31 income disclosures, 19 companies: what direct selling statements publish, and what they leave out

What we did

Over the past weeks we transcribed every income disclosure statement we could retrieve from the companies in our database: 31 statements from 19 companies, covering 2023 to 2025. All are U.S. statements, two of them combined with Canada. Each one is now in the income disclosure database with the company's original table preserved and a note on what the document covers.

We normalize every statement into the same four figures: median annual earnings, the share earning under $500, the share earning nothing, and the top one percent's share of payouts. Where a statement does not publish a figure, the field stays empty. Nothing is estimated.

The result says more about the documents than about earnings. The statements are hard to compare. That is not because they are hidden, but because each company measures something different.

One median for everyone, out of 19 companies

A median tells you what the participant in the middle earned, and a few large earners cannot pull it up. FTC staff, in a 2024 review of 70 statements, noted that averages and top-earner examples can make large incomes look more typical than they are.¹

Of the 19 companies, one publishes a median for all participants: eXp Realty, $4,985 for all registered agents in 2025.² eXp is a real estate brokerage, and its figures include commissions from property sales, so it is not a like-for-like comparison with product-based companies.

Several other statements contain medians, but for a narrower group:

• Amway gives medians for the top 10% and top 50% of IBOs who received a payment ($4,478 and $539 in 2024), not for all IBOs.³
• LifeVantage gives $186 for Consultants who earned during 2024. The same statement says 64.48% of its 54,531 U.S. Consultants earned no commissions.⁴
• LegalShield gives $118.43 for active Associates in 2023, meaning those who sold a membership or used its Prospect app.⁵
• Herbalife describes monthly earnings for Distributors who earned money in a typical month, about 47,000 of the roughly 107,769 who ordered products for resale in 2025.⁶

None of these is wrong on its own terms. Each answers a different question than "what did a typical participant earn".

The share that received nothing

Nine companies publish a share of participants who received nothing, each by its own definition:

The median of these nine figures is 38%. The range runs from 23% to 84%, but the definitions differ enough that the gap between two companies says little on its own. Amway's 38% excludes IBOs who placed orders or sponsored someone but received no payment. LifeWave separately reports that only 21% of its registered and active Brand Partners received a commission payment in at least one month of 2024.⁷ LegalShield's 31% is a share of active Associates only.

Averages, and who is in them

Eight statements publish an annual average in U.S. dollars, and the groups they cover differ:

• NewULife, 2023: $49.45 for all active distributors.⁸
• APL GO, 2024: $59.24 for all Associates, active and inactive.⁹
• LifeWave, 2024: $651 for Brand Partners active at any time in the year.⁷
• Amway, 2025: $750 for all IBOs at the Founders Platinum level and below.¹⁰
• Plexus, 2025: $771 for Brand Ambassadors, active and inactive.¹¹
• Scentsy, 2024: $796.19. This is our weighted combination of the two group averages Scentsy publishes ($1,553.53 for Consultants with the company all year, $151.45 for the rest).¹²
• Princess House, 2024: $1,001 for active Consultants, excluding Organizers.¹³
• LegalShield, 2023: $2,647.89 for active Associates.⁵

All of these are before expenses. USANA is the one statement in the set that reports net profit after some company-side purchases: 81.1% of its 23,336 active U.S. Associates and Affiliates had a 2023 net profit of $500 or less.¹⁴

Figures that cannot be compared at all

Some statements cannot be put next to the others:

• Monthly only. Nu Skin ($178.75 per Active Brand Affiliate per month in 2025),¹⁹ Bravenly Global²⁰ and Herbalife⁶ publish monthly figures. We do not multiply monthly figures into annual ones.
• Mixed currencies. Primerica ($8,199 in 2025)¹⁵ and World Financial Group ($11,443 in 2025)¹⁷ report one average for the U.S. and Canada together, in local currency and not adjusted for exchange rates.
• Undefined columns. Farmasi's 2025 table has columns headed Min, Avg, Max and "12M" with no explanation of what each measures.¹⁶

Figures that do not reconcile

In four documents, figures in the same statement do not fit together. We record them as printed and explain the difference in the notes:

• APL GO's 2024 statement gives a median of $1,329.31 "for all Associates" and also says 84% of Associates received no income. With more than half at zero, the median would be $0. The 2023 statement has the same pattern.⁹
• Princess House prints 67.95% for its Consultant level, while the count it gives (46,251 of 69,086) works out to 66.95%.¹³
• In eXp Realty's 2024 table, one band is printed as "16.68% (19,741)", and 19,741 is about 34% of the 58,404 agents counted.¹⁸
• LegalShield's text gives a median of $118.43 for active Associates, and its chart shows $122.71 on the 50th-percentile row.⁵

What changed from one year to the next

For 11 companies we now have more than one year, read from earlier versions of the same pages in the Internet Archive. A few examples:

• Amway: average $841 in 2023, $723 in 2024 and $750 in 2025. The share with no sales, sponsoring or payments was 32%, then 38% and 38%.
• OPTAVIA: Coaches with no earnings fell from 25.36% in 2024 to 23.28% in 2025.
• Scentsy: the number of U.S. Consultants counted fell from 158,237 in 2023 to 129,019 in 2024.
• Nu Skin: average monthly Active Brand Affiliates fell from 57,107 in 2024 to 39,211 in 2025, and Nu Skin widened its definition of "active" between the two statements.

Year-on-year history for each company is part of DSS Pro.

How to use this

Before comparing two companies, read who each statement counts and whether its figures are monthly or annual. Each company's income page in our database states both. How to read an income disclosure statement has the checklist we use. The full table, including every original, is in the income disclosure database.

If you represent one of these companies and believe we have misread a document, the correction process is on the methodology page.