How the receipts are made

What a receipt shows

Each vote page splits members by how they voted and adds up the money each member’s campaign received from PACs and other political committees during the 2025–26 election cycle (January 1, 2025 through each committee’s latest filing). Totals are then grouped by industry. Because the Yes and No groups are different sizes, the industry bars show the average per member (group total ÷ members in the group with FEC data); group totals and medians are shown alongside.

The site reports what was given and how members voted. It does not claim that any contribution caused any vote.

Sources

• House votes: Office of the Clerk roll-call XML (clerk.house.gov/evs/{year}/roll{nnn}.xml), indexed with the Congress.gov API /house-vote endpoint (beta). Members are identified by their Bioguide ID, which the Clerk includes for every vote.
• Senate votes: U.S. Senate roll-call XML (senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/…). Senators are matched to Bioguide IDs with the public-domain unitedstates/congress-legislators roster.
• Money: Federal Election Commission bulk files for the 2026 cycle, downloaded directly from fec.gov:
  • pas226.zip — contributions from committees to candidates (file dated Oct 18, 2026, 12:22 PM ET; 221,865 rows; SHA-256 653330a100e83c25…)
  • cm26.zip — committee master: committee type, designation, connected organization (Oct 22, 2026, 1:40 AM ET)
  • weball26.zip — candidate financial summaries (Oct 22, 2026, 1:39 AM ET)
  • ccl26.zip — candidate–committee linkages (Oct 22, 2026, 1:40 AM ET)
• Linking members to FEC: FEC candidate IDs from congress-legislators, matched on the member’s current chamber. Where that roster lacked the ID used this cycle, a candidate in the FEC summary file is matched only if office, state, surname and first name all agree; those pages say so.

The data refreshes nightly. FEC bulk files are rebuilt by the FEC on its own schedule, typically weekly for pas2, so money can lag votes by days or weeks.

What is counted

• From pas2, transaction types 24K (contribution made to a nonaffiliated committee) and 24Z (in-kind contribution), excluding memo entries. Refunds appear as negative amounts and are netted.
• Transactions are attributed to a member when the transaction’s candidate ID is one of that member’s FEC IDs for the chamber they now serve in.
• Independent expenditures, party coordinated spending, super PAC spending, and dark money are not included: they are not contributions to the campaign.
• Individual contributions are shown only as a single total per member, taken from the candidate’s own summary report. They are not classified by employer or industry in this version (see limits below).

Industry classification

There is no free, official industry code for FEC committees. The OpenSecrets API, which many sites relied on, was discontinued in April 2025. Receipts Data uses its own rules-based approach, built only from public FEC fields:

1. Structure comes straight from the FEC committee master: corporate, trade/membership, labor, cooperative, leadership PAC, non-connected PAC, party committee, or candidate committee.
2. Industry is assigned by matching the committee’s registered name and its FEC-reported connected organization against an ordered list of keyword and company-name rules (for example, “Lockheed Martin” → Defense & aerospace; “National Association of Realtors” → Finance, insurance & real estate). Labor committees are assigned to Labor. A short list of manual overrides corrects known mistakes.
3. Leadership PACs, party committees and other candidates’ committees are kept as their own groups because their money comes from many industries and cannot honestly be assigned to one. Business PACs whose name gives no industry clue are labeled “Business or trade group, industry not identified.”

Industry groups used: 13 industries — Finance, insurance & real estate; Health; Energy & natural resources; Communications & technology; Defense & aerospace; Transportation; Agriculture & food; Construction & engineering; Lawyers, accountants & professional services; Retail, manufacturing & consumer business; Labor unions; Education, public sector & nonprofits; Issue & ideological groups.

Coverage, current data

Of $367,389,889 in itemized PAC and committee contributions (net) to the 539 voting members with data, 75% is assigned to an industry. The rest:

Business or trade group, industry not identified	$29.0M	7.9%
Leadership PACs (members of Congress)	$37.0M	10%
Party committees	$1.50M	0.4%
Other candidate committees	$8.88M	2.4%
Non-connected PACs, purpose not identified	$16.7M	4.5%

Limits of the classification

• Keyword rules can misfile a committee whose name is ambiguous or whose business has changed. Conglomerates are assigned to one primary industry.
• “Issue & ideological groups” mixes causes across the spectrum; it is a description of structure, not a political label.
• The rules are fixed in code and applied identically to every member and every vote. Corrections are welcome and are applied site-wide.

Two totals that can differ

Member pages show PAC and committee money two ways: as reported by the receiving campaign (FEC candidate summary) and as reported by the giving committees (pas2). Only the giver-side records say who gave, so industry breakdowns use them. For the median member, the giver-side total is 90% of the candidate-reported figure. Differences come from filing timing, joint fundraising transfers, contributions from committees that file only with other agencies, and amendments.

What this site will never publish

Federal law limits how contributor information from FEC reports can be used. Under 52 U.S.C. 30111(a)(4) and 11 CFR 104.15, the names and addresses of individual contributors copied from FEC reports may not be sold or used for commercial purposes or to solicit contributions. Receipts Data therefore:

• never displays, stores for publication, or exports the name, address, employer or occupation of any individual contributor;
• publishes only aggregates — committee and PAC totals, and totals by industry and committee type;
• names committees (PACs, party and candidate committees), which are registered political organizations, not individuals;
• drops committee treasurer names and street addresses from the FEC committee file before any processing;
• offers bulk files that follow the same rule: aggregates only.

An automated check runs on every build and fails the build if individual-contributor fields appear in the published site.

Which votes are “notable”

The home page lists recent notable votes using a fixed rule: votes whose question is final passage (including under suspension of the rules), adoption of a resolution or joint resolution, a conference report or motion to concur, a veto override, a nomination, or impeachment — excluding rules for consideration, the previous question, motions to recommit, table or adjourn. 234 of 570 ingested votes meet the rule. Every vote has a page regardless.

Other known limits

• Time window. All money is from the 2025–26 cycle. Senators raise over six years, so a senator not up in 2026 may show little recent money.
• Members without data. 6 voting members have no itemized PAC money in the current file (for example, newly appointed members or campaigns that report no PAC receipts). They count toward vote tallies but not toward averages.
• Vote coverage. 119th Congress, 2nd session (2026). Earlier sessions can be added with the same pipeline.
• Vote titles. Titles and questions are taken verbatim from the official records.

Corrections

Every figure links to its public source. If you find an error, the source files and the classification rules are versioned so any correction can be traced.