The Menards NOligarchy Profile
T
R
U
S
T
E
D
Menards — the privately held home-improvement chain built by the Menard family — scores 80.65 out of 100 on the NOligarchy Score, from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). That score reflects a company with essentially no federal political footprint, a minimal regulatory fine record, and an executive-pay gap that remains hidden behind private-company rules.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
97.7
Wealth Extraction
51.8
Playing by the Rules
95.0
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: 97.67/100. This near-perfect score reflects zero dollars in federal lobbying and zero dollars in Political Action Committee (PAC) spending over the full two-year period — there is no corporate political-influence machine to score.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 51.77/100. As a private company, Menards faces none of the public stock-buyback or dividend disclosure rules that publicly traded retailers do, so this grade rests almost entirely on an industry-benchmark estimate of executive pay versus typical worker pay.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 72.89/100. A single confirmed workplace-safety penalty from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) totaling $6,000 in 2025 sits alongside $380,090 in public subsidies collected over the same span.
The Sector Context: Menards ranks 2nd out of 6 companies sharing its federal industry classification — Building Material & Supplies Dealers — well above the sector average score of 55.9. Its clean political record carries most of the weight.
The Bottom Line: Taking In More Public Money Than It Pays in Penalties
Menards reported $13.08 billion in annual revenue in its most recent reported fiscal year. Yet over the two-year tracking period, the company paid just $6,000 in OSHA workplace-safety fines while simultaneously collecting $380,090 in government subsidies — meaning taxpayers handed Menards more than 63 times what regulators managed to claw back from it. Menards spent nothing lobbying Washington and nothing through a corporate PAC, so unlike many of its publicly traded peers it isn’t buying political access outright. The sharpest imbalance in the data remains this: a $13 billion company received far more public money than it was made to pay for breaking workplace-safety rules, and the fine was too small to function as anything but a rounding error on a ledger that size.
No Footprint in Washington
Menards reported $0 in federal lobbying spending and $0 in PAC contributions across Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings for the full two-year period. There are no lobbying firms on retainer, no lobbyists registered, and no issue areas or bills tied to the company in federal disclosure records. The one political dollar figure that does appear is $176 in individual contributions from people who listed Menards as their employer, made in the fourth quarter of 2024 and tracked by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Those are personal donations by individuals, not corporate spending, and the amount is too small to represent any organized push for political access.
An Undisclosed Pay Gap
Menards’ CEO pay ratio is not publicly disclosed. The best available figure is 246:1, based on AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch industry benchmarks for comparable companies in this sector. That benchmark means a typical worker’s annual earnings would need to be stacked 246 times over just to reach what the top executive is estimated to take home. Because Menards is privately held, it is not subject to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure rules, so no public record exists confirming or refuting that estimate. No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for Menards — as a privately held company it faces no SEC shareholder-payout disclosure requirements — so there is no public record of how much money, if any, was channeled to shareholders versus the workforce over the two-year period.
A Near-Clean Record on the Public Docket
The single confirmed violation in Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker for Menards over the two-year tracking period is a workplace safety or health violation — a $6,000 OSHA penalty in 2025. One case in one year places Menards among the lighter compliance records in its sector; for a company pulling in $13.08 billion in annual sales, a $6,000 penalty is a consequence that barely registers on any financial statement.
What sharpens the picture is what was flowing in the opposite direction at the same time. While OSHA was writing Menards a safety citation, governments were simultaneously handing the company public money. Across 2024 and 2025, Menards collected $380,090 in public subsidies — the largest single award being a $190,238 grant in 2025, with a $189,852 grant in 2024 close behind.
$380,090
taxpayer subsidies
$6,000
regulatory fines
63.3:1
Menards collected $380,090 in taxpayer subsidies against $6,000 in regulatory fines — 63.3 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.