Stephen Colbert Age 2026: How Old Is He After Late Show?

Last updated: November 1, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Stephen Colbert is 62 years old in 2026. He was born Stephen Tyrone Colbert on 13 May 1964 in Washington, D.C., and he turned 62 on 13 May 2026 — eight days before he hosted the final episode of The Late Show. Any page still calling him 61 is working from pre-birthday 2026 data, and any page calling him 59 or 60 is years out of date. His next birthday, on 13 May 2027, will make him 63.

The age matters because 2026 was the year his public life changed shape. Colbert spent ages 51 to 62 behind the Late Show desk on CBS, from September 2015 to May 2026. He arrived at that desk as a satirist in character, left it as himself, and closed the whole 33-year Late Show franchise at 62 with a finale on 21 May 2026. He did it carrying a fortune estimated at $75 million, a salary that had climbed from $6 million a year to a reported $20 million a year, a wife of 33 years, and three adult children.

What follows is the full picture, kept current to 1 November 2026: the Charleston childhood marked by a plane crash at age 10, the Second City training, the Daily Show years, the Colbert Report character that made him famous, the 11-season Late Show run and why CBS ended it, the salary arc that built the $75 million estimate, his family, and what a 62-year-old host does after the desk goes dark. Every figure is attributed to the outlet that reported it, and every disagreement between sources is named rather than smoothed over.

Who Is Stephen Colbert?

Stephen Colbert is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor and television host whose career has run for more than four decades and whose public identity has changed twice in plain sight. First he was a correspondent pretending to report the news. Then he was a pundit pretending to believe it. Then, for 11 seasons, he was himself — a warm, quick, openly Catholic, openly nerdy host who interviewed presidents, pop stars and scientists from the same desk at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York.

That three-act shape is unusual in late-night television. Most hosts hold one chair and one tone for a career. Colbert held three distinct jobs on two networks, and each one made the next possible: The Daily Show gave him the correspondent’s deadpan, The Colbert Report gave him a national character, and The Late Show gave him the freedom to drop the character and keep the audience. By the time CBS announced the end of the show in July 2025, he was 61, the top-rated host in late night, and — by his own later account — tired in a way that made the ending feel like a release as much as a loss.

He is also, by the numbers, one of the richest men ever to hold a late-night desk. Celebrity Net Worth puts him at $75 million in 2026, per Parade’s May 2026 roundup and Pulptastic’s 22 May 2026 late-night comparison. That figure sits above Jimmy Fallon’s reported $70 million and Jimmy Kimmel’s reported $50 million in the same roundups, and it rests almost entirely on television contracts rather than on a side business or an investment portfolio.

Early Life in Charleston: The Youngest of Eleven

Colbert was born in Washington, D.C., on 13 May 1964, the youngest of 11 children of Lorna Colbert and James William Colbert Jr., a physician and medical school dean. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he grew up in a devout Catholic household. He has described the house as loud, funny and full of older siblings — the kind of childhood where a youngest child learns to get a laugh to get heard.

He attended Porter-Gaud School in Charleston. As a teenager he wanted to be a serious dramatic actor, not a comedian. He read widely, performed in school plays, and carried the earnest ambition of a boy who thought acting meant Shakespeare, not satire. The comedy came later, and it came through improvisation rather than through stand-up: he did not climb the club circuit, he joined a troupe.

Two facts from those years still explain the adult. He was the youngest by a clear margin, which left him watching older brothers and sisters navigate the world first. And he grew up in a house where faith was daily practice, not a talking point — a background that would later shape both his comedy and his public candour about grief.

Age 10: The Plane Crash That Shaped Him

On 11 September 1974, when Colbert was 10 years old, his father and his two brothers closest to him in age, Paul and Peter, died in the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 while it was attempting to land in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was the youngest child, and the loss removed his father and two of his nearest siblings in a single evening.

Colbert has spoken about that loss for decades, in interviews and on his own show, with a directness that surprises audiences who know him only as a joke machine. He has said he does not wish the crash away, because the life he has lived since — his wife, his children, his work — grew out of the person the loss made him. Readers looking for a single explanation of his tone will find it here: a comic who treats grief as a fact of life rather than as a subject to avoid.

The age arithmetic matters for the story. He was 10, not a teenager, when it happened. He spent the rest of his childhood and all of his adolescence in a house remade by absence. By the time he left Charleston for college at 18, he had lived eight years with that absence — longer than many readers realise when they hear the story told in a single sentence.

Northwestern, Second City, and Learning to Improvise

Colbert spent two years at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, from 1982 to 1984, then transferred to Northwestern University, where he graduated in 1986 with a degree in theatre. He had gone to Northwestern to become a dramatic actor. What he found there was improvisation, taught under the influence of Second City director Del Close, and it rerouted his whole career.

After graduation he moved to Chicago and joined Second City, where he worked as an understudy to Steve Carell. The two men, plus Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, became a tight creative unit. Their sketch series Exit 57 ran on Comedy Central in 1995 and 1996, and their cult sitcom Strangers with Candy, in which Colbert played the closeted gay history teacher Chuck Noblet, ran from 1999 to 2000. Neither show was a hit at the time. Both are now cited as proof that Colbert’s satirical voice was fully formed years before a national audience noticed it.

He was 33 when the national break came. That is late for a television career, and it is worth stating plainly: Colbert spent his twenties in Chicago improv rooms and small cable shows, earning little, while contemporaries were already on network television. The late start is part of why his peak years ran so long — he was still in his early fifties when he took the Late Show desk, an age at which many hosts are winding down.

The Daily Show Years: Age 33 to 41

In 1997, at 33, Colbert was hired as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, then hosted by Craig Kilborn and, from 1999, by Jon Stewart. He spent eight years there, to 2005, helping to build the show’s signature device: a correspondent who reports absurd stories with total seriousness, so that the seriousness itself becomes the joke.

The Daily Show years gave him two assets. The first was a national audience that learned his face and his rhythm. The second was a working partnership with Stewart, who trusted him enough to let the correspondent character grow darker and stranger over time. By the early 2000s, Colbert’s segments — the faux-conservative pundit, the man who believed his own spin — were the most quoted part of the show.

He was 41 when Comedy Central gave that character his own programme. Most comedians peak with one show. Colbert was about to peak with a second, built entirely out of a bit he had developed as a supporting player.

The Colbert Report: Truthiness at 41

The Colbert Report premiered on 17 October 2005, with Colbert, 41, playing a blustering conservative cable-news pundit named Stephen Colbert — a character who shared his name, his suit and almost nothing else. In the first episode he coined “truthiness”, the word for a claim that feels true whether or not it is true. The American Dialect Society named it its Word of the Year for 2005, and Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year for 2006.

The show ran for nine years, to 18 December 2014, and it earned Colbert the awards that define his middle career: multiple Primetime Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards for its companion audio work, and Peabody Awards. Older profiles commonly cite nine Primetime Emmys, two Grammys and three Peabodys as his totals at that stage; later Late Show wins, including the 2025 Outstanding Talk Series win and the post-finale 2026 Variety Series win reported in September 2026, push the Emmy count above that older baseline, which is why this article does not print a single final awards total as settled fact.

Two Report moments still circulate. In April 2006, at 41, he performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in character, delivering a routine that praised President George W. Bush to his face in terms so extravagant that the room split between laughter and silence. In October 2010, at 46, he and Jon Stewart staged the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington, drawing a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Both events showed what the character could do that a straight host could not: say the unsayable, then let the audience decide whether it was a joke.

The Late Show: Age 51 to 62

On 10 April 2014, CBS announced that Colbert would succeed David Letterman as host of The Late Show. He premiered on 8 September 2015, at 51, with George Clooney as his first guest, from the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York — the same stage where Letterman had hosted since 1993 and where the Beatles had played in 1964, the year Colbert was born.

The Late Show dropped the character. Colbert appeared as himself: a host who could interview a senator, a scientist and a pop star in one night, who played guitar with his bandleader Jon Batiste and later Louis Cato, and who treated his Catholic faith and his family life as normal topics rather than as secrets. The show became the top-rated programme in late night and stayed there through the Trump years, the pandemic years — when Colbert broadcast from a bathtub, then from a home studio, then from an empty Ed Sullivan Theater — and into the 2020s.

He hosted the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in September 2017, at 53. He published books alongside the show, including I Am America (And So Can You!) in 2007, at 43, and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t in 2012, at 48. He voiced a role in The Hobbit films and appeared in film and television throughout the run, but the desk was the centre of his working life for 11 seasons and 1,801 episodes.

The Money: From Million to Million a Year

Colbert’s fortune is a television fortune, and its shape is unusually well documented because his contract steps were reported at each renewal. Celebrity Net Worth puts his net worth at $75 million in 2026, a figure Parade repeated in May 2026 and Pulptastic repeated on 22 May 2026. No competing 2026 total was found in the reporting surveyed for this article.

The $15 million figure that appears in most May 2026 roundups is the 2019–2023 rate, not the final rate. Celebrity Net Worth’s fuller contract history, published in 2026, says CBS offered Colbert a five-year renewal in mid-2023 and he accepted a shorter three-year extension instead, at a peak of $20 million a year, which he held until the final episode in May 2026. Readers who see $15 million quoted as his salary should read it as the middle chapter of the story, not the last one.

Parade’s own arithmetic gives a sense of scale: with roughly 200 episodes a year, $15 million a year works out at about $75,000 an episode. At the reported $20 million final rate, the same arithmetic gives about $100,000 an episode. Those per-episode figures are arithmetic on reported annual salaries, not disclosed per-episode contracts, and they are labelled as such here because no contract has ever published a per-episode rate.

The rest of the fortune follows the same pattern as other long-running hosts: book advances, production work through his company Spartina Productions, voice and acting roles, and the compounding effect of a decade at the top of late night. None of it required a startup, a product line or a public investment. It required staying employed at the highest rate in his field for 11 years.

Why The Late Show Ended, and the Finale at 62

On 17 July 2025, CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end in May 2026 and that the franchise itself — Letterman from 1993 to 2015, Colbert from 2015 to 2026 — would be retired after 33 years. The network called it “purely a financial decision” against a difficult backdrop in late night. Colbert, 61 at the time, told his audience that evening that he had learned the news the previous night.

The financial case, as reported by unnamed sources in the days that followed, was stark: the show was said to be losing about $40 million a year, with a staff of about 200, in a late-night market where broadcast audiences and advertising had both shrunk. The show still averaged about 2.417 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025, per LateNighter figures cited in later coverage — the top rating in late night, and still not enough, on CBS’s accounting, to cover its costs.

The timing drew scrutiny because it followed Paramount’s settlement of a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump, and because CBS’s parent was seeking regulatory approval for a merger with Skydance. Colbert himself, in a New York Times interview in April 2026, said he did not dispute the network’s financial rationale, while adding that he understood why people found the timing hard to square with it: less than two years before the cancellation, he said, CBS had been eager to sign him for five more years. This article reports both positions and does not settle the motive question, because no document has settled it.

The final run, in May 2026, was staged as a farewell rather than a wake. On 11 May 2026, fellow hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and John Oliver appeared together on the show. On 14 May 2026, David Letterman returned to the desk he had created. The final episode aired on 21 May 2026, eight days after Colbert’s 62nd birthday, as the 1,801st episode of his run, closing with a rendition of “Hello, Goodbye”. Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed took over the time slot afterwards, with Allen telling interviewers he was not trying to replace Colbert.

What Colbert Is Doing Now, at 62

Colbert has not announced a new television hosting job since the finale, and this article does not invent one. What the 2026 record does show is a deliberate change of pace. In a People cover story published in May 2026, he said the cancellation may have “saved” his life, in the sense that a nightly show takes a physical toll — he put it in the same interview as needing “bone marrow” to do the show every day — and that he now had time and energy for other work he wanted to do.

The most concrete project reported so far is a film script. People and subsequent coverage report that he is co-writing a new Lord of the Rings film with his son Peter, adapting six chapters from The Fellowship of the Ring that Peter Jackson’s trilogy left out. Colbert is a lifelong Tolkien reader — he has discussed the books on air for years — so the project fits his public interests more neatly than another talk-show chair would.

The awards season after the finale kept his name in the news. In September 2026, after the show had ended, The Late Show won Outstanding Variety Series at the Emmys, and Colbert used his post-ceremony remarks to defend free speech and late-night television in general, telling reporters that free speech was “alive and well”. On 29 July 2026, the Before Columbus Foundation named him a co-recipient of its 47th annual American Book Awards anti-censorship honour, shared with Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books. That honour is a cultural award, not a legal finding about CBS, and this article presents it as such.

For readers asking the plain question — is he retired? — the honest answer on the November 2026 record is no, and not yet anything else either. He is 62, out of a nightly job for the first time in 21 years, writing a film script, collecting posthumous honours for a finished show, and, by his own account, enjoying having his evenings back.

Family: Evelyn, Madeleine, Peter and John

Colbert met Evelyn McGee in 1990 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. They married on 9 October 1993, when he was 29, and they have been married for 33 years as of 2026. Evelyn McGee-Colbert, born 23 July 1963 in Charleston, is an actress and theatre producer who appeared in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and has produced stage work with her husband.

The couple have three children, all now adults: daughter Madeleine, born in 1995, when Colbert was 31; son Peter, born in 1998, when he was 34; and son John, born in 2002, when he was 38. Peter is the son named in the Lord of the Rings writing project reported in 2026. The family home has long been reported in Montclair, New Jersey, within commuting distance of the Ed Sullivan Theater — a practical choice for a man who taped a nightly show in Manhattan for 11 years.

Colbert’s listed height is 5 ft 11 in (180 cm) in most biographical profiles, and he has himself claimed 5 ft 11 in, once joking about a listing that measured him at 5 ft 10 in. His wife’s height is listed at 5 ft 7 in (170 cm) in her biographical profile, which puts her roughly four inches shorter than him. Neither figure is a confirmed measurement, and the article gives both as listed figures, not as verified facts.

Stephen Colbert’s Age at Every Milestone

Age questions usually arrive as a single number. The table below gives the number in context, because a bare “62” hides the most interesting part of Colbert’s story: how late his national career started, and how long his peak lasted.

Read that table from the bottom up and the career looks inevitable. Read it from the top down and it looks like a gamble that paid off late: a 33-year-old correspondent, a 41-year-old character act, a 51-year-old network host, a 62-year-old former host writing a Tolkien script. The ages are the story.

Why So Many Pages Get His Age Wrong

Three kinds of error recur on Colbert age pages, and readers meet all three in a single search. The first is simple staleness: a page written in 2024 says 60, a page written before 13 May 2026 says 61, and neither page is ever updated. TVOverMind’s biography page, published on 13 May 2026 itself, still listed 61 — a lag of hours that became a lag of months once the page stopped being edited.

The second is the birthday trap. Colbert’s birthday falls in mid-May, which is also when the television season ends. A page updated for the Late Show finale on 21 May 2026 should say 62, because he had turned 62 eight days earlier. A page updated for the cancellation announcement on 17 July 2025 should say 61. Pages that were written for one event and reused for the other carry the wrong number forward.

The third is copying without counting. Age aggregator sites copy each other, so a single stale figure — 59, from a page that itself was years old — propagates across dozens of lookalike profiles. The fix is the one this article uses throughout: start from the birth date, 13 May 1964, count forward to the date you are reading, and ignore any page that does not show its own working.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Reporting

This article was researched on 1 November 2026 from live reporting: Wikipedia and Britannica (September 2026) for the birth date of 13 May 1964, the 11 September 1974 crash, the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Late Show dates, and the 21 May 2026 finale as the 1,801st episode; EBSCO for the biography outline and the 2025 Emmy win; TVOverMind (13 May 2026), Ask Oracle, TV Insider and Best of Date for the current age of 62 and the stale-61 trap; Screen Rant (September 2024) for the self-reported 5 ft 11 in height; MEAWW, JustBiography and The Legit for the 1993 marriage, the three children and Evelyn’s 23 July 1963 birth date; Parade (May 2026) and Pulptastic (22 May 2026) for the $75 million net-worth estimate and the $6 million to $15 million salary steps; Celebrity Net Worth (2026) for the full contract history including the reported $20 million final rate and the mid-2023 five-year offer; CBS’s 17 July 2025 announcement and the finale coverage in Yardbarker (15 September 2026), Collider (July 2026) and Parade for the farewell run, the 11 and 14 May 2026 guest appearances, and the $40 million annual-loss reporting; People (May 2026, via InBella) for the “saved his life” remarks and the Lord of the Rings project with his son Peter; and CelebEBeat Online (31 July 2026) for the Before Columbus Foundation honour. Where sources disagreed — the final salary rate, the awards total, the listed height — the article names the disagreement instead of picking a number silently. Corrections are welcome via the About page.