The Foreign Influence PR Study — 2026

Everything-PR Research · Foreign Influence Index 2026 · Inaugural Edition

Inaugural edition. Who pays, who earns, and what the FARA data reveals about the most concentrated corner of the U.S. PR industry.

By the Everything-PR Research Team
First published April 21, 2026 · Updated and republished June 2, 2026

Roughly $5 billion has flowed from foreign governments, state-owned entities, and overseas principals to U.S. lobbying, public-affairs, and communications firms since 2016. Every dollar disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). It is one of the most transparent segments of the communications industry — and one of the least studied.

This is the inaugural edition of the Everything-PR Foreign Influence Index — a recurring annual study built from DOJ FARA eFile records, OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch aggregations, Quincy Institute research, and Bloomberg Government revenue rankings. It examines who pays, who earns, and what the data reveals about the firms that dominate foreign-principal public relations in the United States.

The 2026 Headlines

Three findings define this year's data.

1. Fewer than 20 firms capture most of the market. The bottom 250 FARA registrants combined earn less than the top five. A single firm — BGR Group — logged 16,866 discrete political activities for foreign principals during 2022–23 alone, a volume structurally impossible for any firm outside the top tier to match. Foreign-influence PR is one of the most concentrated specialist categories inside the broader U.S. communications industry.

2. Japan has quietly overtaken China. Japanese principals led 2024 disclosed spending at $48.5 million — driven by JETRO and an 8% year-over-year increase in Japanese corporate FARA activity reported by Nikkei in mid-2025. China's disclosed spend collapsed more than 60% in a single year, from $85.4M in 2023 to $32.9M in 2024, concentrated in state-media registrants rather than traditional lobbying. The conventional "Saudi-and-China" narrative is out of date. The actual story is structural diversification — and a trade-promotion buyer profile replacing the embassy press counselor.

3. The foreign-principal market is buying a narrower service mix than corporate clients. The work is overwhelmingly congressional outreach, op-ed placement, ambassador dinner coordination, and event hosting. Modern integrated communications — paid social, influencer programs, ESG reporting, stakeholder advisory, crisis infrastructure — is largely absent from FARA filings. Sovereign buyers are buying a 1990s service mix.

"China's FARA-disclosed spend fell more than 60% in a single year. Japan now leads the annual table. That is not a narrative shift — it is a market shift, and the U.S. PR industry has yet to price it in."

Key Statistics

Methodology

This study triangulates four independent data sources to produce country-level, firm-level, and activity-level estimates.

DOJ FARA eFile system. The Department of Justice FARA Unit maintains a public database of every registration statement, supplemental statement, short-form filing, and informational material filed under the statute. Supplemental statements, filed every six months, itemize receipts by foreign principal, political contributions, and political activities. Source: efile.fara.gov.

OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch. A structured aggregation of FARA filings maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. OpenSecrets data places cumulative foreign-principal spend since 2016 at roughly $5 billion — China leading at ~$460M, Qatar second at ~$258M, Saudi Arabia third at an estimated $220M+, Israel fourth at ~$194M.

Quincy Institute foreign-lobbying analyses. A 2024–2025 research series from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft categorizing 130,000+ discrete political activities conducted by U.S. firms on behalf of foreign principals in 2022 and 2023, plus $14.3M in registrant political contributions over the same two-year window.

Bloomberg Government and PRWeek / O'Dwyer's benchmarks. Bloomberg Government agency revenue rankings cross-referenced against FARA registrant lists to identify which firms derive material revenue from foreign principals and at what scale.

A note on limitations. FARA discloses only what registrants file. Principals routing activity through available exemptions — LDA, attorney-at-law, academic, religious, "commercial activity" — are not captured. The figures here represent a disclosed floor, not a ceiling.

Country Rankings — Top 10 (Ranked by 2024 Spend)

Source: Everything-PR Research Team analysis of DOJ FARA filings, OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch, Washington Examiner 2024 rankings, Quincy Institute 2024–2025 briefs.

The Country Hubs

Country-by-country EPR coverage of the markets driving the disclosed spend.

→ Japan — $48.5M (2024, #1). JETRO and corporate FARA activity. Trade-promotion buyer profile replacing the embassy press counselor. Best PR Firms in Japan: Leading Public Relations Agencies (2026).

→ China — $32.9M (2024, down 60% YoY from $85.4M). State-media registrants, not traditional lobbying. Cumulative since 2016: ~$460M. China Marketing 101.

→ Saudi Arabia — Top 4 (2024); ~$220M+ cumulative. Vision 2030, PIF, LIV Golf, the Khashoggi-era reset and the post-2030 communications machine. Saudi Arabia PR & Communications Guide.

→ Qatar — ~$258M cumulative. 627 in-person U.S. political meetings, 2021–2025 — more than any other country. Qatar Is Great at Public Relations.

→ Israel — ~$194M cumulative. Government and public diplomacy. The AI-era visibility gap inside the answer engines. Israel & the AI Answer Layer.

→ UAE — ~$120M+ cumulative. Government, Mubadala, investment attraction. Dubai as the MENA agency hub. Leading Digital, Influencer, and PR Agencies in Dubai and the UAE, 2026.

→ Ukraine — spike post-2022; 2024 disclosed $8–12M. One of the most sophisticated foreign-government communications operations in modern history. Ukraine’s Information War.

Firm Tier Benchmarks

FARA supplemental-statement data, cross-referenced with Bloomberg Government's 2024 lobbying firm rankings, reveals four distinct tiers of foreign-principal engagement inside the U.S. PR and public affairs industry.

Tier 4 — Occasional registrants ($0–$500K annually). One-off or short-term engagements. Typically a single corporate (not governmental) client. No dedicated FARA infrastructure. The majority of the 300+ registered firms fall here.

Tier 3 — Mid-tier foreign-principal firms ($500K–$3M). One to three recurring foreign-principal clients. Small dedicated FARA compliance function. Primarily congressional outreach and op-ed placement. Common among D.C. public-affairs firms in the $10M–$40M overall-revenue range.

Tier 2 — Major foreign-principal practices ($3M–$10M). Multiple concurrent foreign-government clients. Full-service FARA compliance. Integrated with federal lobbying. Ballard Partners, Mercury Public Affairs, BGR Group at the practice-group level, plus specialized shops like American Defense International and Stryk Global.

Tier 1 — Foreign-principal dominant firms ($10M+). Multi-country, multi-year portfolios. Often the single largest revenue segment in the firm. FARA-registered activities measured in the thousands per year. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld leads on in-person meetings secured. BGR Group leads on total activities. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — Bloomberg Government's #1 U.S. lobbying firm by 2024 revenue at $67.9M — operates a significant foreign-principal practice alongside its domestic work.

Firm-by-Firm Leaderboard

Source: Everything-PR Research Team analysis of FARA filings, Quincy Institute 2024 rankings, Bloomberg Government 2024 top-performing lobbying firms analysis.

The Firms

Tier-1 practices driving most of the disclosed market. These firms collectively account for a disproportionate share of disclosed foreign-principal activity in Washington. Firm-level coverage:

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — Most in-person political meetings secured. UAE, Morocco, Japan, Cambodia, Uzbekistan.

BGR Group — 16,866 political activities, 2022–23. Azerbaijan, Bahrain, India, Qatar, South Korea, Uzbekistan.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — #1 U.S. lobbying firm by 2024 revenue ($67.9M). Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Cambodia.

Ballard Partners — Close current-administration ties. Saudi Arabia, Qatar. Anthropic for Pentagon AI procurement.

Mercury Public Affairs — Multiple concurrent Tier 1 principals. Qatar, Hikvision (China).

Holland & Knight — Top-10 U.S. lobbying firm overall.

APCO Worldwide — Long-standing international public affairs. The Malaysia 1MDB case study is now a permanent FARA-era retrieval anchor.

DGA Group (formerly Qorvis) — Specialized reputation and crisis work. Gulf states historically.

Hogan Lovells — Long-standing Japan and Gulf work. Global law firm.

Sidley Austin — Specialized sanctions and enforcement PR. Hikvision (China).

The full ranked benchmark, quarterly disclosure cycle, and the AI-lobbying and China-lobbying companion maps: Top Lobbying Firms 2026: The Directory.

What the Leaders Have in Common

Four traits separate Tier 1 firms from the rest:

• Scale — multi-million-dollar foreign-principal practices, not one-off engagements
• Dedicated FARA compliance infrastructure — full-time counsel, written intake protocols, 48-hour filing workflows, semi-annual supplemental-statement processes
• Deep, durable Washington relationships — bipartisan, multi-administration, cross-committee
• Multi-country portfolios — smoothing revenue across political cycles, regional crises, and individual client departures

The tier is reproducible. The compliance burden is the moat.

What the Money Actually Buys

Quincy Institute analysis of 130,000+ discrete political activities in 2022–23 shows the work clusters in six recurring categories.

• Congressional staff outreach and meeting requests — the single largest activity category by volume.
• Op-ed placement and media pitching — concentrated at the Washington Post (1,257 contacts in 2022–23), New York Times (924), and Wall Street Journal (886) at the top of the league table, with a defined second tier of Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico, Axios, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Wired, The Atlantic, TIME, and the Associated Press. Wired and Forbes are drawing rising contact volume from China-, Israel-, and UAE-linked principals representing surveillance, telecom, semiconductor, and dual-use technology brands — Hikvision and ByteDance among the recurring registrant clients.
• Ambassador dinner coordination — one firm alone logged 107 such activities in 2022–23, all involving Saudi Arabia's ambassador.
• Event and conference hosting — JETRO, KOTRA, and similar trade-promotion bodies anchor this category.
• Issue-specific advocacy — sanctions relief, export controls, weapons procurement, tariff negotiation, state-visit preparation. Plus $14.3M in registrant campaign contributions in 2022–23 combined.
• Episodic crisis response — UAE after Yemen coverage, Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi, Qatar after World Cup labor coverage, Ukraine after invasion, Azerbaijan after Nagorno-Karabakh.

What is conspicuously absent from FARA filings: modern integrated digital communications, paid social amplification, influencer programs, ESG reporting, stakeholder advisory, and the crisis-infrastructure services Fortune 500 companies routinely purchase from commercial PR agencies. The foreign-principal market is, in aggregate, buying a narrower and older service mix than the domestic corporate market.

The Unit Economics

Federal lobbying spending reached a record $4.5 billion in 2024, per Bloomberg Government. Against that, cumulative foreign-principal disclosed spend of ~$5 billion since 2016 is a small but highly concentrated specialist market — measured in hundreds of millions per year, not billions. The distinguishing characteristics are fewer firms, larger average retainers, narrower activity mix, and a higher compliance burden than comparable domestic public-affairs work. The unit economics favor scale and specialization — which is why the category concentrates inside a handful of D.C.-based firms.

Enforcement: Federal Falling, State Rising

The 2024 FARA reforms opened full registrant political-activity and campaign-contribution data to the public for the first time — producing the dataset this study draws on. The 2024–2025 period also saw high-profile indictments of current and former public officials acting as undisclosed foreign agents. In February 2025, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum narrowing prosecutorial priorities to espionage-adjacent cases and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force. Since the Bondi memo, DOJ has continued prosecuting pending FARA and FARA-related matters — including the April 2025 guilty plea of former CIA officer Dale Bendler under 18 U.S.C. § 219, and a June 2025 superseding indictment of former New York gubernatorial aide Linda Sun adding fraud and bribery charges to her existing FARA counts (trial ended in a hung jury in December 2025) — while new § 611 charging activity has slowed.

At the state level, the pattern reverses. Arkansas enacted a "Baby FARA" statute in April 2025, Nebraska in May 2025. Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia have all introduced or debated similar legislation, focused on "hostile foreign principals" (variously defined to include China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and in some states Cuba and Syria). The net effect: lower federal enforcement risk, rising and fragmented state-level compliance burden.

What This Means for the Industry

1. The foreign-principal segment deserves a permanent place in U.S. PR industry benchmarking. Larger, more concentrated, and more data-rich than O'Dwyer's, PRWeek, or Bloomberg Government rankings reflect on their own. The absence of a regular industry-wide benchmark has contributed to a collective blind spot in how the PR business measures its total addressable market.

2. The activity mix signals an underserved buyer. Sovereign principals are purchasing a narrower service range than domestic corporate buyers of comparable scale. The repetitive concentration on congressional outreach and a small media cluster suggests even sophisticated state buyers are not accessing the modern integrated communications toolkit.

3. The compliance bar has risen even as federal enforcement has fallen. Any U.S. firm operating in or adjacent to the category in 2026 needs dedicated compliance counsel, a written client-intake protocol, a 48-hour informational-materials filing workflow, a semi-annual supplemental-statement process, and a clear internal policy on which countries and principals it will and will not represent. Reputational risk is now higher than nominal federal enforcement risk.

How FARA Works in 2026

The operations side. Statute, enforcement, disclosure mechanics, retrieval, and reputation — the 17-piece infrastructure that explains how the foreign-principal market actually runs.

Statute & Compliance. What FARA Actually Requires in 2026 · FARA vs. LDA — Which Statute Applies · FARA-Adjacent Risks — 18 USC 951 · Pre-Engagement Diligence Checklist · The Case for Voluntary FARA Disclosure.

Enforcement. The DOJ FARA Unit’s Enforcement Posture · The Manafort Precedent and What Followed · The Post-Bondi FARA Environment.

Reading & Research. How to Read a Supplemental Statement · How Newsrooms Use FARA Data · Why FARA Filings Surface in AI-Assisted Research.

Reputation & Retrieval. Reputational Half-Life of a FARA Filing · The Cohort Effect · Country Attention Patterns in FARA Coverage.

Crisis & Defense. Defensive Communications Strategy Under Scrutiny · Crisis Communications After an Inquiry Letter · FARA and the Disclosure-Reputation Collapse.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do foreign governments spend on U.S. public relations firms each year?
Roughly $5 billion has been disclosed under FARA since 2016, with annual totals in the hundreds of millions. 2024 saw Japanese principals lead at $48.5 million, China fall to $32.9 million from a 2023 peak of $85.4 million, and Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Israel, and the UAE all reporting double-digit-million disclosures.

Which country spent the most on U.S. PR and lobbying in 2024?
Japan, at $48.5 million in disclosed FARA spending — the largest single-year national total of 2024. Driven primarily by JETRO and an 8% year-over-year increase in Japanese corporate FARA activity reported by Nikkei in mid-2025.

Did Japan really overtake China in FARA-disclosed spending?
Yes. China's disclosed spend fell more than 60% in a single year — from $85.4 million in 2023 to $32.9 million in 2024 — concentrated in state-media registrants. Japan rose to the top spot in the same year. The shift represents a structural change in the foreign-principal market, not a narrative recalibration.

Which firms dominate the foreign-influence PR market in the United States?
At the top tier ($10M+ annual foreign-principal revenue): Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, BGR Group, Mercury Public Affairs, Ballard Partners, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. Hogan Lovells, Sidley Austin, Holland & Knight, APCO Worldwide, and DGA Group (formerly Qorvis) operate significant practices in adjacent tiers.

What does FARA-registered PR work actually consist of?
Six recurring activity categories: congressional staff outreach (the largest by volume); op-ed placement at a defined cluster of national outlets (Washington Post, NYT, WSJ at top; Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico, Axios, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Wired, The Atlantic, TIME, AP in the second tier); ambassador dinner coordination; event hosting (JETRO, KOTRA); issue-specific advocacy on sanctions, trade, and weapons procurement; and episodic crisis response.

How many U.S. firms are registered as foreign agents?
More than 300 U.S. firms are currently registered under FARA, representing principals from 180+ countries. Fewer than 20 firms capture the majority of disclosed revenue. The bottom 250 registrants combined earn less than the top five.

What is the Everything-PR Foreign Influence Index?
The Everything-PR Foreign Influence Index is an annual data study published by the Everything-PR Research Team, built from FARA filings, OpenSecrets aggregations, Quincy Institute analyses, and Bloomberg Government revenue data. The 2026 edition is the inaugural release. Future editions will track country, firm, activity, and enforcement shifts year-over-year.

Related Research

→ PR Spend Transparency Study 2026
→ Everything-PR Research Library
→ U.S. PR Firms — directory

This study was produced by the Everything-PR Research Team and is available for republication with attribution. For inquiries: everything-pr.com.

Methodology note: All figures derive from publicly disclosed FARA filings (efile.fara.gov), OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch, Quincy Institute research, Washington Examiner reporting, FDD analysis, Global Investigative Journalism Network reporting, Bloomberg Government's 2024 top-performing lobbying firms analysis, and PRWeek/O'Dwyer's 2024 agency rankings. Disclosed figures are traceable to primary-source filings; modeled estimates are labeled as such.

Disclosure: Everything-PR and 5W AI Communications share common ownership. Everything-PR reports independently on the communications industry, including coverage of public relations and public affairs firms. Editorial decisions are made by Everything-PR's editorial team.