How much money did Harry Potter have?

So, we know Harry inherited his money from James. By descriptions from the books, it looks like he had enough money to spend during his school years with plenty to spare for later life.

Is there an estimate on how much money he had? How much would that be in muggle money? Was he extremely rich?

I'm thinking here that he could have received more than just an inheritance. For example, anonymous supporters could have given him money through the bank while he was a baby, or when he was about to go to Hogwarts, and he wouldn't have known (not even Dumbledore would have known).

Answer

Slytherincess has given an excellent answer if we could figure out how much Harry has. Let me give you a few clues as to how much that might be, and then let's estimate. Here's what we know.

Harry had a visibly large amount of money, but not so much that he could afford to spend in on whatever he wanted. In particular, the Firebolt seemed out of his reach, although he could have bought it, it would have used a considerable amount of his cash. Estimates for the Firebolt's cost is around 400-1000 Galleons.

Harry stayed for 2 weeks at the Leaky Cauldron. Rates were never mentioned, but it seemed reasonable to guess it would cost a few galleons.

It seems likely that it was more than the 1000 galleons he won during the Triwizard tournament.

It seems that Harry pulls around 20-30 galleons equivalent per school year. This seems to be enough to leave him with a considerable, but not insurmountable, amount after everything is done. Everything in this case is paying for his books, supplies, and other general spending money for the year.

There's a fairly popular article, no longer on the web, but mentioned in sites like this, that estimates the cost of going to Hogwarts at about $50K USD/year. (EDIT- It seems there is no tuition at Hogwarts, making the cost quite a bit less.)

All in all, I'm guessing that the amount of money would be somewhere around $1 million USD, or about 20K Galleons. This is enough to do quite a bit, but while someone could potentially live off of it for life, it wouldn't be a particularly well off lifestyle, and many people would continue to work to earn money even with that income.

Comments

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