A.K. Kotb: Biography, Family, Career, and Personal Life
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Hoda Kotb |
| Born | August 9, 1964 |
| Age | 61 (as of 2026) |
| Birthplace | Norman, Oklahoma, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | Egyptian-American |
| Father | Abdel Kader “A.K.” Kotb (deceased) |
| Mother | Sameha “Sami” Kotb |
| Education | B.A. in Broadcast Journalism, Virginia Tech (1986) |
| Occupation | Television journalist, author, co-anchor |
| Known For | Breast cancer survivor and co-anchor of Hoda & Jenna on NBC’s Today |
| Ex-Husband | Burzis Kanga (m. 1005; div. 2008) |
| Former Fiancé | Joel Schiffman (engaged 2019; split 2022) |
| Children | Haley Joy Kotb (adopted 2017); Hope Catherine Kotb (adopted 2019) |
| Estimated Net Worth | Approximately $30 million |
| Departed Today | January 2024 (announced September 2023) |
Introduction: The Woman America Wakes Up With
There is something special about the people who show up in your home every morning. Not just occasionally — but every single weekday, for years, for decades. They become a part of your life’s furnishings. You notice when they are absent. You know their laughter. You have watched them cry.
For millions of Americans, that person was Hoda Kotb.
She sat at the Today show desk for more than seventeen years, first alongside Kathie Lee Gifford in the show’s fourth hour and then as main co-anchor beside Savannah Guthrie. She brought a warmth that was not manufactured for television. She brought a curiosity about people that came across as genuine because it was. And she brought a personal story — breast cancer, addiction, a career nearly derailed, motherhood arriving late and by a completely unexpected route — that made her feel like someone who had actually lived rather than someone who had simply been performing.
Hoda Kotb matters because she turned a journalism career into something more than journalism. She became a presence — a familiar, trusted, sometimes joyful and sometimes heartbreaking presence in the daily lives of people who needed exactly that.
Her story is worth telling from the beginning.
Early Life and Childhood: An Egyptian-American Childhood Across Several Continents
Hoda was born on August 9, 1964, in Norman, Oklahoma — a college town best known as the home of the University of Oklahoma. Her parents were Egyptian immigrants who had come to the United States in pursuit of education and opportunity, and who brought with them the values of the Egyptian culture they had grown up in: deep family connection, respect for learning, and a religious faith that organized how they understood their place in the world.
Her father, Abdel Kader Kotb — known as A.K. — was the central figure of her childhood. He was an economist by training and by profession, a man of education and principle whose influence on Hoda was profound. He died in 1986, when Hoda was in her early twenties and just beginning her professional life. That loss has stayed with her. She speaks of him in interviews with the specific tenderness of someone who lost a parent before they had enough time with them.
Her mother, Sameha — called Sami by the family — was equally formative. She was the practical intelligence of the household, the organizer, the woman who kept things running while her husband brought his scholarly seriousness to the home’s culture.
The family did not stay in Oklahoma. They moved internationally — to Nigeria and to Egypt during Hoda’s childhood — before eventually settling in Northern Virginia. Growing up across different countries and different cultural contexts gave Hoda something that most American children never have: an early understanding that the world was larger than any single community’s frame of reference. It also gave her the particular adaptability of someone who has had to fit into new environments repeatedly from childhood.
She absorbed her Egyptian heritage deeply. She has spoken throughout her career about the influence of the Muslim faith in which she was raised, and about the way her parents’ immigrant experience shaped her understanding of what America was and what it could offer to people who arrived with nothing but their own abilities.
Virginia is where she truly grew up, and where the young woman who would become a television journalist began to take shape.
See also “Robin Hoen: A Closer Look at Her Life, Career, and Journey“
Education: Virginia Tech and the Broadcast Dream
Hoda attended Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, where she studied broadcast journalism. She graduated in 1986 with her bachelor’s degree — the same year her father died, which makes the beginning of her professional life inseparable in the timeline from the grief of that loss.
At Virginia Tech she was energetic, engaged, and already clearly oriented toward communication as her medium. Broadcast journalism in 1986 was a different industry from the one she would eventually navigate — the internet did not exist in any meaningful form, cable news was still finding itself, and local television news was the entry point for nearly every aspiring journalist.
She made the most of the training she received. She left Virginia Tech with the education and the drive to begin the long climb that local television journalism requires.
Career Beginnings: The Local Television Years
After graduation, Hoda began doing what every young broadcast journalist does: she went to local television markets and she worked. She worked in small markets and then she moved up to larger ones, building the experience, the on-air comfort, and the professional reputation that eventually attracts network attention.
She worked at stations in Virginia and Louisiana and Mississippi — markets that gave her the opportunity to cover real stories with real consequences for real communities. She did not avoid difficult assignments. She covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with the kind of human-centered journalism that made viewers feel present in the disaster rather than at a comfortable distance from it. That Katrina coverage, in particular, established her reputation for getting close to stories without losing her composure or her empathy.
She joined NBC News in 1998 as a correspondent for Dateline, the long-running newsmagazine program. Dateline was serious television — investigative pieces, human interest stories with depth, the kind of journalism that took months to prepare and required a reporter who could hold a complex narrative together on camera. Hoda was good at it.
The fourth hour of the Today show was not where she started with the intention of staying forever. It was initially seen as a lighter platform — the fun end of morning television, heavy on wine and conversation. But something happened in that hour that nobody fully predicted: Hoda and Kathie Lee Gifford became genuinely compelling together. The chemistry was real. The hour developed a loyal following.
Becoming Co-Anchor: The Rise to Morning Television’s Biggest Stage
Hoda’s role on Today expanded steadily. When Matt Lauer’s tenure at the network ended abruptly in November 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct, Hoda was elevated to co-anchor of the main hours of the show alongside Savannah Guthrie. It was a significant promotion — the kind that comes under difficult circumstances but that a person either meets or doesn’t.
She met it. Her composure during the transition, her warmth with colleagues and viewers during a disorienting moment for the show, and her fundamental decency as a broadcaster were all on full display. She became co-anchor in a way that felt like recognition of something that had been visible for years.
She held that role until January 2024, when she departed the show. The announcement came in September 2023. She said she was leaving to spend more time with her daughters. The departure was emotional — for her, for her colleagues, and for viewers who had made the Today show part of their daily lives for years.
Major Achievements: Journalism, Books, and a Career That Outlasted Every Setback
Hoda Kotb’s achievement list covers more than television ratings.
She has written multiple books, including her memoir Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee, published in 2010, and I Really Needed This Today, among others. The books reflect the same qualities that made her television career work: honesty, warmth, and the genuine belief that sharing your own difficult experiences can provide something useful to someone else who is going through something similar.
She has been recognized with Emmy Awards for her journalism work, with Peabody recognition for her Katrina coverage, and with the kind of sustained viewer trust that cannot be manufactured or purchased and that accumulates only through years of consistent, genuine work.
She served on multiple boards connected to her causes — breast cancer awareness, adoption advocacy, mental health visibility. Her public platform became a genuine tool for causes she cared about rather than simply a backdrop for career maintenance.
Her adoption of two daughters — discussed in more detail below — became one of the most visible stories about single-parent adoption and late-life motherhood in American media. The openness with which she shared that journey gave permission to many women to consider paths to family that they might otherwise have dismissed as unavailable to them.
Personal Life: Breast Cancer, Love, and Motherhood on Her Own Terms
The most defining personal experience of Hoda’s adult life came in 2007, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was forty-two years old. She underwent a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. She continued working through treatment as much as she was able. She came out the other side — and she talked about it publicly in ways that contributed to breast cancer awareness and early detection conversations in a genuine rather than performative way.
The cancer treatment affected her fertility, and it shifted the timeline and the form that her eventual path to motherhood would take.
She married Burzis Kanga in 2005. In 2008, the marriage terminated in divorce. She then entered a long relationship with Joel Schiffman, a Wall Street financial executive, to whom she became engaged in 2019. Their relationship ended in early 2022. She has spoken with characteristic honesty about both the grief of that breakup and the determination to build a full life regardless.
The children came before the engagement ended. In February 2017, Hoda adopted a baby girl she named Haley Joy. The name was chosen because Halley’s Comet appears once in a generation — for something that rare and wonderful. In April 2019, she adopted a second daughter, Hope Catherine. The name reflected everything she had been holding onto during the difficult years.
Both girls were adopted as infants. Hoda has spoken openly about telling them their adoption stories as they grow, about the particular quality of a love that was chosen rather than arrived at by biological accident, and about the extraordinary life that single motherhood at her age and in her circumstances has turned out to be.
The departure from Today in January 2024 was explicitly connected to the children. She said she wanted to be present — truly present — during years that would not come back.
Challenges: The Accumulation of Hard Things
The biographical chapter on challenges is long for Hoda Kotb, because hard things came frequently and from multiple directions.
Breast cancer at forty-two, with all that it entailed medically and personally and professionally. A divorce. Years of wanting children without a path to them. A second major relationship that ended. The specific challenge of being a Muslim-named, Arab-American woman in American media in the years after September 11, 2001 — a context she has navigated without making it the center of her story while still acknowledging its reality.
She has also spoken about a period of heavy drinking in her younger years — a coping mechanism that she recognized and addressed before it became a defining crisis rather than after.
What she has consistently demonstrated is the ability to absorb difficulty without becoming bitter, and to turn painful personal experience into genuine human connection with the people watching her. That is not a small quality.
Financial Situation: What a Thirty-Year Career Builds
Hoda Kotb’s estimated net worth is approximately $30 million. This reflects more than three decades of sustained high-level broadcasting — local television, Dateline correspondent years, seventeen-plus years on Today including significant time as co-anchor, book publishing income, speaking fees, and the accumulated value of being one of the most recognized television personalities in America.
Her NBC salary during her peak co-anchor years was reported in the range of $8–10 million annually — a figure that attracted attention when it was reported that she was paid significantly less than her predecessor Matt Lauer had been. That gap was widely discussed as an example of gender pay disparity in broadcasting.
She owns a home in New York City, consistent with her career being based there.
The financial picture is one of genuine, long-built wealth from legitimate professional achievement over three decades.
Life Today: Motherhood, Presence, and What Comes Next
At 61, Hoda Kotb is raising two daughters — Haley, nine in 2026, and Hope, seven — and has spoken about being genuinely present in the daily life of her children in a way that her Today schedule made genuinely difficult.
She has not announced a major new professional project as of 2026. She continues to have an enormous social media presence, with millions of Instagram followers who have followed her journey from the Today show into this next chapter.
Whether she returns to television in some capacity, whether she pursues other creative projects, whether she simply continues the family-focused chapter she stepped into when she left NBC — all of that is open.
What is not open is the question of whether her career mattered. It did. Enormously.
Final Words
Hoda Kotb’s story is, at its core, a story about not giving up on the life you imagined even when the path there looks nothing like what you planned.
She imagined being a journalist. She became one, through markets nobody remembers in states that didn’t make her famous. She imagined being a mother. She became one, at fifty-two, through adoption, in circumstances that most parenting plans would not have predicted. She imagined a long, flourishing marriage. She tried twice and it didn’t hold. She has survived all of it — the cancer, the grief, the professional uncertainty, the relationship endings — with a fundamental decency that cannot be faked across decades of daily live television.
What she leaves behind in the public record is not a list of scoops or a collection of sharp-elbowed journalism. It is something more like warmth, modeled daily and at scale, for an audience that needed it.
In morning television, that turns out to matter more than almost anything else.
FAQs
1. How old is Hoda Kotb in 2026?
She was born on August 9, 1964, making her 61 years old in 2026.
2. Why did Hoda Kotb leave the Today show?
She announced her departure in September 2023 and officially left in January 2024. She stated that she was leaving to spend more focused time with her two young daughters, Haley Joy and Hope Catherine, during years she felt were too important to miss.
3. Does Hoda Kotb have children?
Yes. She adopted two daughters: Haley Joy, adopted in February 2017 and now nine years old, and Hope Catherine, adopted in April 2019 and now seven. Both girls were adopted as infants. Hoda has been open about the adoption stories and about raising them as a single parent.
4. What is Hoda Kotb’s net worth?
Approximately $30 million, accumulated across more than three decades of broadcast journalism — local television, NBC News correspondent work, seventeen-plus years on the Today show including time as co-anchor, book publishing, and speaking fees.
5. Did Hoda Kotb have breast cancer?
Yes. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 at age forty-two. She received radiation, chemotherapy, and a lumpectomy. Her experience with cancer, including its effect on her fertility, is one of the most significant chapters of her personal story, and she has spoken about it publicly to encourage breast cancer awareness and early detection.
6. What is Hoda Kotb’s ethnic background?
She is Egyptian-American. Both of her parents were Egyptian immigrants who came to the United States in pursuit of education and opportunity. She was raised in the Muslim faith and has spoken throughout her career about the influence of her Egyptian heritage and her parents’ immigrant values.
7. Who is Hoda Kotb’s father?
Her father is Abdel Kader Kotb, sometimes written as A.K. Kotb. He was an economist by profession. He died in 1986, the same year Hoda graduated from Virginia Tech, when she was in her early twenties. She has spoken of him with profound affection throughout her career.
8. Was Hoda Kotb ever married?
Yes, once. She married Burzis Kanga in 2005; they divorced in 2008. She was subsequently in a long-term relationship with Joel Schiffman, to whom she became engaged in 2019. That relationship ended in early 2022. She has not remarried.
9. Where did Hoda Kotb go to college?
She attended Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, graduating in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.
10. Where was Hoda Kotb born?
She was born in Norman, Oklahoma, the home of the University of Oklahoma. Her family subsequently lived in Nigeria, Egypt, and eventually settled in Northern Virginia, where she grew up.
11. What books has Hoda Kotb written?
Her books include Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee (2010), Ten Years Later (2013), Where We Belong (2015), I Really Needed This Today (2019), and You Are My Happy, a children’s book she wrote for her daughter Haley Joy.
12. Who replaced Hoda Kotb on the Today show?
Following her departure in January 2024, Craig Melvin and Jenna Bush Hager stepped into expanded roles to cover the main anchor hours alongside Savannah Guthrie. The show’s structure adapted to fill the significant absence her departure created.
