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Federal Lobbying Data · Senate LDA Filings · Updated Quarterly
LobbySpend

Updated May 2026 · Senate LDA filings

Retail & Consumer Products, Lobbying Spending

40 organizations · $200.7M total spend

Retail & Consumer Products carries a mid-tier disclosed federal lobbying footprint, with 40 tracked organizations reporting $200.7M in cumulative spend across the years tracked. This range is typical of sectors with selective federal engagement — major bills and rulemakings draw spending spikes, but quarter-to-quarter activity is steadier than in the heaviest industries.

$200.7M
Total Industry Spend
40
Organizations
$5.0M
Avg Spend per Org

What These Numbers Mean

Average disclosed spend per organization in Retail & Consumer Products is $5.0M, indicating a mix of large filers and steady mid-tier programs. Per-firm averages in this range are typical of mature industries with multiple long-running corporate government-affairs operations.

Within Retail & Consumer Products, the disclosed-spend leader is Walmart Inc at $23.2M — more than 58% ahead of the #2 sector filer Coca-Cola Company ($14.7M). A gap that wide usually indicates one anchor filer with a multi-decade in-house government-affairs operation.

Every figure on this page is drawn from filings submitted to the Senate Office of Public Records under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Filings are quarterly and public domain. The campaign-finance research project at OpenSecrets uses the same Senate LDA filings as one input and frequently provides additional reporting on individual sector filers.

Top Policy Issues

Top-issue coverage for Retail & Consumer Products is unusually broad — at least 10 distinct issue areas appear in the sector's aggregated filings, signalling that filers in this industry engage Congress on a wide regulatory front rather than a single defining policy.

Government Issues
$200.7M
Taxation
$196.4M
Trade
$164.0M
Food Industry
$90.0M
Labor/Workplace
$84.3M
Consumer Issues/Safety
$77.6M
Environment/Superfund
$53.9M
Beverage Industry
$51.9M

Top Spenders in Retail & Consumer Products

How to Read This Page

Industry pages aggregate all LobbySpend-tracked filers whose primary business sits in the same sector. The total-spend number is the sum of disclosed dollars across every quarterly LDA filing for those filers in the years tracked, deduplicated against amendments. The per-organization average is the simple mean and is sensitive to the presence of one or two megaspenders — for sectors with extreme top-heaviness, the median is typically a more useful summary, which the underlying data supports if you click through to the individual filer pages.

The top-issues breakdown reflects filer-allocated dollars on each filing — registrants are required to report which general issue areas they lobbied on and, where applicable, how spend was allocated. Issue dollars should be read as a directional signal of where attention is concentrated rather than as audited line items. For the full Influence Score formula and known limitations of LDA disclosures, see the methodology page.

Retail & Consumer Products organizations have collectively disclosed $200.7M in federal lobbying across 40 tracked filers, drawn from Senate LDA quarterly disclosure filings.

The this entity record above pulls directly from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings. What follows is the per-entity context — how this entity sits in the broader U.S. federal lobbying disclosure distribution and which underlying factors drive the headline numbers.

The methodology behind every numeric value on this page is publicly documented on the the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings portal and described in detail on this site’s methodology page. Refresh cadence varies by underlying series; the page surfaces the as-of date for each number so readers can trace any figure back to the source release.

For readers using this page as a decision input, the related-entity pages elsewhere on the site provide the comparison set. The most useful comparison for this entity is typically a peer within U.S. lobbying activity with similar size, similar exposure, or similar geography — not the national-level summary alone.