Maher was born on January 20, 1956, in New York City and raised in River Vale, New Jersey. His father, William Maher Sr., worked as a news editor for NBC Radio and was Irish Catholic; his mother, Julie (Berman) Maher, was Jewish, though Maher has said he did not learn of his mother’s Jewish background until he was in his early teens, according to a profile published by Irish America magazine. His parents regularly discussed politics and current events at home, an environment Maher has credited with shaping his later career, and his father stopped taking the family to Catholic Mass when Maher was around thirteen over a doctrinal disagreement about birth control.

Maher graduated from Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, in 1974, then attended Cornell University, where he double-majored in English and history and graduated in 1978. He did not pursue comedy immediately after college, instead working a series of jobs in New York before beginning to perform stand-up at clubs including Catch a Rising Star in the early 1980s.

Maher’s stand-up act built momentum through frequent appearances on late-night television in the 1980s, including a run of appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” beginning in 1982, which established him as a working comedian on the national club and television circuit for the rest of the decade.

His breakthrough as a television personality came with “Politically Incorrect,” a panel discussion show that mixed politicians, journalists, comedians, and celebrities debating current events, which premiered on Comedy Central in July 1993. The show’s popularity led ABC to pick it up for its late-night lineup starting in January 1997, positioning Maher for the first time on a broadcast network alongside Ted Koppel’s “Nightline.” “Politically Incorrect” ran on ABC until June 2002, when the network canceled it following an advertiser boycott sparked by comments Maher made on the September 17, 2001 broadcast about U.S. cruise-missile strikes, with FedEx and Sears among the sponsors that pulled their ads, as CNN reported at the time of the cancellation. ABC replaced the show with a new entertainment program hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

HBO picked Maher up less than a year after the “Politically Incorrect” cancellation, launching “Real Time with Bill Maher” on February 21, 2003, in the same panel-discussion format but with a weekly cadence and an added stand-up editorial segment. The show has aired continuously ever since, and by the time of its January 2026 renewal it had become HBO’s second-longest-running series ever, trailing only “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” which concluded in 2023 after 29 seasons, according to LateNighter’s coverage of the renewal.

Alongside the weekly show, Maher has built a substantial stand-up touring and specials career, recording eleven HBO stand-up specials by 2018, including “Bill Maher: Live from Oklahoma,” taped at the Brady Theater in Tulsa on July 7, 2018, and directed by Beth McCarthy-Miller, per the special’s official HBO listing. In film, Maher wrote and starred in the 2008 documentary “Religulous,” a critique of organized religion directed by Larry Charles, which grossed just over $13 million domestically against a $2.5 million production budget after opening on 502 screens with a per-screen average that ranked among the strongest of any documentary that year, according to Box Office Mojo’s box-office data for the film. Maher also served as an executive producer on HBO’s newsmagazine series “Vice” from 2013 to 2018.

More recently, Maher moved into podcasting, launching “Club Random with Bill Maher” in February 2022 as a series of long-form, one-on-one conversations recorded at his home. The podcast has since grown into a small media operation: Maher’s team signed a distribution and advertising-sales partnership with The Arena Group in 2023 and later moved that business to Daylight Media’s creator network in 2026, which also began signing additional shows, including comedian Matt Friend’s “Friend in High Places,” to a “Club Random Studios” banner, according to a PR Newswire announcement of that partnership.

Unlike touring-heavy comedians such as Kevin Hart or Chris Rock, Maher has not appeared on Forbes’ periodic rankings of the world’s highest-paid comedians, and no single-year earnings total for him has been published by Forbes or a comparable outlet. The figure most consistently repeated across entertainment publications is a reported $10 million annual salary for hosting “Real Time,” a number that has circulated for years without a formal confirmation from HBO or Maher himself in a public filing, so it should be read as a widely cited estimate rather than a verified figure.

Beyond that reported base salary, Maher’s yearly income is understood to be supplemented by stand-up special fees, book royalties — his 2024 book became a number-one New York Times bestseller — and, since 2022, advertising and network revenue from “Club Random” and its associated podcast partnerships. No public source breaks out a combined single-year total for all of these income streams.

Maher’s HBO hosting contract for “Real Time” is the best-documented deal of his career, renewed repeatedly in two-season blocks over more than two decades. A contract signed in September 2021 carried the show through the end of 2024; HBO then renewed it again in March 2024 for two additional seasons running through the end of 2026, as reported by both the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. HBO renewed the show a further time in January 2026, picking up seasons 25 and 26 and extending Maher’s tenure through the end of 2028, according to Deadline’s report on the renewal, which noted that Maher’s prior contract had been set to expire at the end of 2026.

None of these renewal announcements has disclosed the total dollar value of Maher’s contract, so no aggregate figure can be verified here. What is documented is the pattern — a series of two-season renewals stretching back years, each keeping Maher as one of HBO’s longest-tenured on-air talents — rather than a single publicly disclosed contract number. As with any television deal, the gross value of a multi-year hosting contract is not the same figure as Maher’s personal net worth, since agency commissions, taxes, and the cost of producing his stand-up specials and podcast network all reduce how much of that headline income converts into personal wealth.

Maher has not taken on a significant, currently active personal brand endorsement or ambassadorship of the kind common among entertainers of his stature. His public-facing commercial ventures run instead through media and businesses he holds an ownership stake in — “Real Time,” “Club Random,” and the cannabis dispensary he co-owns with Woody Harrelson — rather than through paid third-party endorsement fees. No reliable reporting documents a current outside endorsement contract for Maher, so this category should be read as a minimal contributor to his overall wealth.

Maher’s most valuable documented outside investment is a minority ownership stake in the New York Mets. He confirmed the stake to ESPNNewYork.com in June 2012, after the team’s ownership group, led by Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, sold twelve separate 4 percent blocks of the team at $20 million apiece to raise $240 million while the family dealt with financial pressure tied to the Bernard Madoff Ponzi-scheme clawback litigation, according to ESPN’s report at the time. Maher declined to disclose his exact stake size or purchase price. The Mets’ valuation has risen substantially since then — hedge fund manager Steve Cohen acquired majority control of the team in a 2020 sale that valued the franchise at roughly $2.4 billion — but Maher has not publicly confirmed whether he still holds his original position or disclosed its current value, so no specific present-day dollar figure for the stake can be verified.

Maher’s most publicly discussed business venture is “The Woods,” a cannabis dispensary and consumption lounge in West Hollywood that he co-owns with actor Woody Harrelson, which opened in 2022. Rather than promoting it as a profit center, Maher and Harrelson have repeatedly used the shop as a backdrop to criticize California’s cannabis tax structure, recording an episode of “Club Random” on site in which Maher said the business “loses money” because of a combined state and local tax burden he put at around 40 percent, a complaint Mediaite covered in detail. Harrelson separately said the state’s roughly 35 percent excise tax on cannabis, combined with federal restrictions that bar cannabis retailers from deducting ordinary business expenses, made it “almost impossible” to run the business profitably, according to Marijuana Moment’s account of the same discussion. Both figures should be read as the owners’ own characterization rather than an audited financial statement, but no source reports the dispensary as a profitable holding.

Maher’s other notable business activity is the “Club Random” podcast and its associated Club Random Studios network, described above, through which he now shares in advertising and distribution revenue from additional shows beyond his own rather than relying solely on a single podcast feed.

Maher’s primary residence is a roughly 3.2-acre estate in the Beverly Hills Post Office area, assembled from multiple adjoining lots, one of which he purchased from actor Ben Affleck in 2003. Public real-estate compilations, drawing on county assessment and prior-sale data, place the property’s current value at more than $20 million; it remains Maher’s main home and doubles as the recording location for “Club Random.” In late 2019, Maher also purchased a condominium on Santa Catalina Island off the Southern California coast for approximately $1 million, according to public real-estate reporting on the purchase.

No other specific vehicle collection, aircraft, art holding, or additional property belonging to Maher personally is documented in reliable public sources, so no further individual assets are listed here.