The Etsy NOligarchy Profile
C
O
N
C
E
R
N
I
N
G
Etsy scores 49.12 out of 100 on the NOligarchy index — a number that sits just below the midpoint and reflects a company making deliberate choices about where its money flows. From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), the data captures a platform that markets itself as the champion of independent makers and small sellers while quietly channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into a mechanism that enriches its largest shareholders and top executives. Its clean regulatory record and modest lobbying footprint are real — but they don’t offset what’s happening on the payout side.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
42.8
Wealth Extraction
27.8
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.
•
Political Access Grade: 41.62/100. Etsy spent $2.53 million knocking on doors in Washington and hired a lobbying shop staffed with former Hill insiders. No corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) spending was recorded — the company confirmed zero PAC contributions — but the lobbying investment alone is enough to earn a low grade here.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 29.7/100. This is where Etsy’s score takes its heaviest hit. The company poured more than $1.5 billion into stock buybacks across the two most recent fiscal years, while paying its chief executive roughly 90 times what its median worker takes home, and disclosing no employee headcount that would allow a precise per-worker analysis.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. A perfect score. No recorded regulatory fines, no penalties, no public subsidies. The public docket is clean.
Etsy ranks 12th out of 17 companies in the Warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers sector. The sector average score is 51.1 — meaning Etsy trails the industry average by roughly 2 points, a gap that has narrowed from roughly 4.5 points in the prior period as Etsy’s score improved. Five sector peers score substantially worse: Walmart, Amazon, Target, eBay, and Dollar General all sit well below Etsy on the accountability index.
The Bottom Line: A Brand Built on Small Sellers, a Balance Sheet Built for Shareholders
Etsy generated $2.88 billion in annual revenue while simultaneously spending $776.9 million on stock buybacks in fiscal year 2025 alone — nearly 27 cents of every dollar in revenue redirected away from operations and into a deliberate mechanism to inflate per-share metrics. That single-year buyback figure dwarfs the company’s entire lobbying spend many times over and would have transformed the lives of every person on Etsy’s payroll — if Etsy disclosed how many workers it actually employs. The company has built its brand on the back of independent sellers, craftspeople, and artists who depend on the platform’s reach, yet its financial decisions consistently prioritize the wealthiest shareholders over everyone else in the ecosystem. Its clean regulatory record shows Etsy can follow the rules when it chooses to. The question the data raises is which rules it has written for itself.
$2.5 million in political spending
Two-story house · 12 ft
0.8×
Stacked as $100 bills, Etsy's $2.5 million in political spending rises 9 feet — 0.8× the height of a two-story house.
Spending to Buy a Seat at the Table — With Hill Insiders in the Room
Over the two-year tracking period, Etsy channeled $2.53 million into federal lobbying — $620,000 in 2024, $1.23 million in 2025, and $680,000 across the first two quarters of 2026 alone, a quarterly pace that represents the highest rate of the entire period. That investment bought access to both chambers of Congress (88 lobbying contacts each for the House of Representatives and the Senate), the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), the White House Office, the Treasury Department, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), among others.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
88
≈ every 6th business day
SENATE
88
≈ every 6th business day
Commerce, Dept of (DOC)
28
≈ every 18th business day
U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)
22
≈ every 23rd business day
White House Office
13
≈ every 38th business day
10 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Etsy was named in lobbying filings reaching 10 federal bodies — from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to SENATE.
The issue areas tell a precise story about the business pressures Etsy faces. Trade and Taxation were the most active lobbying territories, tied at 16 filings each. On trade, filings described efforts around de minimis customs exemptions — the threshold below which imported goods enter the country duty-free — as well as digital service taxes and intermediary liability protections that govern whether a platform like Etsy can be held responsible for what its third-party sellers do. Any tightening of de minimis rules would directly raise costs for the overseas sellers and buyers who use the platform; any expansion of platform liability could expose Etsy to lawsuits it currently sidesteps.
On taxation, filings cited the Form 1099-K reporting requirements that compel payment platforms to report seller earnings to the IRS at much lower thresholds than before — a change that creates friction for the gig-economy sellers who are Etsy’s core constituency. Lobbyists referenced the SNOOP Act of 2023 (cited twice across filings in both a House and Senate version), the Saving Gig Economy Taxpayers Act (two mentions), and a measure called the Red Tape Reduction Act, all relating to these reporting thresholds and tax simplification for self-employed workers. Both versions of the SNOOP Act remain in progress.
In the computer industry and copyright spaces, filings repeatedly referenced Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content, as well as Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Lobbyists also referenced the SHOP SAFE Act of 2023 — a bill in the Commerce policy area still in progress in the Senate Judiciary Committee, cited twice — which addresses third-party marketplace liability for counterfeit goods. Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2025, Etsy’s lobbyists cited the App Store Accountability Act across multiple issue areas: both the House bill (H.R. 3149, forwarded by subcommittee in December 2025) and the Senate companion (S. 1586, referred to the Commerce Committee in May 2025). On child safety, filings referenced the EARN IT Act of 2023 and the STOP CSAM Act of 2023 — both sitting on the Senate legislative calendar — which address online child sexual abuse material and platform responsibility.
The postal issue area reflects a concrete operational dependency: Etsy sellers rely on the United States Postal Service (USPS) as their primary shipping option, making USPS funding and fleet electrification decisions a direct cost variable for the company’s marketplace economics.
Several of Etsy’s registered lobbyists are revolving-door hires — former government insiders who carry their contacts and institutional knowledge directly into corporate advocacy. Robert Lehman served as Chief of Staff to Senator Rob Portman, Chief of Staff at the Office of Management and Budget, Chief of Staff at the USTR, and spent a decade as Chief of Staff to House members Portman and Larry Combest. Jeffrey Zubricki served as professional staff on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation — the same committee that handles platform liability and trade legislation. Brian Skretny served as Legislative Director for Representative Eliot Engel and as Senior Professional Staff on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Elizabeth Hunger staffed U.S. Senator Joseph Biden and Senator Edward Kaufman. Between them, Etsy’s lobbying team carries direct institutional relationships with the precise committees and agencies overseeing every major issue area on the company’s dossier.
No PAC spending was recorded. Federal Election Commission (FEC) data shows $1,000 in personal political donations by Etsy executives and employees across the entire tracking period — a single contribution recorded in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce — One Buyback at a Time
Etsy’s CEO pay ratio is 90:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, per the SEC DEF 14A — meaning that for every dollar the median Etsy employee earned, the person at the top collected ninety. The median employee salary was $218,815 — a figure that, in isolation, sounds comfortable. But the CEO’s three-year average package was about $19.6 million, and that gap is not compensation for complexity. It is a structural decision to concentrate gains at the top.
Then there are the buybacks — and this is where the numbers become genuinely difficult to square with the company’s public identity as a platform for independent, working-class creators.
According to SEC 10-K filings, Etsy spent $776.9 million in fiscal year 2025 — equal to 26.9% of that year’s total revenue — and $723.9 million in fiscal year 2024, equal to 25.8% of revenue. That is more than $1.5 billion across those two fiscal years, funneled into a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses, with the pace growing year over year.
In 2025 alone, Etsy chose to spend $776.9 million buying back its own stock: more than a quarter of its entire annual revenue, redirected not into the marketplace, not into seller tools, and not into worker paychecks — but into a mechanism whose primary beneficiaries are the wealthiest shareholders and the executives whose bonus formulas are tied to per-share performance.
Etsy does not publicly disclose its total employee headcount, which means a precise per-worker raise calculation cannot be computed. What can be said plainly: the $776.9 million handed to shareholders in 2025 alone represents a sum that, divided across any realistic workforce figure, would constitute a transformative raise for every person on payroll. For context, the $2.53 million Etsy spent on lobbying over the entire two-year tracking period amounts to less than one-third of one percent of what it spent enriching its largest shareholders in a single fiscal year. The company’s stated investment in shaping public policy for small sellers is, in financial terms, a rounding error against the buyback total.
Etsy paid no dividends in any recorded period. That is not a sign of restraint — it is a deliberate concentration of all shareholder returns into the buyback mechanism, which is more targeted in its benefits. Traditional dividends pay out proportionally to every shareholder, including small retail investors. Buybacks, by inflating per-share price, disproportionately reward insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits to capture the premium. Etsy chose the mechanism that concentrates gains most efficiently at the top.
Buybacks also reduce the number of shares outstanding, which arithmetically boosts Earnings Per Share (EPS) — the very metric most executive bonus and long-term incentive plans use as a performance trigger. The same executives who approved the $776.9 million in 2025 buybacks are the ones whose compensation packages benefit directly when EPS rises as a result.
Etsy’s tax position requires careful reading. The company’s 10-K discloses an effective tax rate of 33.9% for the year ended December 31, 2025 — 12.9 percentage points above the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set. On the surface, Etsy appears to be paying more than the law requires, not less. But the story behind that elevated rate is not a display of corporate tax citizenship.
The 10-K reconciliation shows the rate was driven sharply upward by specific items: valuation allowances added 15.2 percentage points ($37.571 million), a non-deductible goodwill impairment charge added another 8.7 percentage points ($21.358 million), and tax deficiencies from stock-based compensation contributed 4.9 percentage points ($12.078 million). Meanwhile, the filing explicitly identifies Ireland and the United Kingdom as foreign jurisdictions generating favorable rate differentials: Ireland delivered a −6.1 percentage point reduction (−$15.155 million), and the U.K. contributed an additional −1.3 percentage point reduction (−$3.278 million). The company also claimed research and development tax credits reducing the rate by 7.0 percentage points.
Etsy’s headline rate of 33.9% is elevated not because the company paid generously, but because specific non-cash charges and valuation allowances pushed it upward — while the company simultaneously extracted favorable treatment from Ireland and the U.K., jurisdictions where its subsidiaries operate under more accommodating tax regimes. The company’s 10-K also discloses Pillar Two top-up taxes of $4.712 million (1.9 percentage points) attributable to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) global minimum tax framework — a cost the company now absorbs as more jurisdictions enforce the global floor. On top of all this, Etsy holds Unrecognized Tax Benefits equal to 21.0% of its pre-tax income — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the IRS has not yet agreed are valid. One dollar in every five of pre-tax income sits in a disputed gray zone with tax authorities.
Statutory federal rate
21%
This company
33.9%
Etsy's effective federal tax rate was 33.9% against the 21% statutory rate — -12.9 percentage points drained away.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
There is nothing to prosecute here in the conventional sense. Etsy’s regulatory record shows zero fines, zero penalties, and zero public subsidies over the tracked period. On this pillar, the company scores a perfect 100/100 — the only dimension where its performance is unambiguous.
No Good Jobs First violations are recorded. No government grants or tax incentives appear in the subsidy database. For a company operating at $2.88 billion in annual revenue, the absence of any regulatory enforcement action is notable — and, on this metric alone, genuinely commendable.