The Surprising Amount Of Money Donald Trump Paid To Buy His Mar-A-Lago Resort

A lot of stuff happened in 1985. It was the year Microsoft debuted Windows 1.0 and Nintendo released "Super Mario Brothers." A volcanic eruption killed 23,000 people in Amero, Colombia, while around 12,000 others died when a massive earthquake hit Mexico City. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Union, and "The Goonies" and "Back to the Future" came out in theaters.

And it was in December 1985 that New York real estate developer and future president Donald J. Trump acquired Mar-a-Lago in the affluent South Florida town of Palm Beach. Built in 1926, the 75,000-square-foot mansion had served as the home of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post until her death in 1973. In 1981, the Post Foundation put the property on the market for $20 million, but Trump was able to buy it for about $10 million. Adjusting for inflation, $10 million in 1985 would be worth $29.64 million as of August 2025. Today, though, the value of Mar-a-Lago is likely far higher than that. 

Trump often refers to the Mar-a-Lago as the Winter White House because that was what Post wanted it to be used for when she willed it to the U.S. Department of the Interior. But, after paying $1 million a year in maintenance and taxes, the federal government handed the property to the Post Foundation in 1981. When Mar-a-Lago was put up for sale soon after, a number of groups made overtures to buy it, including the Marriott hotel chain, Houston developer Cerf Stanford Ross, and South Florida-based shopping center builders William Frederick and Thomas Moye. Those deals fell apart, but Trump kept pushing, even after his claimed initial offer of $28 million was turned down by the foundation.

Playing rough, Trump entered a contract to buy waterfront land across the street from Mar-a-Lago and threated to build something that would block its views. Trump later told the Washington Post that the maneuver was his "first wall," adding that it "drove everybody nuts. They couldn't sell the big house because I owned the beach, so the price kept going down and down." In the end, Trump acquired the 118-room Mar-a-Lago mansion for $5 million, its furniture for $3 million, and the beachfront property for $2 million. And while he went on to lose three Atlantic City casinos and Manhattan's Trump Plaza Hotel in a series of bankruptcies in the early 1990s, he hung on to Mar-a-Lago, officially transforming it into a private club in 1995.

Much like how, say, a $1,000 investment in Microsoft in 1986 will have grown tremendously in value, so too have properties in Palm Beach. In 2025, the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser assigned Mar-a-Lago a preliminary value of $59.16 million.

Why? Because this isn't a mere mansion. It's an income-earning members club owned by the president of the United States. Even prior to his first term, Trump said in a deposition (via The New Yorker) that the club's manager had told him that, thanks to his presidential campaign, 2016 was "the best year we have ever had." By 2017, Trump had doubled Mar-a-Lago's initiation fee from $100,000 to $200,000. By 2024, the fee had reached $700,000 and was reportedly set to rise to up to $1 million in the fall of that year. Writing for the New Yorker in August 2025, David D. Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump took in a total of $125 million in extra profits from Mar-a-Lago as a result of his presidency — even though, in total, he may have actually lost money during his time in the White House.

How that translates to Mar-a-Lago's value isn't clear. The deed restricts it as a historic property with use as a private club, which clouds its value. Without those restrictions, though, the property could be worth $500 million. In 2022, Forbes estimated its value at $350 million. And as for Trump, it was revealed during his New York property value trial that he believed Mar-a-Lago to be worth as much as $1.5 billion.