The Big Lots Inc. NOligarchy Profile
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Big Lots Inc. earns a NOligarchy Score of 87.1 out of 100 — a strong mark driven largely by what this company did not do from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). It spent nothing on lobbying, ran no Political Action Committee (PAC), and racked up no recorded regulatory fines. Where the score takes a real hit is in what the company’s own SEC filings reveal about how much its chief executive earns compared to the workers stocking the shelves.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
52.1
Playing by the Rules
100.0
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. Big Lots Inc. recorded zero federal lobbying expenditure, zero PAC contributions, and zero disclosed executive donations to federal candidates during this period. No footprint in Washington whatsoever.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 51.65/100. This is where the score drops. Big Lots Inc.'s own SEC filing discloses a CEO pay gap that is one of the starkest in the sector — 853 times the median worker’s annual earnings, averaged across three years.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. No regulatory fines, no recorded legal violations, and no public subsidy deals appear in the public record for this period.
The Sector Context: Big Lots Inc. ranks 1st out of 21 companies in the Warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers sector — well above the sector’s average NOligarchy Score of 54.0. That makes Big Lots an accountability outlier among its peers, outperforming the sector baseline on this index.
853 Times the Median: The Pay Gap Hidden in Plain Sight
Big Lots Inc. generated $4.7 billion in annual revenue — enough to rank it as a meaningful national retailer — yet the most striking number in its public filings is not a revenue figure. It is the distance between what the person at the top earns and what the people doing the day-to-day work take home. The company’s own SEC filings show a CEO pay ratio of 853-to-1. There are no recorded lobbying expenditures, no PAC contributions, no regulatory fines, and no buyback or dividend payouts on record — but that single compensation gap is enough to pull the overall score below a perfect mark despite an otherwise clean political and legal record.
No Footprint in Washington
Big Lots Inc. spent $0 on federal lobbying, filed no PAC contributions, and disclosed no executive donations to federal candidates during Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, according to Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings and Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.
No outside lobbying firms were engaged, no external lobbyists were retained, and no inside-access channels were opened across the two-year period. For a national discount retailer operating in a policy environment shaped by trade tariffs, consumer protection regulation, and labor law, that complete silence is notable. The public record shows no effort to tilt federal rulemaking in the company’s favor during this period.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
Big Lots Inc. filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
A CEO Package Worth 853 Times the Median Worker’s Annual Pay
Big Lots Inc.'s own SEC filings tell the sharpest story in this profile. Per the company’s SEC DEF 14A, the CEO pay ratio is 853:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $8.4 million. The median Big Lots employee earned $9,846 in the same period — roughly the cost of a used car, before taxes, to cover an entire year of work. That worker would need to clock in every day for 853 years to match what the chief executive averaged across three.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
11:00
11:26 AM — a median year, earned
12:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
11:26 AM · January 1
853× the median employee’s pay
At 853:1, Big Lots Inc.'s CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 11:26 AM on the first workday of the year.
No stock buyback data and no dividend data are recorded for Big Lots Inc. during this period — meaning the standard contrast between what the company chose to hand back to shareholders versus what it made available to workers cannot be drawn from the available public record.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
Over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, Big Lots Inc. accumulated zero recorded regulatory fines and zero public violations. No enforcement actions, no penalty settlements, and no government sanctions appear in the public record. No public subsidy deals are on file either, so there is no public-money-versus-fines contrast to draw here.
For a national discount retailer with significant consumer-facing and labor-intensive operations, a spotless compliance record across two full years is genuinely uncommon. That said, a two-year window is a fraction of any company’s full regulatory history, and the Good Jobs First source covers the broader public docket.