What lobbying costs
Disclosed spending, read honestly: what the totals mean, what a typical engagement runs, and where the numbers blur.
The headline numbers
Disclosed federal lobbying runs on the order of four billion dollars a year, and the running total for the current quarter is on our homepage, straight from the filings. That figure is a floor, not a ceiling: it counts only activity over the registration thresholds, reported in rounded amounts.
What one engagement runs
A focused, single-issue engagement with an outside firm commonly discloses ten to forty thousand dollars a quarter. Broad representation for a large company can run into the hundreds of thousands per quarter across several firms. Trade associations spend the most, because they carry whole industries.
Rounding and thresholds
Amounts are rounded to the nearest ten thousand dollars, and quarters under the threshold can legally report no amount. So treat per-engagement figures as brackets, not invoices. Trends across quarters are more trustworthy than any single number.
Value is the harder question
The record tells you what advocacy costs; whether it works is your judgment. The strongest signal in the record is retention: clients who renew the same firm year after year, visible on any firm page here, are telling you what they concluded.
Put it to work
Search the live record on the directory, browse by issue, or tell us your problem and let us route it to the right professionals, free.