Warren Buffett filed his first tax return in 1944 at 14 years old, and the bill came to $7. He had earned $592.50 that year, enough to trigger a filing under the IRS rules then in force for U.S. citizens who made $500 or more.
The filing showed where the money came from. Buffett took in $364 from delivering newspapers and another $228 from interest and dividends, after buying three shares of Cities Service Preferred stock. He later shared the two-page return with PBS News Hour in 2017, and said in 2016 that he had paid federal income tax every year since 1944.
There was even a note attached to the return in Buffett’s handwriting, listing $10 for watch repair and $35 for miscellaneous bicycle costs as business expenses. Those numbers matter because they show how early he was already treating money like a system to be studied, not just spent.
Buffett’s first tax return is part of a longer personal record that began in Omaha, where he was born on Aug. 30, 1930, and continued through his paper route in Washington, D.C. He delivered morning and afternoon editions of the Washington Post and the Washington Times-Herald, a route that ran past the homes of six senators and one Supreme Court justice. By the time he was 15, he had earned $2,000 from deliveries and spent $1,200 to buy farmland in Nebraska.
The tension in Buffett’s tax history is that he has long argued he has not paid enough, even as he has described the company he built as a heavy taxpayer. In 2024, he said Berkshire Hathaway paid $26.8 billion in taxes, and he has said the company did not pay a dime of income tax before he took control in 1965. That record is part of what gives the 1944 return its punch: a 14-year-old owing $7 was the start of a relationship with taxes that would become one of the most scrutinized in American business.
