The Walmart NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
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Walmart’s NOligarchy Score is 5.53 out of 100.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
5.4
Wealth Extraction
2.0
Playing by the Rules
17.9
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: 5.37/100. This reflects a steady stream of federal lobbying spending, Political Action Committee (PAC) giving split almost evenly between both parties, and a network of outside lobbying firms that also work for other major corporations.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 1.45/100. This reflects billions of dollars funneled into stock buybacks and dividends alongside a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay package that runs nearly two thousand times what the median Walmart worker takes home.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 13.04/100. This reflects over $130 million in fines and penalties recorded against the company across 56 separate cases.
Walmart ranks 21 out of 21 among companies sharing its federal industry classification (Warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other general merchandise retailers) — dead last. The sector average score is 54.0; Walmart’s 5.53 places it far below every one of its peers. On this scorecard, Walmart isn’t an outlier for good behavior — it’s the outlier for the opposite reason.
The Bottom Line: America’s Largest Employer, Last Place on Accountability
Walmart pulled in $706.4 billion in global revenue, according to its SEC EDGAR 10-K (CIK 0000104169) filing for its most recent fiscal year. Out of that scale, the company channeled billions into stock buybacks and dividends to enrich shareholders, handed its CEO a pay package worth nearly $60 million a year on average, and racked up over $130 million in fines for violations ranging from wage theft to consumer protection breaches — all while collecting over $12 million in public subsidies from state and local governments. The single sharpest imbalance: Walmart’s buyback spending alone dwarfs what it would have cost to give every one of its 2.1 million workers a meaningful raise, and the company chose the payout to shareholders instead.
Walmart's $20.1 million in political spending equals 250 years of median-household income — enough people, one per year worked, to fill 1.4 fully-boarded 737s.
Buying a Seat at Every Table in Washington
Walmart spent $17,890,000 on federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), according to filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA). Spending hit $3,560,000 in 2024, surged to $8,640,000 in 2025, and reached $5,690,000 across the first two quarters of 2026 alone — with Q1 2026 representing the single largest quarter in the entire period at $3,460,000.
That’s a company using its size to make sure it has a voice in nearly every corner of the federal government — its lobbyists reported contact with the House of Representatives 213 times and the Senate 200 times over the period, plus dozens of touches with agencies from the Department of the Treasury to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).
The company’s top issue areas track directly to its business model. Taxation and the Internal Revenue Code led the list at 28 mentions — unsurprising for a company operating at this scale, where a single percentage point in the corporate tax rate moves billions of dollars. Trade issues drew 23 mentions and Banking 21: Walmart imports enormous volumes of merchandise, so tariff and trade-enforcement policy hits its supply chain directly, while its filings cited the Credit Card Competition Act repeatedly in connection with what merchants pay to process customer payments. Labor Issues, Antitrust, and Workplace policy also drew 20 mentions, tied to a company employing over two million people in the United States.
Walmart’s lobbyists cited the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act across multiple bill versions — three to four mentions each depending on the version — and referenced the act that became Public Law No. 119-21 on July 4, 2025 a full seven times, the highest mention count of any single bill in the filings, reflecting the outsized stakes a company of this scale has in federal tax and spending law.
Walmart’s PAC gave $2,184,500 total, split $768,000 to Democratic candidates and $881,000 to Republican candidates — a near-even hedge that keeps the company’s access open no matter which party holds power.
Walmart's PAC gave $768,000 to Democrats and $881,000 to Republicans — a 46.6% / 53.4% split that buys access to whichever party wins.
46.6%
53.4%
Democrats · $768,000
Republicans · $881,000
ACCESS-BUYER PENALTY APPLIED
Walmart works with three outside lobbying firms, two of which — Guidepost Strategies and Mehlman Consulting — also lobby for other major corporations (Whirlpool Corporation and CDW, respectively), giving Walmart’s message added reach through shared channels of influence in the Capitol.
Shared Lobbying Exposure
Walmart
client
MEHLMAN CONSULTING, INC.
lobbying firm
CDW
also a client
GE Appliances
also a client
GUIDEPOSTSTRATEGIES, LLC also lobbies for Whirlpool Corporation
Why it matters: the same firm argues Walmart’s case and its rivals’ — one hire buys a web of shared access that can’t be seen from outside. This network worsens Walmart’s political-access score (see methodology for the exact factor).
One of Walmart’s 62 lobbyists is a former government insider — Mary Savary Taylor, who previously served as General Counsel to the Joint Economic Committee and as a Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Connie Mack, bringing those congressional relationships directly to bear on Walmart’s behalf.
Wall Street’s Payout, the Workforce’s Leftovers
Walmart’s CEO pay ratio is 1965:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $60 million. That figure is not a single bad year — it is the average taken over three years of disclosed pay, measured against a median Walmart employee who earned $30,520 in the most recent fiscal year.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
10:04 AM — a median year, earned
11:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
10:04 AM · January 1
1,965× the median employee’s pay
At 1965:1, Walmart's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 10:04 AM on the first workday of the year.
Over fiscal years 2024 through 2026, Walmart spent $2,779,000,000, $4,494,000,000, and $8,088,000,000 respectively on stock buybacks — a combined total of roughly $15.36 billion — while also paying out $6,140,000,000, $6,688,000,000, and $7,507,000,000 in dividends across the same three years, for a combined dividend total near $20.3 billion, according to the company’s SEC 10-K. Buybacks work as a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — money that flows overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of the stock market, rather than to the people stocking shelves and running registers.
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 2,100,000 workers a $7,314.76 raise, spread across the last 3 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those three years, that works out to a $2,438.25 annual raise the company chose not to give.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 2.1M employees
Spent on buybacks
$15.4B
directed to shareholders
÷ 2.1M
workers
Per-worker raise
$7,315
per employee, 3-year total
Spread over those 3 years, that's a 8% annual raise on the median worker's $30,520 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The data shows Walmart didn’t have to choose between its investors and its workforce: it paid out roughly $20.3 billion in traditional dividends on top of the buybacks and still could have funded that worker raise. It simply chose not to.
That $60 million average CEO package sits alongside a buyback program that reduces the number of shares outstanding, boosting the per-share earnings figure used to calculate executive incentive pay — without needing to grow the underlying business at all.
Wage Theft Tops a Repeat Offense Sheet
Walmart racked up $130,116,235 in penalties across 56 separate cases over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, according to Good Jobs First. The largest category by dollar amount is wage and hour violations, totaling $104,766,860 across 5 cases. Workplace safety or health violations were the most frequent offense type, with 30 separate cases during the same period — a volume that signals these are not isolated accidents but a recurring feature of how the company operates. This two-year window is a fraction of Walmart’s full docket on the Good Jobs First site, which tracks the company’s history well beyond the period covered here.
WORKPLACE SAFETY OR HEALTH VIOLATION
30 SEPARATE CASES
2024–2026 · $555,796 in penalties
30 separate workplace safety or health violation penalties in 2024–2026 — Walmart paid $555,796 for the same category of offense, case after case.
The single largest penalty in this period was $100,000,000, levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2026 for a wage and hour violation. The second-largest was a $10,000,000 FTC penalty in 2025 for a consumer protection violation, followed by a $7,500,000 settlement with the California Attorney General in 2024 for hazardous waste violations.
While regulators were fining Walmart, governments were simultaneously handing the company public money. Walmart and its subsidiaries received $12,422,901 in public subsidies across 2024 and 2025, spread over 9 separate grants. The largest single grant was $8,000,000, awarded in 2024 to a Walmart real estate subsidiary in Texas.