The Ulta Beauty NOligarchy Profile
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Ulta Beauty earns a NOligarchy Score of 60.2 out of 100 — a score that reflects genuine restraint on political spending but a stark imbalance in how the company distributes its financial returns between executives, shareholders, and the workers running its stores.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
97.1
Wealth Extraction
0.0
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: 97.08/100. Ulta Beauty filed no federal lobbying disclosures and ran no Political Action Committee (PAC) from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — an unusually quiet posture for a company its size. A small amount of personal executive donations flows through individual checkbooks, but the corporate machinery for buying political access simply isn’t running.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 0.0/100. This is the engine driving Ulta’s accountability problem. The company poured over $1.9 billion into buying back its own stock across two fiscal years and handed its chief executive compensation that dwarfs what the median store worker takes home — earning the lowest possible score on this pillar.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 72.58/100. A small but real fine total now appears on the public record, alongside public subsidies collected during the same period — enough to move the needle off the clean score this company previously held.
Ulta Beauty ranks 1st out of 5 companies in the Health and personal care retailers sector, against a sector average score of 42.7. Ulta scores above that peer average — but sector leadership is cold comfort when the wealth extraction numbers reveal the scale of cash redirected away from the workers stocking shelves and ringing registers.
The Bottom Line: Nearly $1 Billion a Year to Wall Street, $11,883 for the Median Worker
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the full eight-quarter tracking period — Ulta Beauty posted annual revenue of roughly $12.4 billion. In that same stretch, the company chose to spend nearly $1 billion per year buying back its own stock — a practice that benefits the wealthiest shareholders and triggers executive performance bonuses — while its median employee earned $11,883 for the year. That is not a rounding error. That is roughly $228 a week before taxes, for the workers who keep every Ulta store running. The company spent nothing on federal lobbying and ran no PAC, which earns real credit. But the wealth extraction picture is stark: billions moved toward the top of the income ladder while the people at the bottom of the org chart took home earnings that fall below what full-time minimum wage produces in most American cities.
No Footprint in Washington — But Executives Opened Their Wallets
Ulta Beauty filed zero dollars in federal lobbying disclosures with the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) system and reported no PAC contributions during the two-year period. For a national retail chain employing over 61,000 people and generating more than $12 billion in annual revenue, that silence in Washington is genuinely notable. No revolving-door lobbyists were hired. No outside lobbying firms were retained. No bills were cited in LDA filings because no LDA filings were made.
What does exist is a quieter channel: personal contributions from Ulta executives totaling $662 over the tracking period, reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). These are individual donations attributed to Ulta employees by their disclosed employer — not corporate PAC money — a distinction that matters legally. The contributions arrived in two tranches: $500 in Q3 2024 and $162 in Q4 2024.
Ulta operates in an industry where labor law, cosmetic ingredient regulation, and retail employment standards are all live federal policy questions. The absence of a formal lobbying operation does not mean those issues are irrelevant to the company’s bottom line — it simply means this company chose not to engage them through the most visible channel available.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce: Over $1.9 Billion in Buybacks, $11,883 for the Median Worker
The single sharpest imbalance in the Ulta Beauty data is not about politics. It is about who gets paid.
The CEO Pay Gap. Ulta’s chief executive pay ratio stands at 1656:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid — per SEC DEF 14A. The median Ulta employee earned $11,883 in the most recent reported fiscal year. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $19.7 million. For context: the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. At that rate, a full-time worker earns roughly $15,000 a year. Ulta’s median employee is earning less than full-time minimum wage would produce in many states — while the chief executive’s realized pay ran to nearly $20 million per year over the same three-year span.
The Buyback Machine. Ulta has spent heavily on a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. The figures are large enough to reframe the entire conversation about worker compensation:
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Fiscal year 2025: $901,388,000
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Fiscal year 2024: $1,003,328,000
Two fiscal years. Over $1.9 billion redirected to reduce the share count — squeezing more earnings into each remaining share, lifting the stock price, and handing a windfall to large institutional investors and executives whose bonuses are tied to per-share earnings growth.
The Missed Raise. The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 61,199 workers a $31,123.32 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $15,561.66 annual raise the company chose not to give.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 61K employees
Spent on buybacks
$1.9B
directed to shareholders
÷ 61K
workers
Per-worker raise
$31,123
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 131% annual raise on the median worker's $11,883 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 61,199
Your share of the buyback
+$31,123
Per biweekly paycheck
+$598.53
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $1.9 billion.
Spread across Ulta Beauty's 61,199 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $31,123 per worker — about $599 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
The Dividend Factor. Ulta paid zero dividends during the covered period. Every dollar returned to shareholders was channeled through buybacks — a more targeted mechanism for inflating per-share price that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits. Traditional dividends at least distribute cash broadly to anyone holding a share; buybacks concentrate the benefit on those who sell into the repurchase program or who hold shares whose price rises as a direct result.
Executive Bonuses. That concentration matters because buybacks mechanically boost Earnings Per Share (EPS) — a metric that sits at the center of most executive compensation formulas. When Ulta’s board approved billions in repurchases, they were simultaneously pulling a lever that would inflate the EPS figures used to calculate whether the chief executive earned a bonus. The CEO’s three-year average realized package of about $19.7 million is not independent of the buyback decisions — it is, in part, a product of them.
Fines and Free Money in the Same Ledger
Ulta Beauty’s compliance record over the two-year tracking period is no longer spotless. The public record now shows $39,523 in total regulatory fines — a modest dollar figure for a company of this scale, but a real one. Detailed case records are not available in the current public filing data, so the breakdown by agency or offense cannot be reported here.
The Subsidy Flip. While regulators were recording those penalties, state and local governments were simultaneously handing Ulta public money. Across three grants between 2024 and 2025, Ulta collected a combined $57,488 in public subsidies — including a $44,532 grant in 2024, a $6,567 grant in 2024, and a $6,389 grant in 2025. Set against a company that spent nearly $1 billion per year on share repurchases, these amounts are small — but they represent public dollars flowing to a corporation that demonstrably did not need the help.
The Data Evidence
Every figure in this profile draws from government filings and public databases. Verify them directly: