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Money is the earliest public signal you get about a candidate. It shows up months before a voting record, and for the down-ballot offices few people cover, it can be most of what there is to go on. Somebody decided this person was worth a check. This site shows you who, and how much.

Every number here is copied from a form the candidate filed with the Shelby County Election Commission. Those forms are public records — they're just scanned PDFs with no way to search filings, so almost no one does. We put them in one place and made them searchable. We don't change the numbers — though we do tidy up the names, so one donor doesn't scatter across a dozen spellings when you search.

You don't need to know anything about campaign finance to use this. Here's what the words mean, where to start, and how to read what you find.

Three ways in

Pick whichever sounds like your question.

"What am I actually voting on?" Type your address on the homepage. It gives you your districts, the races on your ballot, and — just as usefully — the offices that aren't on this ballot, so you can stop worrying about them. Your address goes to the Census geocoder to find your districts; it never reaches our servers, and we store nothing.

"Who is paying for this candidate?" Search their name. Their page shows what they raised, who gave it, where those donors live, and where they work. The employer column is the one to read — one employer showing up over and over on a single candidate's page tells you something a list of names can't.

"Show me something strange." Go to Funding Patterns: a standing list of the patterns you can't compute by hand — candidates funding themselves, blocs of donors who all work the same place, candidates whose money comes from very few people. Each is shown without a verdict. Some are ordinary. Some are worth a phone call. The data only says where the money came from.

Then follow a donor. Click any name in any table and you'll see every candidate they gave to. That's where most people start to go down the rabbit hole.

The words

You'll meet these on tables and candidate pages, in roughly this order.

Raised — everything a campaign took in. Monetary raised is the cash part; the gap between the two is in-kind.

In-kind — goods or services given instead of cash: printing, office space, catering, polling. Tennessee counts these against the same limits as cash, at fair-market value. A real donation, with no money changing hands.

Spent — everything paid out: rent, staff, mailers, consultants, robocalls. The Vendors page follows this side.

Cash on hand — what's in the bank right now. Not "raised minus spent," because a campaign can carry a balance forward from a past run.

Self-funded — money the candidate put in themselves, as a gift or a loan. There's no limit on it, and a candidate can repay their own loan later out of other people's contributions.

Donors — the people and organizations who gave. The count usually runs larger than the names you can see; the next section says why.

PAC — a political action committee: any group that takes in or spends more than $1,000 a year to support or oppose candidates. A union, a company, a trade association, or a few neighbors with a cause all count equally. PACs register and report to the state, not the county, so this site has no PAC pages — but a PAC's gift to a county candidate shows on that candidate's page like any other donor.

Nonpartisan / N.P. — an office elected where candidates do not run on party labels or compete in primaries. Note that the Memphis-Shelby County School Board is in the process of switching from nonpartisan to partisan elections.

Party committee — the statewide committees of the Democratic and Republican parties. The law requires one committeeman and one committeewoman for each state senatorial district. These are on public primary ballots and make decisions about party rules and strategies, but are not government officials. They raise almost no money but are required to report financial activity, so we include them. Most people skip them.

Pre-P, Q1, Q2, YE — the report a candidate last filed (pre-primary, quarterly, year-end). The numbers are current only as of that report; this week's money isn't public yet.

Amended — a refiled correction. We show the corrected version.

Why aren't all the donors named?

Three different reasons, worth keeping apart — only one is what people mean by "hidden money."

The law lumps the smallest gifts together. Tennessee names a contributor — with address, occupation, and employer — once they pass $100 in a reporting period. At or below $100, the filer reports one unnamed total. Since 2023 that total is capped at $2,000 per period; past the cap, even a $10 gift gets itemized, so a candidate with many small donors shows both a ~$2,000 lump and a run of named small gifts. Both are normal.

We hold back more than the law does, on purpose. The law names anyone over $100; we wait until $200 to a single candidate before we publish an individual's name. The reason is the difference between a filing and a search engine. Your $150 to a neighbor's school-board run was always technically public, just buried in a PDF nobody would open. Putting it in a database anyone can search in seconds is a different thing, and for a small, private donor we don't think it should be. The money still counts in the candidate's total; we just leave the name off. Organizations, businesses, and PACs get no such floor and show at any amount, because an organization writing a political check is a public act by a public actor — which is the whole point of the site.

So "861 donors (481 shown · 380 below $200)" isn't missing anyone. All 861 are in the total.

And some money never reaches a filing at all — that's the next section.

The money you won't see here

This site covers Shelby County. Your August 6 ballot also has state and federal races (Governor, General Assembly, U.S. House and Senate) and those live at whofundstn.org.

Two other kinds of money sit outside these pages:

• What a PAC does with its money. The county portal holds candidate filings only. A PAC's own report — who funds it, what else it spends on — is filed with the state, so you can't click a PAC here and see where its money came from. Check out our state PACs page instead.
• Spending about a candidate, not to them. A group that buys its own ads for or against someone reports that spending itself; it never lands on the candidate's page. A candidate's totals are what their own campaign raised and controlled.

And nothing is more current than the last filing. Between reports, you're looking at a snapshot.

Contribution limits

Tennessee caps what one donor can give a candidate per election, and a primary and a general count as separate elections — so a donor can give the maximum twice in a single cycle. That's why you'll sometimes see two identical checks from the same person, dated the same day.

For a county or city office, the 2025–2026 limits are $1,900 per election from an individual and $10,100 per election from a multicandidate PAC. Statewide and federal races run higher; those limits, and those races, are on Who Funds Tennessee.

A few things that surprise people

Corporations can give straight to Tennessee candidates. Federal law bars a company from giving its own money to a candidate for Congress; Tennessee dropped that ban in 2011. A company can write a check to a candidate for governor, sheriff, or school board, under the same limits as a person.

There's no limit on what a PAC can take in. Tennessee caps what a PAC gives a candidate, and nothing on the way in. One company or person can fund an entire PAC, and some do.

A candidate can spend unlimited money of their own. The Supreme Court settled that in 1976. Every candidate page shows how much of the money is the candidate's own, and whether they gave it or lent it.

Tennessee has no public financing. No matching funds. Every dollar came from somebody.

Isn't this all just legalized bribery?

Reasonable question, asked often, and we won't pretend to settle it. The legal line is specific: money for a promised official act is bribery, and a crime; a contribution is support. Almost all political money lives in the gap between, and the research on it is more modest than either side claims — contributions reliably buy access and attention, and buy votes far less reliably than people assume.

We don't tell you which side of that line any check falls on. We show you the check, who wrote it, what they do, and who else they wrote one to. The rest is yours.

Don't take our word for it

You don't have to trust us. We make it easy to check our work.

Every figure links to the page of the filing it came from — the Source pages button on a candidate page turns each donation into a link to the exact PDF page. Doubt one line? Go read that line.

Every filing is checked against the summary the candidate signed; one that doesn't reconcile is held back until a person works out why, not published quietly. The About page has the current rates.

And the whole database is downloadable as CSV on the Bulk Data page — if you think we got something wrong, you can prove it with our own files.

Under all of it: we're nonpartisan, we don't characterize candidates, and Democratic and Republican money is shown the same way.

Where to go next

• See your ballot — type your address, get your races.
• Funding Patterns — the patterns worth a second look.
• Races — everything on the ballot, including the offices nobody covers.
• Donors — search by person, employer, or organization.
• About — where the data comes from and how far to trust it.

Find something strange? We'd like to hear about it.