How Much Did Trump Pay For Mar-A-Lago? The Lavish Club Earned Him A Pretty Penny

Mar-a-Lago has long been famous, and not just because it is the Florida home of Donald Trump or the new hot face trend among the conservative elite. Built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s, the 126-room resort became the property of the National Park Service when she passed in 1973. Sadly, the cost to maintain Mar-a-Lago exceeded what the government was willing to pay, and, after being returned to the Post Foundation, it was sold to Trump for $8 million dollars in 1985. That price, according to The New York Times, was less than half what the Post Foundation was hoping for.

Buying Mar-a-Lago wasn't easy for Trump. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Anthony Senecal, a former Mar-a-Lago butler turned mayor of Martinsburg, West Virginia, claimed that The Post Foundation initially turned down his $25 million-dollar bid, but the future president wasn't about to give in. To make it harder for the Post Foundation to sell the property, Trump purchased the lot in front of Mar-a-Lago and threatened to build a large home that would block Mar-a-Lago's view of the ocean. With that threat, the property became far less appealing, and so the Post Foundation gave in to Trump's demands. While this was a big financial win for the real estate mogul, by 1990, Newsweek reported that his net worth had dropped from $1.7 billion to $500 million. Facing money problems, Trump turned Mar-a-Lago into an exclusive club.

A membership to Mar-a-Lago came with a $200,000 fee, not including the annual dues, when the club opened. By 2025, the fee was $1 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. From the start, Donald Trump tried to make his new club the place to be, and it played a big part in the long history of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Still, the club never hit the status Trump dreamed of. According to The Guardian, Trump put out a press release before Mar-a-Lago opened its doors to members claiming that Steven Spielberg, Elizabeth Taylor, and even King Charles III (then Prince Charles) and Princess Diana had all applied for membership. The truth was that they were all invited to join, but none of them did.

Still, Trump has been able to turn Mar-a-Lago into a hot spot. New Year's 2026 was a cavalcade of fashion disasters as the conservative elite danced to Vanilla Ice. Along the way, Trump has been able to use Mar-a-Lago to make a whole lot of money. In 2022, Forbes estimated that his resort was worth $350 million dollars, and he was raking in over $20 million annually from the club. According to HuffPost, each trip Trump takes to Mar-a-Lago costs U.S. taxpayer $3.4 million a pop. That's almost half the amount he paid for the property he refers to as the "Winter White House."