Biden and his wife paid $150,000 in federal taxes last year

US president Joe Biden and his wife Jill had a joint gross income of $610,702 (€565,098) last year, new official returns show.

The Bidens paid $150,439 in federal income tax, an effective rate of 24.6 per cent, according to the figures which were released on Friday afternoon by the White House.

Most of the money Mr Biden and his wife earned came from his $400,000 annual presidential salary and two pensions.

The New York Times reported that the president and his wife received almost $62,000 from what is known technically as an “S corporation” controlled by the Bidens, which received money in 2021 from two publishing houses, Simon & Schuster and Flatiron Books.

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An “S corporation” is a small-business designation that allows business income, credits and deductions to pass through to shareholders.

The Bidens also paid $30,765 in income taxes in their home state of Delaware, the documents show.

Jill Biden also paid $2,721 in income tax in the state of Virginia where she is a professor at Northern Virginia Community College.

The president and his wife reported donations of $17,394 to 10 charities. The largest gift to charity was $5,000 to the Beau Biden Foundation, a public charity dedicated to ensuring that all children are free from the threat of abuse.

US presidents have regularly made their federal tax returns public since Richard Nixon began doing it during his tenure. The lone exception was former president Donald Trump, who refused to reveal his returns and has fought fierce battles with the US Congress and the courts to keep these private.

The US Supreme Court last year cleared the way for a Manhattan prosecutor to obtain Mr Trump's tax returns from his accounting firm, but that ruling did not directly affect the case being brought by a congressional committee seeking the documentation.

Mr Trump maintained he didn’t want to release his tax returns while under audit from the Internal Revenue Service.

The New York Times maintained in 2020 that Mr Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years covered by documents which it had obtained. The newspaper said that in 2017, after he became president, Mr Trump’s tax bill was only $750.

The White House said on Friday that US vice president Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported earning $1,655,563 and paying $523,371 in federal income tax last year, a rate of 31.6 per cent.

They also paid $120,517 in California income tax and $2,044 in New York income tax.

Mr Emhoff, who is an entertainment lawyer, also paid $54,441 in District of Columbia income tax.

Their tax returns show that the couple earned money from the sale of a California property for $860,000 and from income on the memoir Ms Harris published in 2019.

They contributed $22,100 to charity in 2021, according to the tax return released by the White House.