| Posted (ET) | Form | Filer | Client or lobbyist | Amount | Filing |
|---|
These are our published criteria and weights, and none of them are fixed. Drag a slider and every score recomputes in your browser. Scores describe scale and reach. They do not judge anyone's conduct or effectiveness.
Firm income and in-house expenses overlap, so estimated spend removes the overlap rather than adding them. A quarter marked partial is still inside its filing window.
| Quarter | Reports | Firms | Payers | Lobbyists | Firm income | In-house expenses | Estimated spend |
|---|
Reported as filed, but left out of the totals and rankings above until checked. This does not mean a filing is false.
| Filer | Client | Reported | Filing |
|---|
These describe the quarter's filings. They are not rankings of merit.
Every lobbyist named in these filings has a page showing their clients, firms and issues. Browse by last name:
Rankings on the live page update hourly as filings post. Each quarter also gets a permanent report, frozen 14 days after its filing deadline. Its numbers do not change later, and filings that arrive afterward are shown beside them.
For each registrant, client and quarter, only the most recently posted report counts, so an amendment replaces the report it corrects and is never added to it.
Outside firms are ranked on reported income. Income is the filer's good-faith estimate. Federal law rounds it to the nearest $10,000, though filers do not always follow that, and a report with no income figure usually means under $5,000 and is counted as zero.
An outside firm reporting $2 million or more from one client in one quarter is far beyond ordinary engagements, so that figure is left out of totals and rankings and listed on this page with a link to the filing. This does not mean the filing is false, only that it needs checking before it can set a ranking.
In-house filers report expenses, which can already include fees paid to outside firms. A payer's estimated spend is therefore the larger of its in-house expenses and its outside fees, not their sum. This is our estimate: filings do not state how the two overlap, so the true figure can be higher.
A client written as “Firm on behalf of Company” is credited to the company. That fee is left out of the company's spend when another firm reports the company directly, since the prime contract should already include it. It still counts as income for the firm that reported it, so firm income totals can exceed payer spend. Where the client is itself a registered lobbying firm and names no end client, the true payer is unknown and no payer is credited.
Filings report one money figure per report, never per issue. Figures shown for an issue are the full amount on every report naming it. They are not a split, and adding them across issues counts the same dollars repeatedly.
Clients are matched across firms by exact name after removing punctuation and company suffixes such as Inc or LLC. Related companies stay separate, and differently spelled names of one company may not merge. Lobbyists are listed by their LDA record, so one person can appear more than once.
Each criterion is a percentile against all active entries in that table, and the score is their weighted average across the criteria a row has. It describes scale and reach. It is not a judgment of conduct, quality or effectiveness, and tiers are simply score bands.
Political action committee totals come from Federal Election Commission bulk files, for the current two-year cycle rather than the quarter. A PAC is joined to a paying organization only when the PAC's stated connected organization exactly matches its name, so some are missed. Individual donors are not matched to lobbyists, because names alone cannot establish who gave. PAC money and lobbying spend are separate and must not be added together.
Filers submit once and both chambers publish. Filings are read from LDA.gov and regularly compared with the House Clerk's separate downloads to catch missing records.
Only activity reportable under the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act appears here. Foreign-agent registrations, unregistered advocacy and state lobbying are outside this data.
Source: Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, retrieved from LDA.gov on 2026-11-06. Senate Office of Public Records cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from LDA.gov. PAC totals are from the Federal Election Commission; under 52 U.S.C. 30111(a)(4), information copied from FEC reports may not be sold or used to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes.