New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, took home roughly $145,000 in combined income last year, with the city's new first lady contributing less than $9,000 after deductions from her visual design business, tax filings obtained by the Daily Mail show. The couple reported no charitable contributions on their 2025 return.
That last detail matters. Mamdani has built his political brand on the argument that higher earners should contribute more, primarily through increased taxes, while also encouraging charitable giving. Yet his own household, by the numbers on the return, gave nothing to charity.
His spokesperson, Dora Pekec, said Mamdani "did donate to charities but did not itemize those contributions because the couple took the standard deduction." She was unable to immediately provide details about the donations she said they made last year. Voters can decide how much weight to give an unverifiable claim about generosity that conveniently left no paper trail.
Mamdani brought in $131,926 before taxes from his state Assembly salary, the job he held before taking over City Hall in January. He also collected $1,600 in royalty payments from songs he produced under his hip-hop alias, "Mr Cardamom." The couple reported roughly $1,600 in capital gains, which Pekec said "came from a mutual fund."
Duwaji, a 28-year-old Texas-born Syrian-American visual artist, earned $10,010 before taxes and expenses from her design business. After deducting costs, including $500 for "art supplies", her net income fell to $8,860. Newsmax noted that figure puts her well below the 2025 federal poverty threshold of $15,650 for individuals.
The combined pre-tax figure, reported as $144,784 across multiple outlets, makes the Mamdani household one of the lowest-earning mayoral families in recent New York City memory. That is not, by itself, a scandal. Plenty of public servants live modestly. The problem is the gap between Mamdani's rhetoric and his record.
Mamdani campaigned in 2025 on making the city more affordable by expanding the social safety net. He has frequently argued that wealthier New Yorkers should pay more. He has encouraged charitable giving as a civic duty.
Then he filed a return showing zero charitable contributions. His spokesperson's explanation, that donations were made but not itemized, is the kind of answer that would draw a sharp follow-up in any competent press conference. Which charities? How much? When? None of those questions got answers.
The filings drew even greater attention because of the ongoing controversy surrounding Duwaji herself. Mamdani has already faced weeks of difficult questions about his wife's conduct, including the time he was forced to defend her social media activity celebrating the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
In March, old tweets from Duwaji's social media account were unearthed. The Washington Free Beacon, which uncovered the posts, said it linked them to Duwaji using facial recognition software. The posts showed her using a racial slur and a gay slur and hurling insults at Israel.
One 2013 post read: "Helllll yeah, n****. Super duper genius* excuse you." Other posts from the account blamed "white people" for the creation of Al-Qaeda and claimed Israelis should not be allowed to live in Tel Aviv.
The discovery came shortly after Duwaji had already made headlines for liking posts that celebrated the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, including one that called reports of sexual violence a "mass rape hoax." The cascade of revelations forced Mamdani into a series of uncomfortable public responses and eventually led him to scramble to meet with hand-picked Jewish leaders after weeks of antisemitism controversies.
Duwaji addressed the old tweets for the first time on Wednesday in an interview with Hyperallergic, an online arts publication. It was her first public interview since her husband became mayor in January. She told the outlet:
"When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn't excuse it. I've read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry."
She was apparently 15 years old in 2013 when at least one of the posts was written. Whether that context satisfies New Yorkers who have watched months of controversy pile up around the new mayor's household is another question entirely.
Duwaji works as a visual artist known for political pieces focusing on Middle Eastern themes. She has worked with The New Yorker, Vogue, and the Tate Modern, credentials that suggest a professional profile far more prominent than her $8,860 net income would indicate. The Associated Press reported that the couple's joint filings confirmed she earned $10,010 for graphic design work.
One observer on X put it bluntly: "Rama is kind of like if a tradwife was a socialist lmao." The line captures something real about the contradictions at play, a first lady with elite cultural connections and a poverty-level income, married to a mayor who wants to raise everyone else's taxes while reporting no charitable giving of his own.
The broader pattern around Mamdani's public image has been one of persistent friction between his ideological positioning and the facts that keep surfacing. His administration has already drawn scrutiny for his handling of media interviews, and his political controversies extend well beyond his wife's social media history.
The New York Post reported that Mamdani's 2025 returns also showed rap royalties, a small but colorful line item for a sitting mayor. The Post pegged the royalty figure at $2,700, slightly higher than the $1,600 figure cited elsewhere, though the discrepancy may reflect different line items or reporting periods.
None of these individual numbers are large. But they tell a story. A mayor who lectures New Yorkers about shared sacrifice filed a return showing a household income that leans almost entirely on his government paycheck, a wife earning below the poverty line, modest capital gains from a mutual fund, a few thousand dollars in rap royalties, and not a single documented dollar to charity.
Meanwhile, the controversies surrounding Mamdani's ideological approach to governing continue to accumulate. The tax return is just the latest window into a household that keeps generating questions the mayor's team struggles to answer.
Pekec's claim that the couple donated to charities but simply didn't itemize raises an obvious follow-up: produce the receipts. Any taxpayer who takes the standard deduction can still document their giving. The mayor's office has not done so.
It also remains unclear what specific tax form or measure yields the "roughly $145,000" figure, whether that represents gross income, adjusted gross income, or something else. The spokesperson did not clarify.
And the Duwaji controversy is far from resolved. Her apology on Wednesday addressed the old tweets but did not directly address the more recent conduct, the liked posts celebrating October 7, the "mass rape hoax" language. Those incidents happened in her adulthood, not at age 15.
New Yorkers are left with a mayor who ran on expanding the social safety net, married to a first lady with a trail of incendiary social media posts, filing a tax return that shows no charitable giving and a household income sustained almost entirely by the taxpayers he wants to tax more.
When your whole platform is telling other people to give more, the least you can do is show you've given something yourself.
