Histometrics

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Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

IndustryNAICS 92112Public Administration

Legislative Bodies (United States) — NAICS 92112

A rollup primer. This is a NAICS industry (five-digit code) that contains exactly one detailed industry beneath it: 921120. Read this page for the top-level picture and the ground-truth figures for this level; read the 921120 primer for the full detail.

1. Overview

North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 92112 covers legislative bodies — the elected assemblies that write laws and appropriate public money, together with their advisory committees and study commissions. In plain terms that means the U.S. Congress, the 50 state legislatures, and the thousands of county boards, city councils, and town councils across the country.[1]

This is the rare "industry" you cannot buy. It is not a market of competing firms earning profits; it is a core function of government, funded by taxes and staffed by elected officials — no owners, no receipts, no equity. Direct investment in the bodies themselves is impossible and always will be, because each legislature is a jurisdictional monopoly, one per government. Investors still care for two reasons that cut across public-market and private portfolios: legislatures are the single largest source of policy risk in any portfolio (tax rates, tariffs, drug pricing, antitrust, zoning all originate here), and a thin ring of private and a few public firms sells policy-intelligence, lobbying, and legislative-operations software into and around them. That vendor ring is the only investable exposure, and it is small.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

At the five-digit level, NAICS 92112 has a single detailed (six-digit) industry beneath it:

Child code Name Share of the level
921120 Legislative Bodies 100%

Because the split is one-to-one, NAICS 92112 and NAICS 921120 describe exactly the same activity. The extra digit adds no new segment, no sub-market, and no additional economics — the U.S. classification system simply carries the definition down one more level unchanged. Everything true of 921120 is true of 92112. Rather than repeat it, this page gives the rollup figures and the top-level takeaways; the 921120 primer carries the full treatment of scope, the vendor universe, unit economics, regulation, and risks.

For orientation, 92112 sits inside Industry Group 9211 (Executive, Legislative, and Other General Government Support), within Sector 92, Public Administration. Its sibling five-digit codes — 92111 Executive Offices, 92113 Public Finance Activities, 92114 Executive and Legislative Offices Combined, 92115 American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Governments, and 92119 Other General Government Support — deliberately separate the lawmaking function from the executive branch, tax and treasury administration, and general government support.[2]

3. Size of this level

Ground-truth caveat first. Our ingested federal statistics file for NAICS 92112 contains no Census or Small Business Administration (SBA) metrics — and that absence is the honest answer, not a gap to paper over. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns and the Economic Census, which generate the establishment counts, payroll, and receipts behind most Histometrics primers, exclude public administration and government establishments by design; nonemployer statistics do the same.[3] For a purely governmental code, standard business statistics are effectively null, and any figure they did show would badly undercount the real footprint (nearly all of which is individual-officeholder and small-jurisdiction activity that these surveys never capture). No suppressed value is substituted here. Because 92112 equals 921120, the appropriate yardsticks are identical to the child's, drawn from the Census of Governments, government-finance data, and labor statistics:

  • U.S. Congress: 535 voting members — 435 House, 100 Senate — plus non-voting delegates and a resident commissioner.[4]
  • State legislatures: 50 of them, 99 chambers (49 bicameral; Nebraska unicameral and nonpartisan), seating 7,383 state legislators.[5]
  • Local legislative bodies: the Census Bureau counts roughly 90,900 local governments in its 2022 Census of Governments, with a 2025 update near 91,438; about 38,700–39,000 are general-purpose governments (counties, municipalities, townships) that elect councils or boards, plus 12,546 independent school districts with elected boards. These are scale markers, not a clean measure of 92112.[6][7]
  • Total elected officials: roughly half a million Americans hold elected office, about 96% of the seats local.[8]
  • Employment and pay: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks a "Legislators" occupation (Standard Occupational Classification 11-1031) with about 45,500 people employed and a median wage near $37,270 — low because so many state and local legislators serve part-time; note the survey excludes the federal legislative branch, so members of Congress are not in that count.[9][10]
  • The federal money: with no receipts, the closest proxy for "industry revenue" is the appropriation that funds the legislature — about $6.75 billion in the FY2024 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, covering the House, Senate, Capitol Police, Library of Congress, and the legislative-branch analytical agencies.[11] State and local legislative budgets add billions more, spread across thousands of jurisdictions and not centrally totaled.

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the level)

Because the level is a single child, exposure concentrates in exactly one place: not the legislatures, but the vendor ring around them. There is no public company whose business is a legislature. The investable proxies — none a pure play — split into two layers:

  • Policy-intelligence, lobbying, and media (the "watch and influence" layer): the closest listed name is FiscalNote Holdings (OTC: NOTE), a distressed micro-cap that moved off the New York Stock Exchange after a sub-$1 share price; most of the money here is private (Bloomberg Government, POLITICO Pro, Quorum, LegiStorm, and lobbying partnerships).
  • Legislative-operations software (the "run the meeting and the record" layer): private-equity-backed platforms such as Granicus (Vista Equity Partners), CivicPlus (Insight Partners), and Diligent/BoardDocs, plus broad govtech and federal-IT names — Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL), Thomson Reuters (NYSE/TSX: TRI), Leidos (NYSE: LDOS), Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH), and CGI (NYSE: GIB) — whose legislative slice is minor and not separately reported.

The full company-by-company table, tickers, ownership, and investor caveats are in the 921120 primer, Section 4.

5. How the money works

The economics are identical to the child's, so in brief: legislatures run on tax appropriations, not revenue — a body literally votes its own budget, pays fixed statutory salaries (from New Hampshire's $100 a year to Congress's $174,000), and has no profit, residual, or equity value.[11][4] The money an investor can actually own is made around the institution, on four engines — subscription policy data (software-as-a-service economics: FiscalNote reported ~93% recurring revenue, but the core public-affairs-software market is a niche estimated near $160 million in 2024), legislative-operations software, lobbying fees (federal lobbying set a record near $4.4 billion in 2024, and that is only the federally disclosed slice), and disclosure-data resale. The through-line: you never earn money from a legislature; you earn it from the organizations that must watch, influence, comply with, or operate one. See 921120, Section 5.

6. Demand drivers

Demand means demand for the private services around legislatures, and it is unchanged from the child level: regulatory and legislative intensity (more bills and rules to track), election and turnover cycles (the 2026 U.S. midterms lift lobbying and intelligence demand), state-policy divergence (a multi-state company must watch up to 50 legislatures at once), government fragmentation (tens of thousands of under-resourced local bodies needing outside vendors), transparency and digital-participation mandates, and accessibility compliance — the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II web rule requires state and local governments to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, with deadlines of April 26, 2027 and April 26, 2028. Full detail in 921120, Section 6.

7. Regulation

The legislature is the regulator, but it is bound by rules that also shape the vendor ecosystem — and this is identical at 92112 and 921120. Constitutional and charter authority define what each body may do; the Lobbying Disclosure Act (1995), the Foreign Agents Registration Act, ethics and campaign-finance law, and open-meeting and public-records ("sunshine") laws force information into the public record. The key insight: disclosure regulation is the supply chain for the legislative-data business — the stricter the reporting, the richer the datasets vendors can monetize. There is no single national procurement code; contracting rules and security requirements vary by jurisdiction. See 921120, Section 7.

8. Consolidation

The legislatures themselves never consolidate — each is a jurisdictional monopoly with no entry, exit, or price competition. The vendor ring is consolidating and being disrupted at once: FiscalNote rolled up CQ Roll Call, VoterVoice, and others before its balance sheet forced asset sales; Granicus and CivicPlus have grown by acquisition in the operations layer; and generative AI is commoditizing the core bill-tracking-and-summarization product even as it lets incumbents add features. Because our statistics file holds no code-level market-share data, concentration claims should be treated cautiously. Full discussion in 921120, Section 8.

9. Risks

For the institution, ordinary business risks are absent; for the investable niche they are sharp and identical to the child's: no pure play (the closest, FiscalNote, is distressed and illiquid), a small total addressable market, AI commoditization of proprietary tracking, budget and political risk (shutdowns, leadership changes, election-driven priority shifts), procurement and implementation risk, cybersecurity and compliance risk, and customer concentration. The largest risk tied to this code, though, is not to vendors — it is the policy risk legislatures impose on every other holding in a portfolio, where a single tax bill, tariff schedule, or antitrust statute can reprice whole sectors. See 921120, Section 9.

10. How to invest and outlook

Because 92112 is its one child, the playbook is the child's playbook. Public-market routes are limited: only FiscalNote (OTC: NOTE) is a direct — and speculative, distressed — pure play; adjacent names (TRI, TYL, LDOS, BAH, GIB) sell to governments broadly and are not bets on legislatures per se, so start from each company's reported government exposure, not its marketing. Private routes hold most of the money: policy-intelligence and legislative-tracking software (Quorum, LegiStorm) and legislative-operations software (Granicus, CivicPlus, Diligent/BoardDocs) via venture, growth, and private equity, plus lobbying partnerships. A fixed-income route — municipal general-obligation and revenue bonds — buys government credit, not ownership of a legislature.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment): rising regulatory complexity, state-policy divergence, and mandated modernization expand the need for policy monitoring and legislative-operations software, while generative AI compresses what customers pay for basic tracking; the likely endgame is consolidation into a few AI-enabled, high-renewal platforms, with lobbying staying fragmented and private, and procurement friction the main brake on growth. The honest takeaway: NAICS 92112 is essential to understand and nearly impossible to own — treat it first as a policy-risk lens on the rest of your portfolio, and only second as a thin, mostly private vendor niche. For everything behind these summaries, read the 921120 primer.

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 NAICS Definition — 921120 Legislative Bodies." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/ (see code 921120).
  2. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS. "Industry Group 9211 — Executive, Legislative, and Other General Government Support (five-digit codes 92111, 92112, 92113, 92114, 92115, 92119)." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=921120
  3. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns / Economic Census — coverage (public administration and government-operated establishments excluded)." 2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/about.html
  4. Congressional Research Service. "Congressional Salaries and Allowances: In Brief" (535 members: 435 House, 100 Senate; base $174,000 since 2009). RL30064, 2023. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL30064
  5. National Conference of State Legislatures. "Number of Legislators and Length of Terms in Years" (7,383 state legislators; 99 chambers; Nebraska unicameral, nonpartisan). 2024. https://www.ncsl.org/resources/details/number-of-legislators-and-length-of-terms-in-years
  6. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Census of Governments — Organization" (≈90,900 local governments; ~39,000 general-purpose; 12,546 independent school districts). 2023. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/census-of-governments.html
  7. U.S. Census Bureau. "Government Organization Summary Report: 2022 & 2025" (91,438 local governments; 38,704 general-purpose; 52,734 special-purpose). 2026. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2026/econ/govtorg2225.html
  8. Proximity Intelligence. "How Many Elected Officials Are There in the United States?" (~500,000 elected officials; ~96% local). 2023. https://proximityintelligence.org/resources/how-many-elected-officials
  9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — Legislators (SOC 11-1031)" (~45,500 employed; median annual wage ~$37,270). 2024. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111031.htm
  10. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "OEWS Concepts and Coverage" (federal legislative and judicial branches excluded). 2024. https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/oews/concepts.htm
  11. U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. "Bill Summary: Legislative Branch Fiscal Year 2024 Appropriations Bill" (~$6.75 billion). 2024. https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/bill-summary-legislative-branch-fiscal-year-2024-appropriations-bill
  12. OpenSecrets. "Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024" (~$4.4 billion federal lobbying; Lobbying Disclosure Act data). 2025. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/02/federal-lobbying-set-new-record-in-2024/
  13. FiscalNote Holdings / SEC. "NYSE Notice of Delisting and Appeal Process; FY2025 Annual Report" (2025 revenue ~$95M, 2024 ~$120M; ~93% recurring; OTC move 2026). 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1823466/000119312526124523/d31744dex991.htm
  14. Market Growth Reports / Research Nester. "Public Affairs and Advocacy Software Market Size" (market-research estimate: ~$160 million in 2024). 2024. https://www.marketgrowthreports.com/market-reports/public-affairs-and-advocacy-software-market-103465
  15. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Investor.gov. "Bonds, Municipal" (general obligation vs. revenue bonds). 2026. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/bonds-municipal