William Bingham was born on April 8, 1752, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to William Bingham and Mary "Molly" Stamper. In 1768, he graduate from the College of Philadelphia and trained as a merchant under Thomas Wharton. From 1770-1776, Bingham served as the British consul in St. Pierre, Martinique. Soon after his consulship ended, he agreed to remain in the West Indies and serve as an agent of the Continental Congress by overseeing commercial privateering and espionage in support of the American Revolution. In 1780, Bingham returned to Philadelphia and married the daugher of his business partner, Anne Willing. He owned a fleet of ships and large tracts of land in Maine, New York and Pennsylvania, and over time, he became the wealthiest man in the United States. Bingham was one of the founders of the Bank of Pennsylvania, chartered on December 31, 1781 as the Bank of North America, the first bank in the United States.

Bingham's political career included positions as a Continental Congress member (1786-1788), Pennsylvania state representative (1790-1791) and senator (1794-1795), and a United States senator (1795-1801). George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and the Earl of Shelburne William Petty were counted among his friends both politically and socially. They, along with business acquaintances, foreign visitors, relatives and friends, were frequent guests at the Bingham mansion in Philadelphia, where Bingham and his much-admired wife were among the social elites of the nation's first capital. Bingham's daughter, Anne Louisa Bingham, married Alexander Barring, later first Baron Ashburton, 1774-1848, who joined Daniel Webster in resolving the boundary line of northeast Maine between the United States and Canada. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 also provided for the suppression of slave trade off the African coast.

In 1801, Bingham retired from public life and moved to Bath, England, where he died on February 7, 1804, at the age of 51. Bingham's life and career are described in The Golden Voyage (1969) by Robert C. Alberts. His land interests are detailed in William Bingham's Maine Lands (1954) by Frederick S. Allis.