Infographic
The U.S. Senate Just Got a Lot Younger
The midterms put a huge dent in America’s gerontocracy.
The U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday saw the biggest Senate turnover in nearly 50 years, with at least 15 new lawmakers elected to join the upper chamber come January. Several of Capitol Hill’s octogenarians will be leaving the Beltway, and a whole batch of younger legislators will be moving in.
The United States once had one of the oldest average upper houses in the developed world, according to data from IPU Parline. As of this month, the average age of U.S. senators is 65.4 years old. Among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for which data is available, the next eldest nation’s class is roughly five years younger, with Poland’s Senate having an average age of 61.9 years and the Netherlands’s Senate an average age of 58.4 years.
The U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday saw the biggest Senate turnover in nearly 50 years, with at least 15 new lawmakers elected to join the upper chamber come January. Several of Capitol Hill’s octogenarians will be leaving the Beltway, and a whole batch of younger legislators will be moving in.
The United States once had one of the oldest average upper houses in the developed world, according to data from IPU Parline. As of this month, the average age of U.S. senators is 65.4 years old. Among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for which data is available, the next eldest nation’s class is roughly five years younger, with Poland’s Senate having an average age of 61.9 years and the Netherlands’s Senate an average age of 58.4 years.
But Washington’s new crop of senators will reduce that number by quite a significant margin. The average age of the 15 departing U.S. senators is 70 years old. Their replacements are coming in at roughly age 55. That will bring the average age of the U.S. Senate down to at least 62.8 years—still above most of its OECD counterparts but a dramatic shift nonetheless.
That also means that the Senate is moving toward closing the age gap between its members and the constituents they represent. According to the Economist, the United States had the least age-representative government within the OECD as of December 2024, with lawmakers more than 20 years older than the average population age. The outgoing class of senators has only eight members under age 50.
The new class, however, will nearly double that number, with at least 15 lawmakers under 50. Although the eldest age will remain at 93 (Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa), the youngest age will go from 39 (Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia) to 37 (Democratic Sen.-elect James Talarico of Texas).
With more and more young people voting Democrat, according to Associated Press exit polls, it may explain why the upcoming Senate class also shifted younger. Still, only around 1 in 10 voters in the 2026 midterms were under 30.
Alexandra Sharp is the World Brief writer at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @alexandrassharp.bsky.social X: @AlexandraSSharp
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