Defense Lobbying ROI 2024: $2,223 in Contracts per $1 Spent

The problem: Every few years a Senate hearing or a foreign-policy magazine prints the same factoid — defense companies get about $1,000 in contracts back for every $1 they spend on lobbying — repeated across defense-spending reporting, with the canonical academic version being Stephen Semler's $1,813-per-$1 calculation covering 2001–2021. The number is repeated, debated, and rarely re-checked against the underlying disclosures. We pulled FY2024 Department of Defense prime-contract data from USAspending.gov and matched it against 2024 calendar-year Senate LDA lobbying filings for the nine largest DoD contractors. The aggregate ratio is more than double the figure most policy outlets cite.

What is the defense lobbying ROI ratio? It is the simple quotient of federal defense contracts received by a company in a fiscal year divided by what that company spent on federal lobbying in the same period. The 2024 value across the top 9 DoD contractors is $2,223 in contracts per $1 lobbied. Per-company values range from $1,548 (Huntington Ingalls) to $4,005 (Lockheed Martin).

Why it matters: The ratio is a quotability anchor for policy debate, oversight reporting, and procurement reform writing. It is also frequently mis-cited — usually too low — because the industry-wide figure averages a long tail of small lobbying filers in with the prime contractors who win the bulk of the dollars. The Big 5 are not average.

Use it when: You are reporting on defense procurement, drafting an op-ed on influence spending, briefing a committee on contractor concentration, or assembling a market map of federal-revenue dependence in the defense industrial base.

Quick answer:

• What it is: A per-company ratio of FY2024 DoD prime-contract dollars to 2024 federal lobbying spend, computed from publicly disclosed Senate LDA filings and USAspending obligations.
• When to use it: Policy writing, journalism, oversight briefings, market analysis, and defense-economy research where a citable, source-linked figure is needed.
• When NOT to use it: Any argument that requires causal attribution from a single year, or anything that conflates federal lobbying with the much larger universe of total influence spend (PACs, dark money, trade associations, state-level).
• Typical steps: Pull contract obligations by recipient → pull Senate LDA filings by registrant → match and divide → caveat fiercely.
• Main tradeoff: The ratio is striking and easy to cite, but it is a floor on real influence-spend ROI, not the whole picture. See caveats.

Key findings (each one quotable):

1. Top 9 DoD contractors received $2,223 in FY2024 contracts for every $1 spent on 2024 federal lobbying — 2.2x the widely-cited industry-wide ratio of roughly $1,000 per $1, and 1.2x Stephen Semler's canonical $1,813-per-$1 calculation for the top 5 weapons firms over 2001–2021.
2. Lockheed Martin leads at $4,005 per $1 — roughly 4x the industry benchmark, on $50.75B in DoD contracts against $12.67M in federal lobbying.
3. L3Harris is the most efficient lobbyist of the top 9 at $3,202 per $1, despite ranking 8th by contract size — the least lobbying spend of the group ($2.49M) buying the second-best ratio.
4. The Big 5 (Lockheed, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman) collectively spent $59.16M on lobbying and won $136.57B in DoD contracts — a $2,309 ratio.
5. Two of the top nine are not arms makers. Humana ($8.03B) and Cencora/AmerisourceBergen ($6.08B) rank in the top nine on TRICARE and military pharmacy contracts.
6. Northrop Grumman is the lowest lobbying spender of the Big 5 ($8.84M) and still ranks 5th in DoD contracts ($18.58B).
7. General Dynamics is the laggard of the Big 5 at $1,572 per $1 — the lowest ratio of the top five by contract volume.
8. The ratio understates real influence-spend ROI. Federal Senate LDA filings exclude PAC contributions, trade-association dues, dark-money grants, and state-level lobbying — every dollar of those would lower the per-dollar return.

In this article: Leaderboard · Methodology · What the ratio actually measures · Why the Big 5 beat the industry average · L3Harris efficiency outlier · Healthcare crossover · Caveats · Visuals & reuse · Press lift-out · FAQ

Problems this solves:

• How to cite a defense lobbying ROI ratio with source links to the original Senate LDA and USAspending filings
• How to compare individual defense contractors' federal lobbying efficiency for FY2024
• How to source the gap between the widely-cited $1,000:$1 industry figure and the prime-contractor reality
• How to find FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations by company without paying GovWin or Bloomberg Government
• How to identify which top-ten DoD contractors are not traditional arms manufacturers
• How to caveat a lobbying ROI claim against PAC, dark-money, and state-level spend

The FY2024 defense lobbying ROI leaderboard

This is the data the post exists to put on the record. Every figure links to its primary source.

FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations from Defense Security Monitor's Top 100 Defense Contractors 2024 (compiled from USAspending.gov). Lobbying figures from OpenSecrets' 2024 defense lobbying tabulation, drawing on Senate LDA quarterly disclosures. Figures verified against company-level OpenSecrets profiles linked above. Pricing and figures based on publicly available filings as of May 2026 and may revise as 2024 Q4 lobbying amendments post.

Methodology

Every figure in the leaderboard comes from a public government disclosure. Nothing was estimated, modeled, or projected.

Contract data. FY2024 Department of Defense prime-contract obligations, as compiled by Defense Security Monitor's "Top 100 Defense Contractors 2024" published November 12, 2025. DSM's source is the Federal Procurement Data System feed surfaced through USAspending.gov. We restricted the analysis to DoD prime contracts only — contracts with other federal agencies (DOE, NASA, HHS, VA) are excluded. For Lockheed Martin specifically, this is a meaningful narrowing: the company's all-federal contract total in FY2023 was $70.85B versus a $50.75B DoD-only figure in FY2024.

Lobbying data. 2024 calendar-year federal lobbying expenditures as tabulated by OpenSecrets from Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) quarterly filings (Q1 through Q4 2024). The LDA database is the authoritative source — every registered lobbying firm and every covered in-house lobbyist must file quarterly with the Senate Office of Public Records. OpenSecrets' tables aggregate parent-and-subsidiary filings and reconcile registrant name changes (Raytheon → RTX, AmerisourceBergen → Cencora).

Ratio definition. Contracts per $1 lobbied = (FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations) ÷ (2024 calendar-year federal lobbying expenditure). The fiscal year and calendar year do not align (FY2024 = Oct 2023 – Sep 2024; CY 2024 = Jan – Dec 2024), creating a three-month overlap mismatch on either end. We accept this. Both are the most recent complete-year datasets available as of May 2026, and shifting either to align would require waiting for FY2025 DoD totals (not available until late 2026) or splitting lobbying into fiscal-year quarters that the Senate LDA does not publish that way.

Tools used. ApifyForge publishes two Apify actors that wrap the upstream public APIs used here. The usaspending-search Apify actor wraps the USAspending.gov API for federal contract awards and obligations queries. The senate-lobbying-search Apify actor wraps the Senate LDA disclosure database for registrant, filing, and expenditure queries. The leaderboard above was assembled by joining the outputs of those two actors against the OpenSecrets parent-company reconciliation tables. The point of those wrappers is the same as the point of this post: federal influence and procurement data is already public, but it is not in a form where a journalist or researcher can produce a per-company table in an afternoon without writing pagination, retry, and schema-validation code.

What we did not do. We did not request data through FOIA. We did not buy GovWin or Bloomberg Government access. We did not use any non-public dataset. Anyone with the source URLs above and a few hours can re-derive the leaderboard.

What the lobbying ROI ratio actually measures

The number $2,223 per $1 is a quotient, not a causal claim. It says: across these nine companies in this fiscal year, every dollar disclosed to the Senate as federal lobbying expense corresponded to $2,223 of disclosed DoD prime-contract obligations.

It does not say lobbying caused the contracts. The vast majority of DoD prime spending is set by congressional authorisation and appropriation cycles that long predate any single year's lobbying push. Lockheed Martin would receive most of its F-35 obligations in 2024 regardless of its lobbying spend in 2024, because the F-35 program of record was set decades earlier.

What the ratio does measure is the scale at which influence-spend disclosure under-reports the gravitational pull of these companies on federal contracting outcomes. A registrant filing $12.67M of lobbying activity is doing so against a contracting position thousands of times larger. The disclosure regime captures the cost of advocacy, not the value of the position being advocated for.

This is why the ratio matters for policy writing and why journalists keep asking for an updated version of the figure: it puts the disclosure-vs-stake gap in numbers a reader can hold in one head.

Why the Big 5 beat the industry average

The often-cited "$1 in lobbying produces about $1,000 in defense contracts" figure is a defensible aggregate across all defense-coded LDA registrants and contracts — including the long tail of mid-tier subcontractors, software vendors, and one-off filings. The more rigorous academic version, Stephen Semler's calculation at the Security Policy Reform Institute, comes in at $1,813 per $1 over the 2001–2021 window for the top five weapons firms specifically.

The Big 5 are not in that long tail. They are at the extreme top of both distributions: highest contract dollars and among the highest lobbying spends. The ratio holds up there, but the absolute numbers are large enough that small movements in either column produce large movements in the quotient.

There is also a structural reason. Mid-tier contractors lobby on issues that affect specific programs — a single munition line, a single sensor contract, a single facility's BRAC exposure. Their lobbying spend per contract dollar is higher because each contract dollar requires a discrete advocacy push. The primes lobby on the budget envelope itself: top-line DoD authorisation, classified-program funding levels, multi-year procurement authority. One dollar of advocacy at the envelope level scales across a much larger pool of contracts.

That structural difference is what produces the 2.2x gap between the industry-wide ratio and the Big 5 ratio.

Why L3Harris looks like the efficiency leader

L3Harris's ratio of $3,202 per $1 is the second-highest in the leaderboard despite the company ranking only 8th by contract size. The cause is unusually low federal lobbying expenditure: $2.49M in 2024, against a peer group spending $5M to $13.5M.

There are at least three plausible explanations and the public filings do not disambiguate them.

First, L3Harris's product mix skews to communications systems and electronic warfare — categories with concentrated DoD procurement decisions. Fewer programs to advocate for can mean fewer dollars of LDA-reportable lobbying.

Second, L3Harris invests heavily in trade-association memberships (NDIA, AIA) and PAC contributions, neither of which appear in the Senate LDA expenditure column. Total influence spend is plausibly in line with peers; federal-lobbying-only spend is not.

Third, the company is a 2019 merger between L3 Technologies and Harris Corporation. Post-merger consolidation of lobbying functions typically reduces total registered LDA spend without reducing the underlying advocacy.

The leaderboard reports the disclosed federal-lobbying ratio. Anyone using L3Harris's $3,202 figure as evidence of "lobbying efficiency" should disclose those alternatives.

Why Humana and Cencora show up here

Two of the top nine DoD contractors are health companies, not arms manufacturers. Humana ranked 6th with $8.03B in DoD contracts; Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) ranked 9th with $6.08B.

The contracts are TRICARE and military-pharmacy obligations. TRICARE, the DoD's health program for active-duty service members, retirees, and dependents, is one of the largest federal health contracting lines and is administered through commercial managed-care contracts. Humana holds the East Region TRICARE managed-care contract. Cencora is a major military-pharmacy distributor.

This is a recurring blind spot in defense-industrial-base reporting. The "top 10 defense contractors" framing implies an arms-industry list, but the procurement reality is that two of the top ten DoD prime-contract recipients in FY2024 sell health services to service members. Stories that omit them under-state DoD's actual buying-power footprint outside arms.

The lobbying ROI for these two companies is also lower than the arms primes ($1,662 for Humana; $1,842 for Cencora), reflecting that healthcare lobbying is a bigger, more contested issue area requiring more advocacy spend per contract dollar than program-of-record arms lobbying.

Caveats journalists will probe

A research figure this striking will be challenged. The challenges are legitimate. We list them up-front so the post survives sourcing review.

Lobbying does not equal total influence spend. Senate LDA filings cover federal lobbying expenditure: registered lobbyists, in-house lobbyists, and the costs allocable to their advocacy. The filings exclude PAC contributions (typically $1M to $4M per company per cycle), trade-association membership dues (NDIA, AIA, Aerospace Industries Association), dark-money grants to 501(c)(4) policy advocacy organisations, and state-level lobbying. Add those in and every company's per-dollar return falls, sometimes by a factor of 2 to 3. The $2,223 ratio is therefore a floor on disclosed-spend ROI, not the whole picture.

DoD-only contracts. Every company in the leaderboard receives substantial contracts from non-DoD federal agencies — DOE for Lockheed and General Dynamics nuclear work, NASA for Boeing, HHS for Humana and Cencora outside TRICARE. All-federal contract dollars are higher; ratios computed against all-federal totals would push the ROI numbers up further.

Single-year snapshot. Multi-year analyses smooth out single-year contract spikes (program awards land in lumpy fiscal years). The Quincy Institute's "Profits of War" series — most recently the 2020-2024 update reporting roughly $771B over five years to the top five contractors — produces ratios in the same ballpark across longer windows. We chose FY2024 because it is the freshest complete fiscal year available; the per-year volatility means readers should treat the ratio as "around $2,000 per $1 across the top primes," not as a precise constant.

Causation is not implied. Advocacy spend correlates with contracting outcomes; the causal arrow is contested. Defense companies need contracts because they sell almost exclusively to government, regardless of lobbying. Lobbying budget tracks contract budget for structural reasons (you advocate at the scale of your stake), not only because lobbying produces the contracts.

Parent-and-subsidiary attribution. OpenSecrets reconciles parent and subsidiary filings; we relied on that reconciliation. A small number of subsidiary filings (acquisitions completed in 2024, joint ventures) may be attributed to the wrong parent in either direction. The numbers in the leaderboard are correct to the best resolution that public reconciliation tables provide as of May 2026.

Embeddable visuals and attribution

Three chart concepts surface this dataset cleanly. We are publishing the underlying numbers above so any newsroom can produce these visuals in their own house style. Reuse with attribution to ApifyForge and the underlying primary sources is welcome.

Chart 1 — Per-company ratio bar chart. Horizontal bar chart, nine companies sorted by contracts-per-$1-lobbied. Highlight Lockheed Martin ($4,005) and L3Harris ($3,202) as outliers above the $2,223 group average; highlight the OpenSecrets industry-wide $1,000 benchmark as a reference line.

Chart 2 — Lobbying spend vs contract volume scatter. X-axis: 2024 federal lobbying spend ($M). Y-axis: FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations ($B). Nine points labelled with company names. Annotate the diagonal $2,223:$1 trend line; annotate L3Harris as the most-efficient point above the line and General Dynamics as the least-efficient point below it.

Chart 3 — Big 5 vs industry benchmark. Two grouped columns: Big 5 aggregate ratio ($2,309 per $1) versus OpenSecrets industry-wide benchmark (~$1,000 per $1). Source labels: USAspending.gov / Senate LDA / OpenSecrets.

A short Open Data note at the foot of any reused visual should read: "Data: USAspending.gov FY2024 prime-contract obligations + Senate LDA 2024 calendar-year disclosures, compiled May 2026. Source roundup at apifyforge.com/blog/defense-contractor-lobbying-roi-2024."

Pre-packaged quote for press

Newsroom-ready lift-out paragraph, designed to drop into a story without rewriting:

According to a 2026 ApifyForge analysis of FY2024 federal contracting data and 2024 Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, [Company X] received $[N] in Department of Defense prime-contract obligations for every $1 it spent on federal lobbying — [Y]× the widely-cited industry-wide ratio of roughly $1,000 per $1 in defense-spending coverage. Across the top nine DoD prime contractors, the aggregate ratio was $2,223 per $1, on a combined $166.7B in contracts and $75.0M in lobbying.

Per-company values for the bracketed fields are in the leaderboard table above.

For a Lockheed-specific lift:

Lockheed Martin received $4,005 in FY2024 Department of Defense prime-contract obligations for every $1 it spent on federal lobbying in calendar-year 2024 — about four times the widely-cited industry-wide ratio of $1,000 per $1 — based on a 2026 ApifyForge analysis of USAspending.gov contracting data and Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings.

For an industry-shape lift:

The five largest US defense primes — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman — collectively spent $59.16M on federal lobbying in 2024 and received $136.57B in Department of Defense prime contracts in fiscal year 2024, a ratio of $2,309 per $1, according to a 2026 ApifyForge analysis of public Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings and USAspending.gov data.

Cite the underlying sources directly when possible. The ApifyForge analysis assembles the data, but USAspending and the Senate LDA database are the primary records.

What are the alternatives to this kind of analysis?

There are roughly four approaches a researcher can take to produce a defense-lobbying-ROI table. Each makes different trade-offs.

1. Manual scrape and Excel join. Open the OpenSecrets industry page, download per-company lobbying summaries, manually pull the DSM Top 100 list, paste into a spreadsheet. Workable for one snapshot. Painful for any cadence (quarterly updates, multi-year panels) and brittle to registrant-name changes (RTX, Cencora) and parent-subsidiary reconciliation.
2. GovWin or Bloomberg Government. Commercial procurement-intelligence platforms with curated contractor profiles and lobbying overlays. Comprehensive. Pricing typically $5,000 to $20,000 per seat per year and licence terms commonly restrict redistribution of derived figures in published reporting.
3. Direct API integration with USAspending and Senate LDA. Both are public APIs. You write the pagination, retry, schema-validation, and parent-subsidiary reconciliation yourself, plus you maintain the registrant-name change mapping every cycle. Possible. It is also a maintained service rather than an afternoon's work — the LDA schema in particular has historically shifted between filing system upgrades.
4. A turnkey actor pair plus a manual reconciliation step. The usaspending-search Apify actor and the senate-lobbying-search Apify actor handle the API integration, pagination, and schema mapping for the two upstream sources; the researcher does the join and the parent-subsidiary reconciliation against the OpenSecrets crosswalk. This is the path used to assemble this leaderboard.

Each approach has trade-offs in cost, depth, redistribution rights, and operational maturity. The right choice depends on whether the analysis is a one-off, a running publication, or a primary-research subscription deliverable.

Comparison table — paths to a defense lobbying ROI dataset

Pricing and features based on publicly available information as of May 2026 and may change.

Best practices for citing this kind of figure

1. Always cite the underlying primary source first. The Senate LDA database and USAspending.gov are the authoritative records. OpenSecrets is a tabulation layer over LDA. ApifyForge's analysis is a join layer over both.
2. Disclose the FY-versus-CY mismatch. A reader who notices the three-month overlap will discount your figure if you do not flag it first.
3. Distinguish federal lobbying from total influence spend. PAC, dark money, and trade-association dues are not in the LDA totals. Saying "lobbying" when you mean "federal Senate LDA expenditure" is the single most common mis-citation.
4. Use the per-company ratio when the story is about a specific contractor. Use the aggregate $2,223 figure when the story is about the industry. The Big 5 ratio ($2,309) is the right anchor for stories about industry concentration.
5. Avoid causal language. "Companies that lobby get contracts" is a correlation. "Lobbying produces contracts" is a causal claim that this dataset cannot support on its own.
6. Update when Q4 amendments post. Senate LDA Q4 filings often see amendment activity through Q1 of the following year. The 2024 figures may shift by 1-3% as late-amendment filings post.
7. Match the ratio to its scope. $4,005 is the Lockheed Martin DoD-only ratio. Lockheed's all-federal contract total would push the ratio higher; do not use one ratio to argue the other.
8. Link the actors when the story is methodological. When the story is about how the analysis was assembled, link usaspending-search and senate-lobbying-search for repeatability. When the story is about the contractors themselves, the data sources are what the reader needs.

Common mistakes when reporting defense lobbying ROI

1. Using the widely-cited $1,000:$1 industry figure to describe Big-5 behaviour. The industry-wide figure averages a long tail of small filers. The primes' ratio is roughly twice that, and Stephen Semler's canonical $1,813:$1 figure for the top 5 weapons firms over 2001–2021 sits between the two.
2. Including non-DoD federal contracts in the numerator. All-federal totals push the ratio up. Mixing scopes mid-article is the most common factual slip.
3. Calling the LDA total "what the company spent on lobbying" when the company also spent on PACs, dark money, and trade-association dues. The LDA total is one disclosure category, not the whole influence-spend stack.
4. Treating the ratio as causal. Every company in the leaderboard would receive most of its 2024 contracts from prior-year programs of record regardless of 2024 lobbying.
5. Not reconciling registrant-name changes. Raytheon → RTX (2023) and AmerisourceBergen → Cencora (2023) trip up automated analyses that do not consult OpenSecrets' parent-subsidiary crosswalk.

Common misconceptions

"The industry says defense companies get $1,000 per $1 lobbied, so that's the whole story." The widely-cited industry-wide figure is a defensible average across the full LDA defense industry filing population. The top primes sit far above that average, at roughly $2,000 to $4,000 per $1, and Stephen Semler's $1,813:$1 calculation for the top 5 weapons firms over 2001–2021 splits the difference. The industry average is correct; it is just not the right anchor for a story about the top contractors specifically.

"The ratio is the same as a return on investment." It is not. ROI implies a causal chain — money in produces money out. Lobbying spend correlates with contract volume largely because both scale with the size of the company's federal-revenue position. The ratio is a disclosure-vs-stake snapshot, not a treatment effect.

"Federal lobbying disclosure captures most of what defense companies spend on influence." It captures registered federal lobbying expense. It excludes federal PAC contributions, federal trade-association dues, federal dark-money grants, and all state-level activity. Aggregate influence spend is meaningfully larger than the LDA line.

Mini case study — the Lockheed Martin row

The single most-cited number from this analysis is going to be Lockheed Martin's $4,005. Worth walking through how that figure was assembled, because every Lockheed-citing story will need to defend it.

FY2024 DoD contracts: $50.75B. Defense Security Monitor's Top 100 2024 ranks Lockheed Martin first by a wide margin. The figure is DoD prime-contract obligations only, sourced from the FPDS feed exposed via USAspending.gov. The prior-year FY2023 all-federal Lockheed total was $70.85B; the gap (~$20B) is non-DoD federal work, primarily DOE nuclear weapons-complex contracts at Sandia and other sites. Some stories will mistakenly cite the all-federal figure against DoD-only lobbying ratios. The leaderboard above does not.

2024 federal lobbying: $12.67M. OpenSecrets' Lockheed Martin organisation profile shows $12.67M in 2024 calendar-year LDA expenditure, sourced from Q1-Q4 Senate LDA filings. Lockheed's PAC activity in 2024 was a separate line item ($1,568,000 in PAC contributions to federal candidates plus an additional ~$2.5M in PAC-to-PAC and party transfers, totalling $4.07M of 2024 PAC fundraising activity per OpenSecrets) and is not included.

Ratio: $4,005. $50,750,000,000 ÷ $12,670,000 = $4,005.52 per $1 lobbied. Reported as $4,005.

What the figure does and does not say. It says Lockheed Martin's disclosed federal-lobbying-to-DoD-prime-contract ratio in 2024 was four times the industry-wide benchmark. It does not say lobbying caused the contracts. It does not include the $4.07M of 2024 PAC fundraising activity ($1.57M of which went to federal candidates), an unknown but non-trivial trade-association budget at AIA and NDIA, and zero state-level lobbying (Lockheed has facilities in roughly 20 states, all of which see state-level activity). Including those would shrink the ratio toward the $2,000 per $1 group average.

These figures reflect one fiscal year for one company and will shift as 2024 LDA Q4 amendments post and as FY2025 contract data lands.

Implementation checklist — for re-running this analysis

The full reproduction requires four steps. Anyone with access to public APIs and a few hours can repeat them.

1. Pull FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations by recipient from USAspending.gov, filtered to awarding_agency_id for Department of Defense, fiscal year 2024.
2. Pull 2024 calendar-year Senate LDA filings by registrant, summed across Q1-Q4, for the candidate parent companies identified in step 1.
3. Reconcile parent-and-subsidiary names using OpenSecrets' organisation crosswalk (RTX vs Raytheon, Cencora vs AmerisourceBergen, Huntington Ingalls vs HII, etc).
4. Compute contracts ÷ lobbying for each parent, sort descending, publish with caveats.

Steps 1 and 2 are where most of the engineering effort lives. The ApifyForge actor wrappers exist because pagination, retry, schema validation, and rate-limit recovery against both upstream APIs is several hundred lines of operational code apiece.

Limitations

This analysis has explicit, citable limits. We list them so a critical reader can decide how far to take the figures.

1. One-fiscal-year snapshot. The $2,223 ratio is the FY2024-and-CY2024 aggregate. Multi-year panels will smooth the figure. Single-year reads should be treated as point estimates with $200-$400 of plausible noise from contract-award lumpiness.
2. DoD prime contracts only. Subcontract value, non-DoD federal contracts, FMS pass-throughs, and grant-funded R&D are not in the contracts column.
3. Federal LDA expenditure only. PAC contributions, 501(c)(4) advocacy grants, trade-association membership dues, and state-level lobbying are not in the lobbying column. The disclosed-spend ROI is a floor; total-influence-spend ROI is lower.
4. Top 9 only. Selection follows DSM's Top 100 ranking. Companies ranked 10 through 100 are not in this dataset; the patterns may differ for them.
5. Snapshot date May 2026. Senate LDA Q4 amendments, FY2024 contract obligation revisions, and parent-subsidiary corporate actions after that date are not reflected.

Key facts about defense contractor lobbying ROI 2024

• The top 9 DoD contractors received $166.66B in FY2024 prime-contract obligations against $74.96M in 2024 federal lobbying expenditure, a ratio of $2,223 per $1.
• Lockheed Martin's 2024 ratio of $4,005 per $1 is approximately four times the widely-cited industry-wide benchmark of roughly $1,000 per $1.
• L3Harris recorded the second-highest ratio at $3,202 per $1, on the lowest absolute lobbying spend in the top 9 ($2.49M).
• General Dynamics recorded the lowest ratio of the Big 5 at $1,572 per $1.
• Two of the top nine DoD contractors are health-services companies — Humana ($8.03B, TRICARE managed care) and Cencora ($6.08B, military pharmacy distribution).
• Big 5 aggregate: $136.57B in DoD contracts against $59.16M in federal lobbying, a $2,309 ratio.
• All figures cite Senate LDA quarterly filings, USAspending.gov FPDS-derived prime-contract obligations, and OpenSecrets' parent-company reconciliation tables, captured in May 2026.

Short glossary

LDA — Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, the federal statute requiring registered lobbyists and covered in-house lobbyists to file quarterly expenditure disclosures with the Senate Office of Public Records.

Prime contract obligation — A federal-contracting term for the dollar amount the government has committed to a prime contractor in a given fiscal year. Distinct from outlays (cash actually spent) and total contract value (multi-year ceiling).

FPDS — Federal Procurement Data System, the upstream feed of federal-contract transaction records that USAspending.gov surfaces.

OpenSecrets parent-and-subsidiary reconciliation — OpenSecrets' editorial layer that maps subsidiary LDA filings to corporate parents, e.g. consolidating Sikorsky Aircraft filings under Lockheed Martin.

DoD prime contract — A direct contract between the Department of Defense and a top-tier vendor. Excludes subcontracts further down the supply chain and contracts with other federal agencies.

Industry-wide ratio — Aggregate-defense calculation across all defense-coded LDA registrants, widely cited at roughly $1,000 per $1 in defense-spending coverage. The most rigorous version of this calculation is Stephen Semler's $1,813-per-$1 figure for the top five weapons firms over 2001–2021, published via the Security Policy Reform Institute.

Broader applicability

The same join-and-divide pattern produces useful ratios in adjacent federal-data spaces beyond defense.

1. Pharmaceutical lobbying ROI — HHS and CMS contracts and Medicare reimbursement totals, joined against PhRMA and individual-company LDA filings.
2. Tech-sector federal contracting — GSA, DoD, and IC contracts to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Palantir, joined against their LDA filings.
3. Energy-sector federal contracting — DOE site-management contracts and Strategic Petroleum Reserve contracts, joined against energy-industry LDA filings.
4. Healthcare-managed-care procurement — TRICARE, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid managed-care contracts, joined against insurer LDA filings.
5. Compliance and oversight reporting — Any federal-receipt analysis that needs to be cited against primary-source disclosures, including federal compliance-screening workflows and government data comparisons across data sources.

The methodology generalises because both inputs — federal contracts and federal lobbying expenditure — are public, structured, and queryable through stable APIs.

When you need this data

You probably need this analysis if any of the following applies.

• You are reporting on FY2024 defense procurement, contractor concentration, or influence spending and need a citable per-company ratio.
• You are drafting an op-ed, white paper, or committee briefing that requires source-linked figures rather than restated headline factoids.
• You are running a recurring analysis program and need an actor-driven pipeline against USAspending and the Senate LDA.
• You want to compare the Big 5 ratio against the OpenSecrets industry-wide benchmark in a single visual.

You probably do not need this analysis if any of the following applies.

• You are doing causal inference on lobbying-to-contract pathways. This dataset does not support causal claims and the structural confounders are large.
• You need real-time tracking. Senate LDA filings are quarterly with amendments lagging by several months.
• You need contractor-level analysis below the top 9. The leaderboard is restricted to the largest filers.
• You are comparing across very different fiscal years without smoothing single-year spikes.

For broader federal contracting and grant-monitoring patterns, the operational toolkit and cadence are different from the one-shot research join described here.

Frequently asked questions

What was the defense lobbying ROI in 2024?

The top 9 DoD contractors received an aggregate $2,223 in FY2024 federal defense prime contracts for every $1 they spent on 2024 federal lobbying, on a combined $166.7B in contracts and $75.0M in lobbying spend. Per-company ratios range from $1,548 (Huntington Ingalls) to $4,005 (Lockheed Martin). The figure is more than twice the widely-cited industry-wide ratio of roughly $1,000 per $1 (which averages a long tail of smaller defense filers) and 1.2x Stephen Semler's canonical $1,813:$1 calculation covering the top five weapons firms over 2001–2021.

Which defense contractor had the highest lobbying ROI in 2024?

Lockheed Martin had the highest ROI at $4,005 in DoD prime-contract obligations per $1 of federal lobbying — $50.75B in FY2024 contracts against $12.67M in 2024 LDA expenditure. L3Harris Technologies was second at $3,202 per $1, despite ranking only 8th by absolute contract size, because L3Harris reported the lowest federal-lobbying spend of the top 9 at $2.49M. Both ratios are roughly three to four times the OpenSecrets industry benchmark.

Where does the data for this analysis come from?

Contract data comes from FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations as compiled by Defense Security Monitor's Top 100 Defense Contractors 2024 list, sourced upstream from USAspending.gov and the Federal Procurement Data System. Lobbying data comes from 2024 calendar-year Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings tabulated by OpenSecrets. Every figure in the leaderboard links back to its primary source, and the methodology section above describes the join.

Is this ROI figure causal?

No. The ratio measures a quotient between disclosed lobbying spend and disclosed contract obligations in the same period. It does not establish that lobbying produced the contracts. Most prime-contract obligations in any given year flow from programs of record set by congressional authorisation cycles long before the lobbying year being measured. The ratio captures the disclosure-to-stake gap, not a treatment effect, and any reporting that uses it should avoid causal language.

Why is this number different from the widely-cited $1,000 per $1 industry figure?

The industry-wide benchmark averages all defense-coded LDA registrants, including a long tail of mid-tier subcontractors and one-off filers. The top 9 prime contractors are at the extreme top of both contract volume and lobbying spend, and their ratio is structurally higher because they lobby on the budget envelope (top-line DoD authorisation) rather than program-specific issues. The most rigorous version of the industry-wide calculation, Stephen Semler's analysis at the Security Policy Reform Institute, produces $1,813:$1 for the top five firms over 2001–2021 — closer to but still below our 2024 reading. All three figures are correct for their respective scopes; the gaps reflect long-tail averaging and time-window effects.

Does the ratio include PAC donations and trade-association dues?

No. The lobbying figure is federal Senate LDA expenditure only. It excludes PAC contributions to federal candidates and committees, dues paid to trade associations such as NDIA and AIA, grants to 501(c)(4) advocacy organisations, and state-level lobbying. Adding any of those in lowers the per-dollar return because the denominator grows. The $2,223 ratio is therefore best read as a floor on disclosed-spend ROI, not as the full-influence-spend ROI.

How can I reproduce this analysis?

Pull FY2024 DoD prime-contract obligations by recipient from USAspending.gov, pull 2024 calendar-year Senate LDA filings by registrant, reconcile parent-and-subsidiary names using OpenSecrets' organisation crosswalk, then compute contracts divided by lobbying per parent. The two upstream APIs handle the heavy lifting; the wrapper actors usaspending-search and senate-lobbying-search handle pagination, retries, and schema validation against the Senate LDA and USAspending APIs respectively, leaving the join and the parent-subsidiary reconciliation as the analyst's part of the work.

Why are Humana and Cencora in a defense contractor leaderboard?

Both are top-9 DoD prime-contract recipients in FY2024 because they hold large TRICARE and military-pharmacy contracts. Humana administers TRICARE managed-care services in the East Region. Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) is a major military-pharmacy distributor. The Department of Defense buys substantial healthcare services for active-duty service members, retirees, and dependents, and those obligations land on the same DoD prime-contract list as F-35 and Virginia-class submarine awards. Defense-industrial-base reporting that omits health companies under-states DoD's actual procurement footprint.

Ryan Clinton publishes the usaspending-search and senate-lobbying-search Apify actors at apifyforge.com, where federal-contracting and lobbying-disclosure data is wrapped for repeatable research.

Last updated: May 2026. This analysis focuses on US federal defense procurement and Senate LDA disclosures, but the same join-and-divide methodology applies broadly to any sector where federal contracting and lobbying data are both publicly disclosed.