Methodology

Where the numbers come from

All campaign finance figures come from the Federal Election Commission, the government agency candidates are legally required to file with. We use the FEC’s public API. If a dollar amount isn’t in a filing, we don’t have it and won’t guess at it.

Two kinds of money, never mixed

Money given to a campaign and money spent about a candidate are different things, and we keep them in separate sections. Contributions go to the campaign, which controls them. Independent expenditures are made by outside groups, usually super PACs, that are legally barred from coordinating with the candidate. None of that spending shows up in the candidate’s own filings.

A member can look modestly funded while millions are spent on their race by groups they have no control over. Mixing those two kinds of money together would hide that.

The headline figure is a share, and it is a floor

Each profile leads with the share of a member’s money that came from organized sources: contributions from political action committees, plus individual donations that an organization collected and directed to that member. We lead with a share rather than raw dollars because a large campaign and a small one can take similar amounts while depending on them to completely different degrees.

We used to lead with the PAC share alone. We stopped because it measures the one channel organized money largely avoids: organizations bundle contributions that stay legally individual, so a PAC total never sees them. The figure is always worded “at least”. Bundled money is only counted for organizations we have measured, so the true share can be higher than what we show. It cannot be lower.

One more thing is left out of it, and we would rather name it than have it found. Political parties give directly to their own candidates, and the Commission reports that separately from PAC money. We don’t count it, because a party funding its own nominee is a different relationship from an industry funding a committee member, and folding them together would blur the thing this site exists to show. It is also small: across every current member’s career it comes to about $13.9 million, roughly one-eighth of one percent of all money raised. Counting it would move the typical member’s figure by a fraction of a percentage point, and always upward—which is another reason the number is a floor.

Bundled money

An organization can collect contributions from its own members, already earmarked for a named candidate, and pass them along. The law counts this as individual money, and so do the campaign’s filings. The organization still chose where it went. We count it from the Commission’s own earmark attributions on each receipt.

So far we have measured: AIPAC, Senate Conservatives Fund, SBA Pro-Life America, NORPAC, Maggie's List, EMILY's List, JStreetPAC, Club for Growth, GiveGreen. A member showing no bundled money either received none through these organizations, or received some through one we haven’t measured yet. We can’t tell those two cases apart, which is why every bundled figure is a floor. Payment platforms like ActBlue and WinRed are left out on purpose. They process a donor’s own choice of candidate, and counting them would label every small online donation as organized money.

Before publishing any of these figures we run one sanity check. Bundled money is individual money, so it can never exceed what the member reported receiving from individuals in total. If a member fails that check, their bundled figure is left off the site entirely.

How we avoid double-counting

Independent expenditure records can’t just be added up. Groups file 24-hour notices close to an election that are later restated in their regular reports, and amended filings sit alongside the originals they correct. When we tried summing the raw rows, the total was inflated badly enough to reverse the ranking of the two largest spenders in one race. So we use the FEC’s own aggregated totals instead.

Bundled contributions have the same trap. Amended filings repeat the same earmarked receipt with fresh identifiers, and in one case naive summing inflated a member’s figure twenty-five-fold. We remove repeated amounts within the same filing before publishing anything.

Industry labels are our judgment, published in full

The Commission records that a committee belongs to a corporation, a trade association, a labor union, or a membership organization. It does not record which industry. The industry names on this site are our own classification of named organizations. Rather than hide that judgment in code, we publish the complete list below. Money from any organization not on the list is shown as unlabeled, and we never guess. Right now about a fifth of committee money is unlabeled. The one-sentence descriptions that appear under organization names are also ours, written from each organization’s own public self-description; an organization we haven’t written one for shows no description at all.

Votes next to money

Where a profile shows votes beside funding, we keep the chain short. The bill number comes from the chamber’s own roll-call record. The bill’s policy area is assigned by the Library of Congress, so no bill is chosen by us to make a point. The plain-English description of each bill is the Congressional Research Service’s own summary, quoted word for word. Our only judgment in that chain is deciding which policy areas match which industries, and that mapping is published in full below.

We don’t tally votes for or against an industry, and never will. A yes on one energy bill and a yes on another can point in opposite directions, and deciding which way each bill “benefits” an industry would be our opinion dressed up as a finding. If fewer than three of an industry’s bills reached a recorded vote, we leave that industry out, since a handful of votes can’t show a pattern.

Every figure says which election it belongs to

Campaign finance data is organized by election rather than by calendar year, and a member’s most recent completed election may be years apart from the outside spending on a different race. Every number on this site carries the election year it covers and the date its reporting period closed.

Why our totals may differ from a two-year cycle view

We report what a member raised for a whole election. For a representative that is two years. For a senator it is six, because a Senate term is six years and money raised across all of it went toward winning that seat.

The Commission’s own website opens on a single two-year cycle by default, so the same senator can show a much smaller figure there. Both numbers are correct. They just measure different spans. Every figure on this site states the exact reporting period it covers, and the link on each profile opens the Commission’s page filtered to that same election and the same full period, so the two should agree line for line.

We chose the full-election figure because a two-year slice of a six-year term is arbitrary. It would show a senator’s fundraising in the years they were not running, and hide the money that actually won them the seat.

How fresh the data is, and how it is checked

Funding figures are a snapshot drawn from the Commission on August 24, 2026, and every profile states this date. A completed election’s figures are final; an election still under way keeps raising money, so those figures grow between snapshots and ours will read slightly low until the next refresh.

To check our work, a separate program asks the Commission fresh for every member’s totals and compares the answers to ours. Because it re-asks instead of re-running our pipeline, a bug in the pipeline can’t hide behind itself. In the most recent full pass, 533 of 535 members matched to the dollar. One of the other two differed by $990 on a completed election, because the Commission’s own figure moved after we read it. The last was an election the Commission records at zero dollars, which we don’t publish as an election at all. On top of that, an automated test suite runs on every build. Totals must equal the sum of their parts, no share can exceed 100%, and money spent about a member can never be merged into money given to them.

What we do not claim

We do not say that any donation caused any vote. A group giving money to a politician who already agreed with them is common and is not corruption. Where we show funding and voting together, we show them side by side and let you draw your own conclusion. We will never assert that a vote was bought.

We also cannot show you everything. Some political spending is legally permitted to stay anonymous and appears in no filing at all. Where that is likely to matter, we say so on the page rather than presenting an incomplete picture as a complete one.

When we are not sure, we publish nothing

If we can’t source a figure, it doesn’t go on the site. That applies to whole sections too: a page stays empty rather than filling up with estimates. We would rather show you less than show you something we can’t stand behind.

If you think a number here is wrong, please tell us. Corrections are published on our corrections page.

Who is covered

We currently hold funding records for 535 members — 98 in the Senate and 437 in the House, including 6 non-voting delegates from the District of Columbia and the territories.