Our Methodology

LobbySpend makes federal lobbying disclosures searchable. We report what organizations disclosed in the legally required quarterly filings they submit under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 — factually, without editorialization, and without inference of motive. Lobbying is a legal, constitutionally protected activity; our job is to make the public record easier to read, not to grade intent.

This page documents every step between the raw filing and what you see on a company, industry, or issue page: where the data comes from, how registrants are matched across filings, how the Influence Score is computed, how often the index is refreshed, and what the Senate LDA disclosures do and do not cover. If a number on the site looks off, this page is where to start.

Data Sources

• Senate Office of Public Records LDA API. Our primary source, accessed at lda.senate.gov/api/. Under the LDA, organizations that lobby Congress or covered executive branch officials must register and file quarterly reports disclosing spending, the issues they lobbied on, the bills referenced, and the lobbyists who carried out the contacts. The full filing history back to 1999 is available through the API; LobbySpend currently indexes the most recent five-year window.
• FEC Bulk Data. Campaign contribution data from the Federal Election Commission, used selectively to provide context on individual lobbyists who also serve as PAC treasurers or major donors. FEC filings are independent of LDA filings and are not blended into the Influence Score.
• Cross-reference: OpenSecrets. The independent campaign finance research project at OpenSecrets uses the same Senate LDA filings as one input. We periodically spot-check our aggregations against the OpenSecrets organization profiles to confirm name-matching and dollar totals are within rounding of the standard convention.

How We Calculate the Influence Score

Every organization in the index receives an Influence Score on a 0-100 scale, mapped to a letter grade A through F. The score is a weighted composite of three signals, each independently normalized against the distribution of all tracked filers before being combined. The intent is to summarize the breadth and depth of an organization's disclosed lobbying presence — not to rank effectiveness, ethics, or policy outcomes.

• Total Lobbying Spend, 40% weight. Cumulative reported lobbying expenditures across the years tracked, normalized against the overall distribution. Because spend is heavily right-skewed — a handful of megaspenders dwarf the median — we use a percentile-based normalization rather than raw dollars, so a $200M filer does not blow out the scale and flatten everyone else to zero.
• Issue Breadth, 30% weight. The count of distinct general issue areas the organization's filings touch, drawn from the fixed Senate LDA list of roughly 80 codes (Taxation, Health Issues, Defense, Environment, and so on). Filers who report activity across 10+ issues score higher than narrow single-issue advocates, on the theory that breadth signals a more sustained and diversified federal program.
• Revolving Door Connections, 30% weight. The share of named lobbyists who disclose a covered prior federal position on the LDA cover sheet — former Members of Congress, senior committee or leadership staff, and executive branch officials. This signal captures one of the most consistent findings in the academic literature on lobbying: organizations with experienced government-affairs benches operate at a different scale than those without.

Letter grades map to score bands: A (80-100) for organizations clearly in the top tier on multiple signals, B (65-79) for well-above-average filers, C (45-64) for the broad middle of established but moderate programs, D (30-44) for low-activity filers, and F (0-29) for minimum-threshold filers and recently registered entities. Read the LobbySpend about page for the editorial framing behind these design choices.

Data Collection & Cleaning

Building the index from raw filings is the bulk of the engineering. The Senate LDA API returns one record per quarterly filing per registrant-client pair. We pull the full window, deduplicate amendments (registrants frequently file an updated version of a prior quarter, which would otherwise double-count), and normalize organization names across filings — handling subsidiaries, name changes, mergers, and the inevitable spelling variants in self-reported data. For each filing we use max(income, expenses) as the canonical "amount," which is the standard convention used by both the Senate's own dashboards and downstream researchers.

Lobbyist-level data is rolled up from the individual lobbyist entries on each filing's cover sheet. The covered-position field is captured verbatim where present; we do not attempt to infer prior government service from external biographical sources, which would introduce noise and inconsistent coverage. Issue-level dollar splits, when reported, are filer-allocated and should be read as a directional signal of where attention is concentrated rather than as audited line items.

Update Frequency

LDA filings are due 20 days after the close of each calendar quarter (April 20, July 20, October 20, and January 20). We refresh the LobbySpend index within roughly two weeks of each deadline, which gives the Senate Office of Public Records time to process amendments and late submissions. Year-end totals are typically stable by late January or early February. Each entity page displays the date its underlying filings were last refreshed in the "Updated" eyebrow.

Known Limitations

• The LDA only requires disclosure of direct lobbying — meetings, calls, and written contacts with covered federal officials. Grassroots lobbying, public affairs campaigns, paid issue advertising, op-ed placement, and strategic consulting that does not involve a direct contact are not reportable. The true cost of an influence campaign is therefore typically higher than the LDA total.
• Spending amounts are self-reported and frequently rounded to the nearest $10,000 or $20,000. Aggregated totals across many filings smooth this out, but individual quarterly numbers should be read with rounding in mind.
• The revolving-door indicator relies on self-disclosed covered positions on the LDA cover sheet. Some former-government ties — particularly state-level service or roles outside the LDA's "covered position" definition — will not appear in the count.
• The Influence Score measures activity, not effectiveness. A high score means an organization disclosed extensive lobbying; it says nothing about whether the lobbying achieved its policy goals, and it does not imply any judgment about the legitimacy of the underlying advocacy.
• Foreign government lobbying is filed separately under FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) and is not currently included in the LobbySpend index.

How to Cite This Data

If you use data from LobbySpend in research, journalism, or analysis, please cite the page directly and include an access date:

LobbySpend. "[Organization Name] Lobbying Data." lobbyspend.org, 2026. Accessed [date].

The underlying Senate LDA filings are public domain. We cite the original filings on each entity page so readers and researchers can verify any figure against the primary source.