The H&M NOligarchy Profile
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H&M earns a NOligarchy Score of 77.6 out of 100, covering from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). That score is built from three separate grades examining political spending, shareholder payouts, and legal compliance.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
69.2
Playing by the Rules
41.4
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. H&M reported zero federal lobbying spend, zero Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions, and zero executive donations on the public record during this period.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 69.5/100. This reflects an estimated, industry-benchmarked CEO pay gap and a near-total absence of US shareholder-payout filings to examine.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 41.37/100. One regulatory violation — a $75,000 discrimination penalty in 2025 — sits on H&M’s ledger for this period, alongside $1.3 million in public subsidies collected during the same span.
The Sector Context: H&M ranks 8th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers federal industry classification. Its score of 77.6 sits above the sector average of 69.7, placing it ahead of the majority of its peers in this classification.
The Bottom Line: Collecting Public Money While Facing a Discrimination Penalty
H&M’s overall score remains above the sector average, but the sharpest finding in the data is a straightforward imbalance: a government body fined the company $75,000 for discriminatory practices in 2025 — and separately, a government grant handed it $1.3 million in taxpayer funds in 2024. The public gave H&M more than seventeen times what regulators took back from it. The company’s disclosure footprint under US rules remains thin, so this profile captures a fraction of H&M’s full picture; the CEO pay gap, for example, comes from an industry benchmark rather than any filing H&M itself made.
No Footprint in Washington
H&M shows no federal lobbying activity and no PAC contributions anywhere in the two-year period. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings list zero registered lobbyists, zero lobbying firms, and zero issue areas for the company, and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows no executive campaign donations tied to H&M. There are no bills to cite and no government entities lobbied, because there is no lobbying record to draw from. No hired former government officials appear in the data, so there is nothing to report on a revolving door either.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
H&M filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
An Undisclosed Pay Gap
H&M’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio is not publicly disclosed. The best available figure is 115:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector. That gap means the person at the top of the organization takes home roughly 115 times the earnings of a typical worker in this industry, by this benchmark’s reckoning. No buyback or dividend data is available for H&M in the public record, so there is no shareholder-payout figure to weigh against what workers earned during this period.
Fined for Discrimination, Rewarded With Public Funds
H&M’s compliance record for the two-year tracking period is not spotless. A single case logged in 2025 — a $75,000 penalty handed down by the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NY-NYCCHR) — found the company responsible for discriminatory practices directed at the public, not its own workforce. One case in a two-year window might look like an isolated incident; this two-year window is only a slice of the company’s full docket available at the source site.
$1.3 million
taxpayer subsidies
$75,000
regulatory fines
17.3:1
H&M collected $1.3 million in taxpayer subsidies against $75,000 in regulatory fines — 17.3 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.
The subsidy picture makes the penalty figure harder to absorb. In 2024, a government grant channeled $1.3 million in public money to H&M — an amount dwarfing the $75,000 the company was ordered to pay for breaking the rules. Government bodies simultaneously penalized H&M for discrimination and rewarded it with taxpayer dollars, with the rewards outpacing the penalties by a ratio of more than seventeen to one.
The Data Evidence
No public PAC filing, stock buyback filing, dividend record, or SEC executive pay filing was available for H&M in the data behind this profile.