The Trademark Is the Business: Six Trade Associations R...

A trade association looks like a membership club, and its tax return says it is something else: a nonprofit that owns a piece of intellectual property everyone in an industry has to use, and lives on the tolls. Six of them filed returns that landed together this week, and read side by side they tell one story. The dues matter less than the trademark, the standard, or the code. The reserves are large and invested in the same markets everyone else is in. And in 2025 and 2026, several of these organizations are discovering that owning the thing an entire industry must use looks, to a regulator, a lot like a monopoly. Everything below is from the Form 990s, free at ProPublica.

The code, the mark, and the color

Start with the three purest cases, because they explain the model.

The American Medical Association, founded in 1847 and the largest physician group in the country with more than 290,000 members, does not mainly live on those members' dues. It owns the copyright to Current Procedural Terminology, the CPT codes that every clinician and insurer in America must use to bill for a medical service, and it licenses them for royalties. In 2023 those CPT royalties came to roughly $284 million, more than half of the association's revenue (RealClearHealth). The AMA reported $546 million in total revenue for 2024 and holds $1.15 billion in net assets. A doctors' association, funded mostly by copyrighting the language of medical billing.

The National Association of Realtors, founded in 1908 and the largest trade association in the United States with more than 1.5 million members, owns the word Realtor. Its members dominate the local listing services through which most American homes are sold, and its rulebook long governed how commissions were paid. It reported $360.8 million in revenue and holds $1.08 billion in assets, and it is worth its own post, because its rulebook set the price of buying a house, and a $418 million settlement just rewrote it.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, formed in 1982, owns the Blue Cross and Blue Shield names and licenses them to 33 independent insurance companies that together cover more than 115 million Americans. It is not the insurer; it is the trademark, dividing the country into territories where the licensees agree not to compete under the Blue brand. That arrangement produced two enormous antitrust settlements: a $2.67 billion deal with subscribers and, finalized in August 2025, a $2.8 billion deal with doctors and hospitals, more than $5.47 billion combined (Becker's Payer). The association itself runs on $862.7 million in revenue and holds $332 million in net assets. A trademark that carves up a country is a valuable trademark, and an expensive one to defend.

The dues-and-fees associations, and the pressure of 2025

The American Dental Association, founded in 1859 with about 159,000 members, is the more conventional model: dues of roughly $600 a year, plus the fees manufacturers pay for its Seal of Acceptance and the revenue from its journal. It reported $237 million and holds $210 million in net assets, and in 2025 it cut about $20 million from its budget amid a revenue decline, selling its Washington building to help (ADA News). The American Bar Association, founded in 1878 and the accreditor of the nation's law schools, is the political casualty of the group: with a declining membership around 150,000 and a heavy dependence on federal grants, it laid off more than 300 employees in 2025 after roughly $69 million in grants were cut, then sued the Justice Department alleging the cuts were retaliation for the ABA's criticism, and a court found the administration had likely violated the association's First Amendment rights (Bloomberg Law; Reason). The ABA reported $166 million in revenue for its 2025 fiscal year, down sharply from the prior year as those grants disappeared, a reminder that even an association can be a government-dependent pass-through when it leans on federal money.

The two-billion-dollar nonprofit that inspects ships

The outlier is the American Bureau of Shipping, founded in 1862, which is neither a lobby nor a club. It is a classification society: a nonprofit that writes the technical standards for how ships and offshore structures must be built, then sends surveyors to inspect vessels against those standards from keel to scrapyard. It is a quasi-regulator that gets paid fees for service, and the striking thing on its filing is the reserve. On roughly $537 million of revenue, ABS holds $1.92 billion in net assets, an outsized surplus for an organization of its size (ProPublica). How does a nonprofit accumulate nearly two billion dollars? The same way any of them do: it takes in a little more than it spends, year after year, and invests the difference in the markets. ABS is the cleanest illustration in this group that a nonprofit is not a break-even operation. It is an operation with a surplus and a portfolio, and over 160 years the portfolio grew large.

The lobbying, quantified

There is one more number these returns disclose that most people never see: how much each association spends on lobbying and political activity, reported on Schedule C. For a trade association, the figure appears as the portion of member dues that funds lobbying and is therefore not deductible to members, and the spread across these six is enormous. The National Association of Realtors reports $86,084,387 in nondeductible lobbying and political expenditures for the year, against $303 million in member dues, the return's own confirmation of the outside tally that made it the largest lobbying spender in the country. The American Medical Association reports $24,301,265, which is striking against member dues of just $32.5 million, so most of what AMA members pay in dues goes to lobbying and politics, even though dues are a small slice of the AMA's overall revenue. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association reports $7,718,656, the American Dental Association $1,720,000, and the American Bar Association $1,198,570. And the American Bureau of Shipping, alone among the six, reports none at all, which is exactly what you would expect of a body that writes technical standards for ships rather than lobbying for a profession. The trademark is the business, and Schedule C shows which of these associations also treats influence as one.

The one well, and the antitrust weather

Every association here holds a reserve, and every reserve is invested in the same public and security markets a pension fund and a retiree use. That is the recurring finding of this whole series: the money an institution keeps, whatever the institution is for, ends up in the same markets as everyone else's money. What is distinctive about the trade associations is the source of the surplus. It is not donations and not, mostly, dues. It is the toll on the thing the industry must use, the CPT code, the Realtor mark, the Blue license, the ship-class certificate, the Seal of Acceptance. And that is exactly why the weather changed in 2025. A nonprofit that owns the indispensable thing looks, from one angle, like a public-spirited standard-setter and, from another, like a monopolist collecting rent. NAR paid $418 million and gave up its commission rule. The Blue Cross licensees paid billions and agreed to structural reforms. And a Senate committee has opened an investigation into whether the AMA's control of the billing codes is an "abusive monopoly," demanding to see the licensing profits (Medscape). The trademark is the business. It is also, increasingly, the liability.

Fact-check notes and sources

All revenue and net-asset figures are from each organization's most recent IRS Form 990 via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer: AMA (EIN 36-0727175, revenue $546.2M, net assets $1.15B), ABA (EIN 36-0723150, revenue $166.2M), ADA (EIN 36-0724690, revenue $237.1M), NAR (EIN 36-1520690, revenue $360.8M, assets $1.08B), BCBSA (EIN 13-5656874, revenue $862.7M), and ABS (EIN 13-4921556, revenue $536.6M, net assets $1.92B).
The AMA's CPT royalties of roughly $284 million in 2023, more than half its revenue, and the 2025 Senate investigation: RealClearHealth and Medscape.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's trademark-licensing structure and the $2.8 billion provider settlement finalized August 2025, plus the earlier $2.67 billion subscriber settlement: Becker's Payer.
The ADA's 2025 budget cuts and building sale: ADA News. The ABA's 2025 layoffs after federal grant cuts and its lawsuit against the Justice Department: Bloomberg Law and Reason.
The American Bureau of Shipping as a classification society founded in 1862 with roughly $1.92 billion in net assets: Wikipedia, "American Bureau of Shipping", attributed, and ProPublica.
The lobbying and political expenditure figures (NAR $86,084,387 against $303,456,097 in dues; AMA $24,301,265 against $32,520,719 in dues; Blue Cross Blue Shield Association $7,718,656; ADA $1,720,000; ABA $1,198,570; and no such expenditure reported by the American Bureau of Shipping): read from each organization's Schedule C, Part III-B, of its Form 990 (the section 162(e) nondeductible lobbying and political expenditures line), via the returns linked above.

This post is informational, not legal or financial advice. All figures are reproduced from public filings and the public record. Organizations are discussed from the public record as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by any of them.

The Trademark Is the Business: Six Trade Associations Read From Their Filings