The Dollar Tree NOligarchy Profile
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Dollar Tree’s NOligarchy Score is 53.28 out of 100 — a number that sits just below the sector average but masks sharp extremes underneath. The company scores nearly clean on political influence spending, but that relative restraint is overwhelmed by a CEO pay gap that dwarfs almost anything else in its sector and a workplace safety record that reads like a catalogue of willful neglect.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
94.0
Wealth Extraction
12.2
Playing by the Rules
26.8
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: 93.98/100. Dollar Tree spent zero dollars on federal lobbying and ran no Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). That near-perfect grade reflects an almost total absence of visible federal influence spending.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 12.06/100. A 911-to-1 CEO pay ratio and nearly $2 billion in stock buybacks over recent fiscal years drive this near-failing score. The money flowing to the top of the company stands in brutal contrast to the earnings of the workers stocking its shelves.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 23.82/100. Twenty-four violations and nearly $1.46 million in penalties over the two-year tracking period — the bulk of them for workplace safety failures — produce one of the lowest compliance scores in the sector.
Dollar Tree ranks 14th out of 21 among companies sharing its federal industry classification (Warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers), against a sector average of 54.0. Its score of 53.28 sits just below the sector mean — the pay gap at the top and the safety record at the bottom are what keep it there.
The Bottom Line: A $14.8 Million CEO, $1.46 Million in Fines, and Workers Taking Home $16,214 a Year
Dollar Tree generated $19.4 billion in annual revenue. In that same breath, it chose to hand its chief executive total compensation of nearly $14.8 million while the median Dollar Tree employee took home $16,214 for the year — less than what the CEO pocketed in a single working morning. The company simultaneously channeled nearly $2 billion into buying back its own stock — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — while racking up 24 regulatory violations, most of them for putting workers in unsafe conditions. Dollar Tree’s compliance bill came to $1.46 million; its buyback program in fiscal year 2025 alone was more than 1,000 times larger.
No Footprint in Washington — Except a Quiet Eye on Tariffs
Dollar Tree filed zero dollars in federal lobbying expenditure and contributed nothing through its PAC during the two-year tracking period, according to Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings and Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. For a company doing $19.4 billion in annual sales, that is a strikingly light touch on Capitol Hill.
But “zero lobbying spend” does not mean zero interest in federal policy. Dollar Tree retained one outside lobbying firm and deployed two registered lobbyists, and every single one of their issue-area filings was focused on a single subject: trade. Specifically, tariffs. Quarter after quarter — through Q4 of 2025, Q1 of 2026, and Q2 of 2026 — the LDA filings record the same spare phrase: “Generally monitored tariffs.” No bills were cited, no specific legislation named. The activity reads less like an aggressive lobbying campaign and more like an antenna pointed at Washington, watching for shifts in import costs.
That focus makes commercial sense. Dollar Tree is a discount retailer whose entire business model depends on sourcing enormous volumes of cheap goods — many of them manufactured overseas — and selling them at rock-bottom price points. A tariff increase on imported consumer goods is not an abstraction for Dollar Tree; it is a direct threat to the margin on every item on every shelf in every one of its thousands of stores. The company was watching tariff policy closely even while spending nothing to formally shape it.
Individual executives routed $11,300 in personal political donations through the FEC during the two-year tracking period — with more than $10,000 of that arriving in a single quarter. These remain individual contributions rather than a coordinated company PAC strategy, but the figure is no longer trivial pocket change.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce: A 911-to-1 Pay Gap and $1.95 Billion in Buybacks
The sharpest story inside Dollar Tree’s finances is not what happens in Washington. It is what happens at payroll time.
Dollar Tree’s CEO pay ratio is 911:1, according to the company’s own SEC DEF 14A filing. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $14.8 million. The median Dollar Tree employee — the person running the register, unloading stock, and keeping the store running — earned $16,214 for the entire year. That is roughly $1,350 a month before taxes, in a job that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) records suggest carries real physical risk. For every dollar that worker earned, the CEO pocketed $911.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
11:00
11:17 AM — a median year, earned
12:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
11:17 AM · January 1
911× the median employee’s pay
At 911:1, Dollar Tree's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 11:17 AM on the first workday of the year.
While that pay gap held firm, Dollar Tree’s board was channeling vast sums to shareholders through stock buybacks — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. In fiscal year 2025 alone, the company spent $1.548 billion on buybacks, equivalent to 8% of its annual revenue. In fiscal year 2024, it spent a further $400 million. That is nearly $2 billion across the two most recent fiscal years — money that flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of all stock.
Dollar Tree employs 153,032 workers. The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of those workers a $12,729.36 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $6,364.68 annual raise the company chose not to give.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 153K employees
Spent on buybacks
$1.9B
directed to shareholders
÷ 153K
workers
Per-worker raise
$12,729
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 39% annual raise on the median worker's $16,214 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
Dollar Tree paid no dividends during this period, according to SEC 10-K filings. That means it abandoned traditional investor payouts entirely, concentrating all shareholder returns into buybacks — a more targeted mechanism for boosting per-share price that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits. And as the per-share metrics climbed, so did the CEO’s performance bonuses — the same executive whose $14.8 million payday was approved by the same board that signed off on the buyback program.
Fines Treated as a Business Expense: 24 Violations, Dangerous Stores, and a $560,000 Food Safety Settlement
Dollar Tree’s compliance record over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 is not the story of a company that occasionally slips up. It is a pattern: 24 separate violations totaling $1,460,775 in penalties, spread across four distinct offense categories, across multiple states, and across multiple regulatory agencies. That two-year window is a fraction of the company’s full docket on the source site.
The largest offense group by dollar amount is workplace safety. OSHA cited Dollar Tree in 21 separate cases, collecting $705,775 in safety penalties. These are not paperwork violations. OSHA citations for retailers typically involve blocked emergency exits, unsafe storage conditions, and hazards that put the workers stocking those shelves in physical danger. Dollar Tree’s stores were flagged for these conditions again and again — across multiple states and multiple years.
WORKPLACE SAFETY OR HEALTH VIOLATION
21 SEPARATE CASES
2024–2026 · $705,775 in penalties
21 separate workplace safety or health violation penalties in 2024–2026 — Dollar Tree paid $705,775 for the same category of offense, case after case.
The single largest individual penalty tells a different story about the company’s reach. In 2026, the New York Attorney General’s office settled a food safety case against Dollar Tree for $560,000 — meaning customers, not just workers, were put at risk by conditions inside the company’s locations. In 2024, the Washington State Attorney General’s office fined Dollar Tree $190,000 for consumer protection violations.
Now consider the arithmetic of accountability. Dollar Tree’s total penalty bill over this entire period — $1.46 million — amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent of what the company spent on buybacks in fiscal year 2025 alone. The total buyback spend across both fiscal years was more than 1,300 times the size of the total penalty bill. Fines at that scale do not sting. They are absorbed.
While regulators were issuing those citations, state governments were simultaneously handing Dollar Tree public money. Between 2024 and 2025, the company’s distribution operations collected $624,536 in public subsidies across five grants. The largest single award — $552,000 in 2025 — went to Dollar Tree Distribution Inc. Four additional grants flowed from state governments in 2024. The public was simultaneously subsidizing Dollar Tree’s operations and absorbing the cost of its safety failures.