How old is Bernie Sanders
Executive summary
Bernard “Bernie” Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, a datum recorded by major biographical repositories including Wikipedia, Ballotpedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica [1][2][3]. Using that birthdate and the current date of January 23, 2026, Sanders is 84 years old, having turned 84 on September 8, 2025 [1][3]; reporting that lists other ages reflects either older snapshots or rounding errors in coverage [4][5][6].
1. Birthdate and the authoritative record
Multiple authoritative biographical sources agree on Sanders’s birthdate of September 8, 1941 — Wikipedia lists the date explicitly [1], Ballotpedia notes his birth year as 1941 [2], and EBSCO/Biography summaries also give September 8, 1941 as his birthday [3]; Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains a current profile on Sanders and is updated as of January 20, 2026, reinforcing the same foundational biographical facts [7].
2. The arithmetic: how that birthdate becomes an age
Counting from September 8, 1941 to September 8, 2025 yields 84 completed years, so Sanders is 84 years old as of January 23, 2026; lifestyle and fan sites that compute “X years, Y months” for Sanders’ age corroborate this by listing him in his eighty-fourth year in early 2026 [8]. This is a simple calendrical calculation grounded in the consistently reported birthdate across primary public records [1][3].
3. Why some outlets say different ages — timestamps, rounding and context
Media accounts cite varying ages depending on when the story ran: PBS, reporting on his 2024 reelection bid, described Sanders as “82‑year‑old” in May 2024 because it reflected his age at that time [4], while outlets writing in 2025 sometimes called him “83” because they used the 2025 calendar year as context [5][9]. Conversely, a late-2025 lifestyle piece asserted he was already 85 in 2026, a claim inconsistent with the primary birthdate sources and likely the result of a miscalculation or editorial error [6]. These discrepancies underline that reported age can vary with publication date and editorial care, not with the underlying biographical fact [1][3].
4. What the senator’s official pages and filings show
Sanders’s official Senate biography and campaign/about pages cite his birth year and career milestones consistently with the September 1941 birthdate and confirm his long congressional tenure and recent reelection in 2024, which, combined with the birthdate, places him at 84 in early 2026 [10][11]. Federal filings referenced in reporting (such as FEC-related filings reported in 2025) reflect ongoing political activity into his eighties but do not change the basic birthdate-based age calculation [5][10].
5. What this means and reporting caveats
Stating Sanders’s age as 84 in January 2026 is a straightforward, verifiable fact anchored in multiple reputable sources that list his September 8, 1941 birthdate [1][3][7]; when encountering differing ages in news coverage, readers should check the publication date and whether the outlet calculated the age at the time of a past event rather than at the present moment [4][9]. If a source’s age claim conflicts with the primary birthdate without explaining its method, that inconsistency is an editorial error rather than evidence of uncertainty about his birth date [1][3].