Andrew Mark Cuomo was born on 6 December 1957 in Queens, the eldest son of Mario Cuomo, who served three terms as governor of New York. He read law at Fordham and Albany Law School, managed his father’s 1982 campaign and worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan before joining a New York law firm as a partner.

Almost everything on the money side of his record is a public salary or a book deal, and both are documented to the dollar. One of the book deals is still contested, which is why the figure at the end carries a wider band than a long public career usually would.

In 1986 he founded HELP USA, a non-profit developer of transitional housing for homeless families, and later chaired New York City’s homeless commission under Mayor David Dinkins. That work took him into the federal government in 1993, as an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

President Clinton promoted him to run the department in 1997, and he served as secretary of housing and urban development until January 2001. Cabinet secretaries are paid at Level I of the Executive Schedule, which the Office of Personnel Management publishes, and the rate then stood at roughly $150,000, so the Cabinet years were worth about $600,000 gross.

He was elected attorney general of New York in 2006 and held the office from 2007 to 2010 on a statutory salary of $151,500, about $606,000 across four years. He won the governorship in 2010 and served from January 2011 until August 2021.

The governor’s salary was $179,000 a year for most of that period. A state pay commission, whose recommendations WAMC reported in December 2018, phased it to $250,000 by 1 January 2021. Eight years at the old rate is about $1.43 million and the last three add roughly $650,000, so eleven years as governor paid about $2.08 million. Across all three offices his gross public salary comes to roughly $3.3 million.

The books paid more than the offices. His 2014 memoir All Things Possible brought him $783,000 from HarperCollins, made up of $565,000 of advances and other payments in 2013 and 2014 and a further $218,100 in 2016, against sales that The Daily Beast reported at 3,200 copies on NPD BookScan figures. His pandemic memoir American Crisis, published in October 2020, was worth $5.1 million.

Added together, roughly $9.2 million in documented career earnings before tax — and nearly two-thirds of it came from one book.

The legislative record of his governorship is substantial: New York legalised same-sex marriage in 2011, passed gun legislation in 2013, raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour and introduced paid family leave. The capital projects included the replacement of the Tappan Zee crossing, now named for his father, and the rebuilding of LaGuardia Airport.

The pandemic briefings of spring 2020 were what made him nationally famous and what produced the book contract that dominates his earnings. He was given an International Emmy Founders Award in November 2020 for those broadcasts, an honour the academy rescinded in August 2021.

He held a Cabinet post, a state attorney generalship and a governorship, the last of them in a state his father had governed for three terms.

His last campaign was for mayor of New York City in 2025. He lost the Democratic primary in June, ran again as an independent, and lost the general election on 4 November 2025 to Zohran Mamdani, taking about 41 per cent of the vote according to NBC News. He has since taken a weekly Sunday programme on 77 WABC radio, which the New York Post reported is uncompensated.

His equivalent of endorsement income is publishing and broadcasting. The two book contracts are the documented items, worth $5.883 million between them, and they are the reason a career of mostly modest public salaries produced the capital it did.

The WABC programme adds profile rather than money: the paper reported the arrangement as uncompensated, intended to let him speak freely and avoid conflicts. For former governors the usual post-office streams are paid speaking and board seats, and the documented record here is the publishing one.

HELP USA, which he founded in 1986 and which has developed thousands of units of transitional and affordable housing, is the enterprise most closely associated with him, and it is a non-profit, so it generates no equity for him. His commercial life before public office was a law partnership rather than a company he owned.

That pattern explains the size of the figure below: across four decades his income has been salaried or advance-based rather than equity-based, so nothing compounds in the background the way a founder’s stake would.

The clearest asset in his picture is his state pension. WKBW reported, on figures confirmed by the New York State comptroller’s office, that he draws $4,219 a month, about $50,000 a year, first paid in October 2021 after he applied for service retirement at 63. A lifetime indexed annuity of that size is worth roughly $700,000 as a capital equivalent at his age, and the working carries it on that basis.

The other documented item is a trust. Yahoo News, reporting on the book litigation, noted that part of the $5.1 million had gone to taxes, expenses, a donation and a trust for his daughters. Money settled on his children is theirs, not his, and is excluded from the figure.