What are the annual Secret Service protection costs for Joe Biden since 2021 compared with previous presidents?

1. Why you can’t find a neat “Biden annual protection cost” number — the data problem that matters

Publicly available documents and reporting on Secret Service spending focus on aggregated appropriations or discrete, investigatory episodes rather than a president-specific annual bill, leaving no official annual tally for Biden’s protection published in these sources. The Congressional Research Service fact sheet compiles annual Secret Service appropriations and protection-specific funding — for example, $1,036,739,000 in FY2021 rising to $1,137,149,000 in FY2023 and a requested $1,283,064,000 for FY2025 — but these figures cover the entire agency’s protection mission and staffing, not a single president’s line-item ^[1]. Other government summaries on former presidents note lifetime protection obligations and budgetary treatment, but they, too, do not translate into an annualized presidential cost specific to Joe Biden ^[2]. The result is a structural transparency gap: aggregated budgets and episodic news reports do not equal a clean per-president annual cost calculation.

2. Hunter Biden’s $11 million detail — what reporters documented and why it’s relevant

Investigative reports in September 2025 highlighted nearly $11 million in Secret Service spending on Hunter Biden’s protection from 2022–2024, broken down into large hotel bills (~$9.3 million), transportation (~$1.1 million), and car costs (~$600,000) and concentrated around California and specific trips like Nantucket and the Virgin Islands ^{[3] [4]}. Those stories do not claim the $11 million represents presidential protection costs for Joe Biden; rather, they document an expensive family-member detail that has budgetary implications and raises questions about resource allocation and mission priorities ^{[5] [3]}. The reporting underscores that protection expenditures for relatives can be sizable and are often disclosed only after investigative pressure, complicating comparisons between administrations unless similar family-protection records are available for past presidents.

3. Broader examples of protection expense episodes — putting $11M in context

The Secret Service’s mission has produced other high-cost protection episodes across recent years: reporting shows roughly $12.28 million was spent to protect two former national security officials for a near-year period, with line items of $4.9 million and $5.8 million respectively ^[6]. Similarly, coverage of former President Donald Trump’s post-presidency protection detailed over $1.3 million in hotel and travel costs in one year, plus additional unquantified expenses ^[7]. These discrete figures illustrate that large single-party or single-person protection costs recur and can vary widely depending on travel patterns, locations, and mission scope, reinforcing why apples-to-apples presidential comparisons require consistent disclosure practices.

4. Trends in agency funding — budgets climbed, but not a per-president ledger

Congressional-level data show protection-specific funding has trended upward from FY2021 through FY2025, reflecting higher appropriations for staffing and mission needs ^[1]. Simultaneously, funding lines that reimburse state and local agencies for protecting presidential non-governmental residences fluctuated: available amounts dropped from $41 million in earlier fiscal years to $12.7 million in 2021 and $3 million in both 2022 and 2023, indicating shifts in reimbursement policy and resource allocation ^[8]. These budget trends signal growing overall agency costs, but they do not reveal how much of that growth is attributable to President Biden’s day-to-day protection versus expanded mission scope, family details, or broader counterthreat efforts.

5. What the different sources claim and where agendas may shape coverage

Investigative pieces that highlight the $11 million Hunter Biden figure frame the data as a potential misallocation of taxpayer resources and sometimes compare it to denials of protection for other figures, which can carry political implications ^{[3] [4]}. Network investigative segments emphasize the magnitude of protection costs for high-profile individuals ^[6]. Congressional fact-sheet reporting is descriptive and budget-focused, with no partisan framing, but it lacks the granularity journalists seek ^[1]. Readers should note that outlet selection and emphasis—family protection vs. agency-wide budgets—shape narratives: journalists highlight episodic large bills; government summaries show aggregate trends, and neither supplies a definitive per-president annual figure on its own.

6. Bottom line: what we can say, and what remains unknown

Based on the materials summarized here, we can state that no publicly available, authoritative source among these documents provides a direct annual Secret Service cost for Joe Biden broken out and compared year-by-year with previous presidents; instead, available evidence shows rising agency protection budgets, high-cost protection episodes for family members and former officials, and selective disclosures that produce partial totals such as the $11 million Hunter Biden figure ^{[3] [1] [6]}. Closing this gap would require either agency-level release of per-principal accounting or legislative oversight that mandates standardized, president-specific reporting; until then, comparisons across administrations remain approximate and context-dependent rather than precise. ^{[5] [2]}