Kotb was born on August 9, 1964 in Norman, Oklahoma. She grew up in West Virginia and Alexandra Virginia. She completed her graduation in 1982 from Fort Hunt High School. She is from an Egyptian bloodline with both her parents from Egypt. She lived in Egypt for a year as well as in Nigeria for a year more.  Her name ‘Hoda’ translates to guidance from Arabic, and is a very common name among Arab women. ‘Kotb’ means pole like that in North and South Pole and it too is a common Egyptian surname. Her father is no more alive, and her mother works at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

She graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism in 1986. She was the keynote speaker at the 2008 graduation. From 2010 for a period of three years, she was elected for the Virginia Tech Alumni Association Board of Directors. She is the author of two books. Her first book Hoda: How I survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee was released in October 2010 and was the New York Times Bestselling book. Her second book Ten Years Later: Six People who Faced Adversity and Transformed their Lives hit the market on January 15 2013. This book revolves around six people who face a life changing event and revisits them a decade later.

Hoda started her journalism career from 1986 in CBS News as a news assistant in Cairo, Egypt. She also started working as the morning anchor and general assignment reporter for WQAD- TV, ABC Moline and anchor for WXVT-TV in the same year. 1989- 1991 saw her as a weekend anchor and reporter for WINK- TV Fort Meyers, Florida. The following year in 1992, she became the anchor and reporter of WWL-TV, CBS New Orleans. From 1998, she is the correspondent for Dateline NBC. Kotb appears alongside Kathie Lee Gifford in Todays Show. She is also the co-anchor of Today for Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira, Ann Curry and Savannah Guthrie.

Hoda was the member of Delta Delta Delta Women’s Sorority, Beta Nu Chapter in her college years at Virginia Tech. In 2005, she married Burzis Kanga, tennis coach of the University of New Orleans in 2005. They divorced two years later. She suffered from breast cancer and in March 2007, she underwent a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery for breast cancer. The Today Show cameras documented her entire cancer struggle. Since then she has become an advocate for breast cancer awareness. She is currently in a relationship with New York financier Joel Schiff since two years.