WASHINGTON -- The numbers are in: The nation's capital has a lot of "sugar daddies," but they aren't very generous.
In what might be the world's least surprising finding, D.C.'s sugar daddies are also more likely to be lobbyists than are sugar daddies elsewhere in the country.
D.C. comes in sixth on a list of U.S. cities with the most sugar daddies per capita, according to Brandon Wade, founder of a website called SeekingArrangement.com. The site matches up (mostly) men of means with (mostly) women seeking such means. (The sugar providers are 99.53 percent male, according to Wade, and 95.6 percent identify as straight.)
Those in the latter group are called "sugar babies," and they aren't prostitutes, Wade told The Wall Street Journal in an interview last year.
Regardless of who the sugar babies are, their local sugar daddies can be tightwads.
"Unfortunately, D.C. sugar daddies aren't the most generous bunch so they don't make the Top 20 list of cities with the most generous sugar daddies," Wade says.
Wade gave HuffPost information about D.C.'s Seeking Arrangement users, plus a preview of statistics he plans on publishing later this week based on five years' worth of -- mostly self-reported -- user data.
Here are some highlights:
The typical sugar daddy is male, and his average income in D.C. is $233,457. His net worth is $4,332,364, and he spends an average of $3,913 per month on sugar babies -- that's about $47,000 per year; not a hugely different amount from what a congressional staffer might make.
Seeking Arrangement estimates there are 2.24 sugar daddies per 1,000 men over the age of 21 in the D.C. area. Where does this 2.24 number come from? Based on Census data, Wade calculates that there are some 1.925 million adult males in the D.C. area, including suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia. About 4,300 of them have registered sugar daddy accounts with Seeking Arrangement.
(We did this math ourselves: If there are 4,300 men in the D.C. area spending $47,000 each being sugar daddies, that means D.C.'s sugar daddy economy is worth approximately $202,100,000 -- a little more than Disney is projecting it'll lose on the sci-fi flop "John Carter.")
More sugar daddies in D.C. are married than those you'd find in other cities. Nearly 48 percent of the sugar daddies in the D.C. metro area are hitched. In Los Angeles, by contrast, only 30.5 percent of the sugar daddies are married. In New York, it's 42.2 percent. Nationwide, 41.2 percent of Seeking Arrangement's sugar daddies are married.
"It would appear there are more 'philandering' D.C. sugar daddies than [in] other major metropolitan cities," says Wade.
Also unique to the nation's capital, Wade writes: "Clearly, there are more lobbyist sugar daddies in the D.C. area than anywhere else in the country."
Lobbyists in fact make up 7 percent of Seeking Arrangement's D.C. sugar daddy population -- as compared with 0 percent in the rest of the country. D.C.'s percentage of lawyers is also unusually high: 9 percent, which is 2 percent higher than the national average, Wade says.
And here's more interesting information from the data that Wade plans to publish later this week:
Los Angeles sugar daddies are the country's most generous, spending, on average, $68,520 per year on their sugar babies. The next most generous cities are New York, Seattle, Miami and ... Louisville, Ky.
Louisville's sugar daddies give their sugar babies $58,320 per year.
There are some surprises in the Seeking Arrangement stats. For example, Salt Lake City sugar daddies are the country's eighth most generous, spending $54,760 per year on sugar babies. The Utah capital comes in 17th on the list of cities with the most sugar daddies per capita (1.5 per 1000 men).
Another city you might not have guessed would be on the list: Cleveland has the country's 14th most generous sugar daddies -- they spend $50,528 per year on average (for those keeping track, that's about $3,500 more per year than in D.C.).
But, unlike in D.C., these generous men are scarce. The Forest City isn't on the list of cities with the most sugar daddies per capita. And you just try finding a lobbyist among them.
We've got more information about how D.C.'s sugar daddies compare to others in the nation below:
