The Advance Auto Parts NOligarchy Profile
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Advance Auto Parts scores 72.72 out of 100 on the NOligarchy scale — where a perfect 100 means a company spends nothing on political influence, extracts nothing from its workforce in favor of shareholders, and breaks no rules. A score of 72.72 sits just above the sector midpoint, but the grade breakdown tells a more unsettling story: a perfect political restraint score sits alongside a genuinely alarming pay gap and a compliance record that includes a federal benefit plan failure and a workplace safety citation affecting the people keeping its stores running.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
64.3
Playing by the Rules
17.1
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 100/100. Advance Auto Parts spent nothing on federal lobbying and operated no Political Action Committee (PAC) from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). No external lobbying firms, no revolving-door hires, and no PAC activity appear anywhere on the public record.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 63.82/100. A CEO-to-median-worker pay gap of 358:1, combined with tens of millions of dollars in regular dividends alongside a modest stock buyback program, drags this grade down sharply. The structural inequality in who profits from this company’s performance remains stark.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 16.92/100. Two enforcement actions between 2024 and 2025 produced $1,725,536 in penalties — the second-worst compliance record in its five-company sector. The penalties span a federal benefit plan lawsuit and an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citation.
Advance Auto Parts ranks 3rd out of 5 in the Automotive Parts & Accessories Stores federal industry classification, with a NOligarchy score of 72.72 against a sector average of 72.1. That razor-thin margin above the average is not a badge of honor — it reflects how the sector as a whole clusters near the same middling accountability level, not genuine leadership.
The Bottom Line: Near-Poverty Wages for the Workforce, Millions for Shareholders
Advance Auto Parts generated $8.6 billion in annual revenue yet disclosed a median employee salary of just $25,492 — the midpoint earnings for a workforce stocking shelves, diagnosing car problems, and running the registers. In the same years those employees took home poverty-adjacent paychecks, the company channeled tens of millions of dollars to shareholders through regular dividends and buybacks, and its chief executive collected about $9.1 million in a single year. Advance Auto Parts filed not one federal lobbying disclosure during the two-year tracking period, which makes it an outlier in its sector — but the silence in Washington provides no comfort to workers earning $25,000 a year while the person at the top takes home 358 times that amount.
No Footprint in Washington
Advance Auto Parts chose to spend zero dollars on federal lobbying between Q3 2024 and Q2 2026, filed no PAC with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and deployed no outside lobbying firms. That makes it an outlier in the Automotive Parts & Accessories Stores sector, where competitors have built influence machinery in Washington to shape the rules governing everything from emissions standards to right-to-repair legislation — policies with direct and measurable effects on who is allowed to fix your car and where.
The company’s lobbyist headcount is zero. Its revolving-door count — former government officials hired to convert political relationships into corporate access — is also zero. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database contains no filings under its name for the covered period, and no PAC activity appears in FEC records.
What this restraint means in practice is that Advance Auto Parts does not pay anyone to walk the halls of Congress on its behalf. Whether that reflects principle, strategic calculation, or simply a company focused inward during a turbulent business restructuring is not visible in the public record.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
Advance Auto Parts filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
A Pay Gap That Belongs on a Warning Label
The most revealing number in the entire Advance Auto Parts data set is not a lobbying total or a fine. It is $25,492 — the median annual earnings of an Advance Auto Parts employee, as disclosed in the company’s proxy filing. That is the midpoint salary: half of all workers at this company earn less than that.
Against that backdrop, the CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $9.1 million. The pay ratio is 358:1, per the SEC DEF 14A. Put plainly: the chief executive pocketed, in a single year, what it would take a median store worker 358 years to earn.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
11:00
12:00
1:00
2:00
2:49 PM — a median year, earned
3:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
2:49 PM · January 1
358× the median employee’s pay
At 358:1, Advance Auto Parts's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 2:49 PM on the first workday of the year.
The shareholder payout picture shows a company that spent $6,501,000 buying back its own stock in fiscal year 2024 — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — while simultaneously paying out $59,855,000 in regular dividends that same year, according to SEC 10-K filings. In fiscal year 2026, the company paid another $60,000,000 in dividends.
The worker raise that wasn’t: Advance Auto Parts does not publicly disclose a total employee headcount, which means a precise per-worker calculation from the buyback spend cannot be made — that data gap is the company’s own omission. What can be said plainly: the $6.5 million in buybacks and the nearly $60 million in dividends paid in fiscal year 2024 did not flow to the workers earning $25,492 a year. They flowed to shareholders — the wealthiest 10% of Americans who own 93% of all stock market wealth. The company did not have to choose between investors and its workforce; it simply chose investors.
Executive bonuses: Buybacks reduce the number of shares in circulation, which mechanically lifts earnings per share (EPS). Since most executive incentive plans reward EPS growth, the same executives who approved those buyback programs stood to collect larger performance bonuses as a direct result. The 358:1 pay gap is not just a headline — it is partly the downstream consequence of a compensation architecture that rewards the people making the decisions and leaves everyone else at $25,000 a year.
Two Violations, Two Years, and Workers Who Paid the Price
Advance Auto Parts racked up $1,725,536 in total penalties across two cases over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — a federal benefit plan lawsuit and a workplace safety citation. A company that generated $8.6 billion in revenue paid out roughly $1.7 million in fines — equal to about two-hundredths of one percent of annual sales. At that scale, the penalties function as a rounding error, not a deterrent. (The source linked above covers the company’s full historical enforcement record, not just this two-year window.)
The benefit plan case is the headline. In 2024, a federal private lawsuit resulted in a $1,700,000 penalty for a benefit plan administrator violation — meaning the company failed workers who depended on the proper management of their workplace benefits. Benefits are often the only meaningful financial cushion available to workers earning $25,000 a year: health coverage, retirement savings, and paid leave. When a company at $8.6 billion in revenue mismanages those benefits, the stakes are not abstract.
The OSHA record adds another layer. A 2025 citation of subsidiary Worldpac LLC carried a $25,536 penalty for a workplace safety violation — a reminder that the compliance failures in this two-year window touched both how the company administered worker benefits and how it maintained safe conditions on the job.
No public subsidies from federal, state, or local governments are recorded for Advance Auto Parts, so there is no subsidy-versus-fine contrast to draw. The violations stand on their own as a measure of how the company managed its obligations to workers and the rules it agreed to follow.
This is the median American household.
Two earners, a kid, a dog, $80,610 a year — the exact middle of the country (U.S. Census).
NOTICE OF PENALTY — HOUSEHOLD SCALE
ISSUED TO
the median U.S. household
BASIS
0.02% of annual income
$16.17
the same share of income that $1.7 million in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Advance Auto Parts's $1.7 million in regulatory penalties is 0.02% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $16.17 ticket.