Coverage and update schedule
Written to be read before you pay. It says plainly where the data is thin, where a state collects nothing, and where no product — ours or anyone's — can answer the question.
Two clocks matter. State portals refresh on their own schedule, mostly daily. Filings arrive in waves on statutory deadlines. We rebuild weekly, and daily during legislative session for the states that publish live.
| State | Compensation | Bill positions | History | Portal refresh | Filing deadlines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska | Contract rate per client, 100% populated | Bill numbers in free text | 2010–2026 | Continuous | Lobbyists monthly, employers quarterly |
| Arizona | Not collected — excluded by statute | Not collected | Current roster only | Continuous | Quarterly and annual (Mar 1) |
| Colorado | Exact, per client, per month | Supporting / Opposing / Amending, with date ranges | Compensation to 1995 · positions to 2005 | Daily, after midnight | Monthly, the 15th |
| Delaware | Not collected — excluded by statute | Bills, with links to the legislature | 2023–2026 | Live | Activity within 5 business days; expenses quarterly, the 20th |
| Iowa | Exact, per lobbyist, per client | For / Against / Undecided on every bill | 2009–2026 | Minute-level during session | Declarations continuous; compensation annually, July 31 |
| Indiana | Exact, per client, per half-year | Topics only, no bill numbers | 2015–2026 | Live | Twice a year: May 31 and Nov 30 |
| Kentucky | Exact, per client, per month | Bills appear in filings, not in bulk | 2025–2026 | Monthly | Monthly, the 15th |
| Louisiana | Bands only — five statutory brackets | Not collected | Current registrations | Live | Monthly, the 25th |
| Maine | Exact, per client, per month | Bills (LD numbers), in bulk | 2024–2026 | Live | Monthly, the 15th |
| Minnesota | Aggregate per principal, roundable to $5,000 | Subject only, and only on the June filing | 2014–2025 | Continuous | Jan 15, Mar 16, Jun 15 |
| Missouri | Not collected — excluded by statute | Not collected | Current snapshot | Monthly | Monthly, the 10th |
| North Dakota | Not collected — excluded by statute | Not collected | 1995–2026 | Live | Annually, August 1 |
| Nebraska | Exact, per client, per quarter | Positions by bill | Current session | Near-daily | Quarterly, 30 days after quarter end |
| New York | Contract rate at registration; amounts paid bi-monthly | Bill and rule identifiers, plus the person lobbied | 2019–2026 | Periodic | Lobbyists bi-monthly, clients semiannually |
| Ohio | Not collected — explicitly excluded by statute | Bills lobbied, but never the side taken | 2009–2026 | Rosters daily | Three waves: May 31, Sep 30, Jan 31 |
| Oklahoma | Not collected | Not collected | 2015–2026 | Nightly | Monthly and quarterly |
| Oregon | Exact, per client, per quarter | Subject only | 2016–2026 | Live | Quarterly: Apr 15, Jul 15, Oct 15, Jan 15 |
| South Carolina | Exact income per lobbyist-principal pair | Required by law, but absent from the published report | 2010–2026 | Per filing | Twice a year: Jun 30 and Jan 31 |
| Texas | Ranges, and the brackets change every year with inflation | Subject matter only, no bill numbers | 1991–2026 | Daily | Annual or monthly by registrant |
| Washington | Exact, per client, per month | Not collected | 2007–2026 | Daily | Monthly |
Seventeen states never require lobbyists to disclose what they are paid. Several more publish only ranges. Anyone advertising nationwide compensation coverage is selling something else.
Only a handful of states record which side a lobbyist took. We hold that for Colorado, Iowa and Nebraska — about 3.1 million positions. Most states record which bills were touched, or nothing at all.
Some states publish money received, some a contract rate, some a bracket. Every figure we publish is tagged, and we never total across kinds.
States accept corrections for months afterward, sometimes years. Recent periods move. Older ones settle.
Firms are spelled several ways and sometimes misspelled outright — Alaska's own filings contain both "Hickey, Rogers & Robinson" and "Hiceky, Rogers and Robinson." We fold formatting differences but never merge names that merely look alike, because merging two real firms is a worse error than listing one twice.
| State | Status | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Michigan | Excluded on legal advice | State law (MCL 4.411 §11(3)) says information copied from these filings "may not be sold or utilized by any person for any commercial purpose," with a civil penalty. We do not hold it. |
| Florida, Wisconsin | Held pending review | Both publish open bulk files while serving a blanket robots.txt exclusion. Wisconsin's data is unusually good — dollars and hours per principal — so this is under review rather than closed. |
| Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Connecticut, New Hampshire | Not yet available | All sit behind bot protection or CAPTCHAs. Virginia and Connecticut have some of the best records in the country and the worst access to them; these will come through public records requests, not scraping. |
| Montana, Vermont | Not yet available | Montana has no electronic filing mandate, so a share of filings exist only as scanned paper. Vermont's portal renders over a websocket and only launched in 2025. |
| The remaining states | In progress | Roughly a dozen more publish downloadable data of varying quality. Coverage grows; this page is the record of what is true today. |
The things you would otherwise discover the hard way.
The figure is a RATE (e.g. $2,000 monthly), never a period total. We never sum it.
Arizona destroys lobbying records five years after filing, so deep history cannot be built from the state. Searches also cap silently at 200 rows, which we work around.
Subject-matter lobbying is filed under placeholders like OTHER24. Those are not bills and we do not count them as such.
Best bill linkage of any state, but ~93% of expense filings are zeros and no compensation exists.
Roughly two thirds of declarations are 'Undecided' — lobbyists must declare before speaking, so neutral filings are common.
Test records exist in the state's live data and are filtered out.
Only two years are published in bulk; earlier years exist as narrative reports.
A failed search silently returns the full unfiltered list, which we guard against.
The state's system only goes back to 2024.
Filers may round to the nearest $5,000, so totals are approximate by design.
Expenditures are published about seven weeks after the period ends.
Expenditure reporting starts at $60 per occasion, so almost every filing is empty — one row across 214 registrants in 2023.
Positions are recorded against the filer, without the client attached, so they are weaker than Colorado's or Iowa's.
Registration figures are contract rates, not payments, and are excluded from totals.
Ohio law states that expenditures exclude compensation paid to legislative agents.
Expenditure rows include negative amendment offsets; a naive sum double-counts.
Figures come from the client's side of the filing, which is the same money seen from the payer.
Bill-level detail would require reading each filer's own report.
Because brackets shift annually, the same code means different dollars in different years.
The cleanest compensation data in the country, with no bill linkage at all.
If it did not, write to corrections@lobbyistinsight.com. A coverage question that is unclear here is a defect in this page.