The NAPA Auto Parts NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score: 83.46 out of 100. NAPA Auto Parts — the retail face of Genuine Parts Company — earns a strong score driven by a near-total absence of political spending and a modest regulatory record. The main drag comes from the wealth extraction pillar: a CEO who earned 331 times what the median employee took home, combined with more than $1.1 billion in shareholder dividends paid across two fiscal years.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
95.6
Wealth Extraction
55.5
Playing by the Rules
86.0
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: 95.61/100. NAPA filed zero lobbying disclosures, retained no outside firms, and made no Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. The only political money tied to the company’s name was $3,500 in personal executive donations — a rounding error by Washington standards. This is one of the cleanest political profiles in the dataset.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 54.98/100. A 331-to-1 pay gap between the CEO and the median worker, and over $1.1 billion funneled to shareholders in dividends over two fiscal years, drag this grade below the midpoint. The people keeping the parts counters stocked saw none of it proportionately.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 85.96/100. Four safety and environmental violations between 2024 and 2025, totaling just under $38,100 in penalties, represent a relatively contained regulatory record — though three separate Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citations across distinct locations suggest that workplace safety enforcement is applied inconsistently across the network.
NAPA ranks 2nd out of 5 companies in the Automotive Parts & Accessories Stores sector, with a score of 83.46 against a sector average of 72.1. That gap puts NAPA meaningfully ahead of the sector baseline — a genuine accountability advantage over most of its industry peers.
The Bottom Line: A $563 Million Dividend Check While Workers Earn $38,901
NAPA Auto Parts generated $24.3 billion in annual revenue — enough to make it a genuine heavyweight in American retail. Yet in fiscal year 2025, the company handed $563 million directly to shareholders through dividends alone, while the median NAPA employee took home $38,901 for the year. That single year’s dividend payment was more than 14,000 times what the company paid in regulatory fines across the same two-year span. The sharpest imbalance here is not political corruption or brazen regulatory fraud; it is the quiet, routine decision to prioritize capital owners over the people doing the actual work.
No Footprint in Washington
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the eight-quarter, two-year tracking period — NAPA Auto Parts filed no federal lobbying disclosures, retained no outside lobbying firms, and made no PAC contributions. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database shows a blank ledger.
The only political fingerprint is $3,500 in executive-level personal donations logged by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in the first quarter of 2026 — a figure so small it registers as personal civic participation, not corporate strategy.
For a $24 billion company with obvious stakes in automotive repair regulation, emissions standards, supply-chain trade policy, and warehouse worker safety rules, the absence of any Washington presence is notable. Whether that silence reflects genuine restraint or simply means the company benefits sufficiently from the existing regulatory landscape without needing to reshape it is not visible in the public record.
Prioritizing Shareholders While Workers Earn Poverty-Adjacent Wages
NAPA’s CEO pay ratio is 331:1, per the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $12.9 million. The median NAPA employee — the parts specialist, the warehouse picker, the delivery driver — earned $38,901 that same year. Put plainly: the CEO pocketed roughly what 331 median workers earned combined, all in twelve months.
NAPA’s real wealth story is in its dividend stream. Over the two tracked fiscal years, the company channeled a combined $1.118 billion directly to shareholders through regular dividends — $554.9 million in fiscal 2024 and $563.8 million in fiscal 2025 — per the SEC 10-K. Every dollar of that went to the people who own NAPA’s stock — a group that skews overwhelmingly toward the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who collectively hold 93% of the stock market.
On top of dividends, the company executed a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — spending $150 million in fiscal 2024 before pausing that practice entirely in fiscal 2025, per the SEC 10-K.
Unlike companies that abandon traditional dividends entirely in favor of buybacks, NAPA ran both tracks simultaneously. The dividend stream is consistent, growing, and enormous: $563.8 million in fiscal 2025 alone. The company didn’t face a binary choice between investors and workers; it had more than half a billion dollars flowing to shareholders via dividends while also executing buybacks in the prior year. That is a structural decision repeated every single fiscal year, not a one-time emergency.
With a 331:1 pay ratio, the executives approving each year’s buyback program are the same people whose performance bonuses are tied to per-share metrics. When buybacks shrink the supply of outstanding shares, earnings per share rises automatically — even if the underlying business generates exactly the same profit. That mechanical rise can trigger bonus thresholds that reward top leadership. The approximately $12.9 million CEO compensation package exists, at least in part, downstream of that loop.
Fines That Barely Register Against a $24 Billion Operation
NAPA’s regulatory record over Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 shows four violations logged between 2024 and 2025, totaling $38,078 in penalties, according to Good Jobs First.
Three of the four cases are workplace safety or health infractions — all cited by OSHA, totaling $30,578. One environmental case, cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), accounts for the remaining $7,500. Both categories involve how the company treats the physical spaces where its employees and surrounding communities live and work.
Three OSHA citations across the two-year tracking period, spanning distinct locations and entities within the Genuine Parts Company family, suggest that safety standards are applied inconsistently across the network rather than driven by a unified central policy.
The single largest fine was an $11,000 OSHA workplace-safety penalty in 2024. At a company generating $24.3 billion in annual revenue, an eleven-thousand-dollar fine barely registers as a cost of doing business.
$247,240
taxpayer subsidies
$38,078
regulatory fines
6.5:1
NAPA Auto Parts collected $247,240 in taxpayer subsidies against $38,078 in regulatory fines — 6.5 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.
While regulators were citing NAPA and its subsidiaries for safety and environmental breaches, governments were simultaneously handing the company public money. In 2024, NAPA received $247,240 in public subsidies — $146,718 from one grant and $100,522 from another, both documented by the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker. That means taxpayers subsidized NAPA’s operations by more than six times the amount NAPA paid in penalties for breaking worker safety and environmental rules in the same year. The public bore cost on both ends — subsidizing the company’s presence while also absorbing the risk of its safety lapses.