Updated May 2026 · Senate LDA filings
Trade Association, Lobbying Spending
114 organizations · $1.1B total spend
Trade Association is one of the highest-spending industries in the LobbySpend index. Its 114 tracked organizations have collectively reported $1.1B in disclosed federal lobbying — a billion-dollar-plus footprint that puts the sector squarely in the top tier of regulatory engagement on Capitol Hill.
What These Numbers Mean
Average disclosed spend per organization in Trade Association is $9.5M, 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 Trade Association, the disclosed-spend leader is US Chamber of Commerce at $387.8M — more than 361% ahead of the #2 sector filer Business Roundtable ($84.2M). 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 Trade Association 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.
Top Spenders in Trade Association
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.
Trade Association organizations have collectively disclosed $1.1B in federal lobbying across 114 tracked filers, drawn from Senate LDA quarterly disclosure filings.
For this entity, the underlying data on this page comes from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings. The breakdown above is the federal record; the paragraphs below add the per-entity context that makes the headline numbers usable for a real decision rather than just a data lookup.
Every number on this page links back to the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings; the methodology page describes the inputs, refresh cadence, and known limitations of the underlying data product.
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.