using delegation averages to compare regions or make claims about broader trends. A state with a large delegation and a high average, like Vermont or Idaho, reflects a genuine pattern across multiple offices. A territory or district with a single seat reflects exactly one biography. Read both, but read them differently.
The average delegation age for each state or territory is calculated by taking the current ages of all sitting members of that delegation, House and Senate combined where applicable, and dividing by the number of members. The result is a simple mean, not a weighted or adjusted figure. Member counts are shown alongside every average specifically so the underlying sample size is never hidden. No number here is estimated or rounded beyond what standard age calculation produces from each member's date of birth.
This approach is deliberately plain. There is no attempt to correct for delegation size, chamber, or seniority. The goal is a transparent, repeatable number that anyone can check against the underlying member list, not a smoothed or index-adjusted score that requires trusting a hidden formula.
For the complete breakdown of how ages, delegation averages, and rankings are calculated across the entire dataset, see toodamnold.com/data.