The Victoria’s Secret NOligarchy Profile
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Victoria’s Secret earned a NOligarchy Score of 64.86 out of 100 from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). The score is pulled down not by a sprawling lobbying empire or a pile of regulatory fines, but by a single relentless engine: the chasm between what the company’s chief executive pockets and what the people folding bras and ringing registers take home.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
66.4
Wealth Extraction
51.5
Playing by the Rules
74.8
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: 66.36/100. Victoria’s Secret channeled $220,000 into federal lobbying during the period — a modest sum by corporate standards, concentrated entirely on one issue: taxes. No Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions were filed, and executive donations to federal candidates totaled just $1,275.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 51.52/100. The score reflects a CEO pay ratio of 2,131:1 against a median worker earning barely above poverty wages. No stock buybacks or dividends were recorded in the two-year period, but the pay gap alone is cavernous.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 74.85/100. The company carries a single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fine of $18,441 on its public record — one case, one year. The modest dollar total is reflected in a relatively strong score, though the underlying safety failure is real.
Victoria’s Secret ranks 15th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers sector, against a sector average score of 69.7. The brand trails the industry average on public accountability — a gap driven almost entirely by one of the most extreme CEO pay ratios in the sector. For higher-scoring places to shop in this category, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Real Inequality Hiding Behind the Lingerie
Victoria’s Secret pulled in $6.55 billion in annual revenue — enough to make it a substantial player in American retail — yet the typical employee took home just $10,578 for the year, according to the company’s own proxy filing. Against that backdrop, the chief executive’s three-year average compensation package ran to roughly $22.5 million. This is not a story of a company buried in lobbying spend or legal fines. It is a story of a company that quietly positioned its most powerful lever — executive pay — to concentrate rewards at the very top of the corporate structure while the workforce absorbs the cost.
Spending to Buy a Seat at the Table — Just on One Topic
Over the two-year tracking period, Victoria’s Secret spent $220,000 on federal lobbying, filing through a single outside lobbying firm with three registered lobbyists. Every filing pointed at the same issue: taxation and the Internal Revenue Code. The company’s own Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings describe the subject as “issues relating to tax reform; including, international and domestic tax policy.”
That is a carefully chosen hill to plant a flag on. Victoria’s Secret operates across multiple international jurisdictions, which means shifts in how the United States taxes foreign income and cross-border transactions carry direct financial consequences. A retailer with that kind of global footprint has concrete, measurable reasons to track both chambers of Congress when lawmakers debate international tax rules — and, as the most recent filings show, to attend Treasury Department meetings on the same topics.
Lobbyists filed issue descriptions with the House of Representatives, the Senate, and — in at least one instance — the Treasury Department, across all eight quarters of the period. The 2026-Q2 filing notes lobbyists attended a Treasury meeting to discuss a tax bill. No specific bill titles or numbers were named in any LDA disclosure. No PAC was active. Individual executive donations to federal candidates totaled $1,275 — the price of a single pair of premium lingerie sets. The political footprint is narrow, but the single issue it targets is the one where a company with global operations stands to gain the most from favorable rule-making.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
8
≈ every 62nd business day
SENATE
8
≈ every 62nd business day
Treasury, Dept of
1
≈ every 500th business day
3 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Victoria's Secret was named in lobbying filings reaching 3 federal bodies — from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to SENATE.
A Pay Gap That Dwarfs the Business Itself
The starkest number in Victoria’s Secret’s public record has nothing to do with lobbying or fines. The median Victoria’s Secret employee — a sales associate, a stock-room worker, a cashier — earned $10,578 in the most recent fiscal year disclosed. The CEO pay ratio is 2131:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the company’s own SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $22.5 million.
Put another way: for every dollar that landed in a typical worker’s paycheck, the person at the top collected roughly $2,131.
No stock buybacks were recorded in fiscal years 2024 or 2025, and no dividends were paid during the two-year period. The shareholder payout machinery was quiet. That means the pay gap is not being subsidized by capital returned to shareholders at the expense of workers — it is simply the standing architecture of compensation at this company.
One Safety Citation, One Fine
Over the two-year tracking period, Victoria’s Secret accumulated a single public regulatory penalty on the Good Jobs First violation record: an OSHA finding in 2025, carrying a fine of $18,441. One case, one agency, one year. The total stands at $18,441.
That a single safety citation constitutes the entire public enforcement record is not necessarily a clean bill of health: OSHA’s inspection resources are stretched thin across millions of workplaces, and a fine of this scale is unlikely to function as a meaningful deterrent for a company reporting $6.55 billion in annual revenue. What the public record shows is one documented safety failure that regulators caught and fined.