Every Iowa legislator’s campaign committee reports the money it receives to the Iowa Ethics & Campaign Finance Disclosure Commission. The Commission publishes those reports on the Iowa Data Hub under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. We load them every week, and every day after a filing deadline, then total and summarize them. Full credits are on the Sources page.
We show the current two-year election cycle and the one before it. A cycle is named for the election that ends it: 2025–26 runs from January 2025 through December 2026. Senators serve four-year terms, so half of them aren’t on the ballot in any cycle and usually raise little in it.
What we count
- Individuals: people giving their own money. We count their gifts and sort them by size, but we never show their names or addresses, and we don’t store them.
- PACs: political action committees, set up by unions, businesses, trade groups and causes to give to candidates. Party caucus funds are registered as PACs, so they count here too.
- Party committees: the state party and county party committees.
- Other candidates: one politician’s campaign giving to another’s.
- Businesses and other: businesses and groups giving directly, committees that have since closed, and small gifts reported as one lump sum.
Education money
Our editors mark donors whose money is about schools, such as a teachers’ union PAC or a school-choice PAC. The “education money” figure adds up gifts from those donors only. A donor we haven’t marked isn’t counted there, even if its members work in schools.
What it leaves out
These totals only cover money given to the legislator’s own campaign committee for the Iowa House or Senate. A legislator running for another office, such as Congress, raises that money in a separate committee reported to the Federal Election Commission, and it isn’t included here. Money that outside groups spend on ads or mail for or against a candidate is reported separately and isn’t included. Neither is money a legislator spent.
Reports are filed by the campaigns, and amended ones replace earlier numbers when we next load them. If something looks wrong, the Commission’s own search shows each report as filed.