Did Jill Biden babysit for Joe Biden before they dated? Here’s the real story

In August 2026, a long-standing rumor recirculated on social media, claiming that former U.S. first lady Jill Biden was a teenager working as a babysitter for former President Joe Biden’s children when they met.

“Working class Joe. The only thing he worked over was the underage babysitter,” one X post (archived) read. 

The post featured an image purportedly showing Jill and Joe Biden alongside text that read:

This is Joe Biden at age 30 with his then 15 year old babysitter (while stil[l] married to his first wife)

The babysitter became his 2nd wife when she turned 18 three years later Her name is JILL BIDEN

In short, the claim that Jill Biden was a teenage babysitter for Joe Biden’s children when they started dating is false. The couple met in 1975, after the death of Joe Biden’s first wife, when Jill was in her 20s.

We previously fact-checked this claim in 2021 and 2025 when similar false rumors spread on social media.

How and when the Bidens first met

Jill Biden was born on June 3, 1951, and Joe Biden on Nov. 20, 1942, making them nearly nine years apart in age. Given this age difference, it would have been impossible for Joe Biden to be in his 30s while Jill Biden was still a teenager.

According to the White House website, Jill Biden met then-Senator Joe Biden in 1975. They married in 1977. In a 2016 Vogue interview, Jill stated that when she met Joe, she was a college senior. This means she was in her 20s at the time, not a teenager.

A Delaware Morning News article from July 17, 1977, detailed the origins of their relationship, stating that Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, set them up on a blind date:

Son told Joe to marry Jill Jul 17, 1977 The Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware) Newspapers.com

In a 2012 CNN interview, when asked whether it was true that Joe Biden “set his eyes” on her after seeing a picture of her, Jill Biden recalled: “I had met him once before, and but we were in a crowd and it was at a fundraiser. So then I guess he saw my picture somewhere and he said ‘oh, that’s the kind of girl I’d like to date.’ And I knew his brother, so his brother said ‘oh, I know her.’ Cause I was in college at the time and his brother was there. So Frank called me and, or got my number, and Joe called me. He said ‘this is Joe Biden’ and ‘would you like to go out?'”

A 2020 campaign video titled “Get to Know Jill Biden” further corroborates this timeline. In it, Joe Biden recounts:

Joe Biden: My brother said, “There’s this woman. You’ll really like her, Joe.” So I gave her a call. And she had a date that night. 

Jill Biden: You said “Do you think you could break your date?”  

Joe Biden: Oh, that’s right. What did you do?

Jill Biden: “Well, I called and told the guy that I had a friend in from out of town and went out with Joe.

Joe Biden: I was 30. I was a senator. And I was a widower. Several years earlier, a tractor-trailer broadsided my wife and three children. My wife and daughter were killed. I wasn’t big on the whole dating scene. But when I met Jill, I fell in love with her when I saw her.

Photographs that spread with the claim

Posts spreading the rumor have used authentic photographs of Jill and Joe Biden, but paired them with false descriptions of Jill Biden’s age and how the couple met.

Jill Biden originally posted one of the photographs used to spread the rumor on her Instagram and X accounts in August 2020, stating it was taken after she met Joe Biden in 1975, when she was in her 20s.

“Those were the first words I spoke to Joe when he called me out of the blue on a Saturday in 1975,” Jill wrote. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer also published the photo with a caption credited to the Biden campaign, dating it to 1976. At the time, Jill would have been about 24, and Joe about 33. Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, had died in a car crash three years earlier.

When the claim recirculated in 2026, some posts used another old photograph of the couple alongside the false claim that Jill Biden was Joe Biden’s teenage babysitter. That photograph was also authentic and seemed to have been taken in the same setting. 

Joe Biden’s granddaughter Naomi Biden shared the image on X in November 2020, captioning it: “They’ve come a long, long, way together.”

However, at least one version of the rumor circulating in August 2026 used what appeared to be a digitally distorted version of the same photograph.

Other rumors about Jill Biden that we have fact-checked in the past include the claim that she is not a medical doctor and is therefore wrongly using the title “Dr.” and a rumor that she did not agree to marry Joe Biden until his fifth proposal.

Sources