The RH NOligarchy Profile
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RH earns a NOligarchy Score of 99.21 out of 100 — the highest mark in its sector and one of the cleanest profiles in the entire NOligarchy database. No lobbyists. No Political Action Committee (PAC). No regulatory penalties. No public subsidies. And a CEO-to-worker pay gap that is modest by the standards of publicly traded American retail.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
85.6
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.
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Political Access Grade: 100/100. RH spent nothing on federal lobbying, ran no PAC, and logged no executive political contributions during the period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). The company maintained a complete absence of formal political machinery in Washington.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 86.32/100. The CEO-to-worker pay gap is compressed by the standards of publicly traded retail, and buyback activity over the two-year period was minimal relative to revenue. The one accountability gap: no employee headcount is publicly disclosed, which means the full scale of what workers could have received in its place cannot be calculated from the public record.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. No recorded fines, no regulatory penalties, no public subsidies. A perfect score on the public docket.
RH ranks 1st out of 9 companies in the Furniture and home furnishings retailers sector — outperforming the sector average of 74.5 by nearly 25 points. In a sector where corporate accountability is routinely weak, RH is a genuine outlier.
The Bottom Line: The Cleanest Record in Its Sector, With One Narrow Gap to Watch
RH generated $3.44 billion in annual revenue and chose to direct virtually none of it toward lobbying campaigns, PAC contributions, or regulatory violations. The company’s CEO earns 25 times what the median employee takes home — a ratio that is genuinely low for a company this size. The only remaining accountability gap is a modest buyback program that channeled cash toward shareholders rather than the workforce, at a moment when no disclosed employee headcount makes it impossible to put a precise dollar figure on what workers missed.
No Footprint in Washington
RH filed zero federal lobbying disclosures, operated no PAC, and recorded no executive political contributions from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) record shows no registered lobbyists, no outside lobbying firms retained, and no government entities formally contacted. The revolving-door pipeline — former government insiders hired to exploit political connections — is empty.
For a company holding 1.79% of the U.S. Furniture and home furnishings retailers market, the absence of any formal political machinery is notable. No issue areas on file, no bills cited, no trade association lobbying flagged. RH, for now, is not pulling that particular lever.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
RH filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
A Modest Pay Gap and Minimal Shareholder Payouts
The CEO-to-Worker Gap
RH’s CEO pay ratio is 25:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, per the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package came to about $1.26 million. The median RH employee earned $49,681 — meaning the person running the enterprise collected roughly 25 times what the person managing a gallery floor brought home. By the standards of publicly traded American retail, that gap is genuinely compressed; many competitors in this sector post ratios ten or more times higher.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
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passes the median employee’s full annual pay
12:12 PM · January 11
25× the median employee’s pay
At 25:1, RH's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 12:12 PM on January 11.
The Buyback Record
RH paid no dividends during the two-year period. Instead, it ran a modest buyback program — spending about $12 million in each of fiscal years 2024 and 2025, according to SEC 10-K filings. At roughly 0.4% of annual revenue each year, these are small numbers by the standards of corporate cash deployment. But they still represent a deliberate choice to reduce the number of shares outstanding — which inflates per-share metrics and can trigger executive performance bonuses tied to Earnings Per Share (EPS) targets — rather than directing that money elsewhere.
The Missed Raise
No employee headcount is publicly disclosed in RH’s filings, which means a precise per-worker raise calculation cannot be computed from the available record. What is visible: cash that could have gone to the people carrying furniture, managing galleries, or staffing customer service lines instead flowed to shareholders and upward through EPS-linked executive pay structures. Because RH paid no dividends at all, it did not offer investors the traditional path of a steady income return. Every dollar of shareholder payout was concentrated into buybacks — a mechanism that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
RH has no recorded regulatory violations, no fines, and no penalties in the public record covering Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. The Playing by the Rules score is a perfect 100. No public subsidies appear either — the company neither broke the rules in ways that drew a penalty nor extracted taxpayer money through government grant programs during the two-year period.
Among retailers of this scale, a completely clean compliance docket is rare. The public data shows no infractions.