Who pays to lobby the state government.
Registered lobbyists, their clients and what the clients reported, from Texas’s lobbying records.
registered lobbyists
registered lobbyists (unique TEC filer IDs) on the 2026 Registered Lobbyists list; 1513 of them list at least one client in the 2026 Group by Client list
clients (lobbyist employers)
distinct client names exactly as filed in the 2026 Group by Client list; 3973 if case and punctuation differences are ignored. Name variants of one client (e.g. 'Las Vegas Sands Corp.' / 'Las Vegas Sands Corp') are not merged, so this overstates distinct organizations somewhat
| AT&T | $3,776,330.00 | $7,701,379.47 |
| Las Vegas Sands Corp. | $2,700,670.00 | $5,229,599.62 |
| Texas Trial Lawyers Association | $1,739,410.00 | $3,169,789.81 |
| Texas Hospital Association | $1,659,270.00 | $3,249,929.82 |
| Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC | $1,602,110.00 | $3,169,819.73 |
| Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas | $1,396,120.00 | $2,265,799.84 |
| Texas Medical Association | $1,361,750.00 | $2,769,309.83 |
| NRG Energy, Inc. | $1,258,770.00 | $2,494,659.83 |
| Vistra Corp. | $1,258,760.00 | $2,929,579.65 |
| Texas REALTORS | $995,590.00 | $1,819,489.83 |
The state collects pay in ranges; both ends are shown as filed and never averaged.
Sources: Texas Ethics Commission, Lobby search, lists and code tables; Texas Ethics Commission, Lobby Registration Lists 2026; TEC, 2026 Lobby Group by Client (xlsx); TEC, 2026 Registered Lobbyists (xlsx); TEC, 2025 Lobby Group by Client (xlsx); TEC, 2025 Registered Lobbyists (xlsx); TEC, 2026 Lobby Registration notice (compensation code ranges); TEC, 2025 Lobby Registration notice (compensation code ranges); TEC, Lobby Activities CSV Database (as of Oct. 17, 2026).
How to read this
Counts and compensation come from the Texas Ethics Commission's daily registration lists for 2026 (Group by Client; Registered Lobbyists). Each registration names one lobbyist and one client and gives a compensation code; TEC publishes the dollar range for each code by year (2026 notice: LOBBCOMP01 'Less than $22,890' ... LOBBCOMP13 '$1,144,330 or more'). For each client we add up the low bounds and, separately, the high bounds of its registrations; 'Less than $X' counts as 0.00 to X minus one cent. These are the ranges registrants filed for compensation paid or to be paid for lobbying in the year, not amounts reported as paid, and not lobby expenditures (gifts, food, travel), which are in the separate activity-report CSV. Top clients are ranked by the summed low bound; client names are grouped exactly as filed, so spelling variants are listed beside the client and not added in. 'amount' is null on purpose: Texas reports ranges, never a single figure. 2025 figures are in prior_year and are never combined with 2026.
What is not here yet
- Compensation figures are range bounds from registrations, not amounts actually paid; Texas does not publish a single dollar figure per client.
- Ranking sums each client's registrations as filed. Where both a lobbying firm (registered as an entity) and its individual lobbyists list the same client, the same compensation may be counted more than once; registrations were not de-duplicated by firm. Not yet checked client by client.
- Client names are not merged across spelling variants; variants of top clients are listed in other_spellings_filed. Affiliated companies filed under different names (e.g. 'Vistra Corp.' and 'Vistra Corporate Services Company') are kept separate.
- No 2026 top-ten client has an open-ended LOBBCOMP13 row, so every high bound is finite.
- Uncoded amounts in 2026: Texas Trial Lawyers Association has three rows with Amount filed as '0' (text, not a range code; two are second rows for lobbyists who also have a coded row); these add nothing to either bound. Texas Apartment Association has three rows filed as 'LT99999', which is not a code in TEC's 2026 table; they were left out.
- Meaning of the 'Method Payment' values (PROSPECT, PAID, EARNED) was not found in a TEC document opened for this pull; they are reported as filed and not interpreted.
- Lobby activity reports (expenditures on officials: food, gifts, travel, events) are in the saved TEC_LA_CSV.zip (2026 reports received through Oct. 16, 2026) but were not summarized here; they measure lobbyist spending, not client compensation, and are not yet checked.
- The 2026 lists are updated daily by TEC; counts will change through Dec. 31, 2026.
- Subject-matter lists (2026LobbySubjMatter) and political-fund lists were not pulled; not yet checked.
Gaps in the lobbying records as of the date checked.