Methodology

Everything on this site is a sum, share, rank or per-resident rate over records fetched from the USAspending API v2. No sentence is generated by a language model; the prose is assembled from fixed templates filled with the figures on the page.

Fiscal years and freshness

A federal fiscal year runs from 1 October to 30 September and is named for the year in which it ends. The site covers FY2022 to FY2026. FY2025 is the most recent complete year and is used for every "last fiscal year" figure and per-resident rate. FY2026 is shown "to date" and is incomplete; agencies report with a lag, and contract data for the Department of Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers is published 90 days late. USAspending loaded the award data used here on 30 Sep 2026.

Closed fiscal years are fetched once after year end and kept as snapshots; agencies do revise closed years, and the snapshots are refreshed periodically rather than daily. The current fiscal year, the recent award months and the national and state series are refreshed on each build.

Obligations, award value and outlays

Fiscal-year figures are obligations: the amount agencies committed in that year, including de-obligations (which can make a year negative). Award lists show award value: the total obligated to a specific award to date, which usually spans several fiscal years. Neither is an outlay (money paid). For loans, fiscal-year figures count the subsidy cost, which is what the budget records; award lists show the loan's face value and say so.

Recipient organisations

• For each fiscal year the site pulls USAspending's ranking of recipients by obligation, by recipient state, down to a listing floor of $1.0M. An organisation's fiscal-year value is shown only where it reached the floor; otherwise the year is marked "under $1.0M" and the five-year total sums the listed years only, so it is a lower bound.
• A second ranking limited to contract award types gives the contracts column; the assistance figure is the remainder.
• Pages are built for the 30,000 organisations with the largest listed five-year totals (at least $1.0M). Recipients are grouped by the state of their own address as USAspending records it. Ranks count organisations on this site, not every recipient in USAspending.
• Agency, industry, program and place-of-performance breakdowns on recipient pages come from the site's list of prime awards of $1.0M or more begun since FY2022, so they describe large awards rather than every transaction.
• Parent organisations and business categories come from USAspending recipient profiles, fetched for the largest recipients.

Individuals are never published

USAspending records awards to individuals, mostly as aggregated rows ("multiple recipients", "redacted due to PII") but sometimes by name. The site removes, before storing anything, every recipient that USAspending's business categories mark as an individual or a sole proprietorship, every name that reads as a person (a given name or common surname with no organisational word, "last, first" forms, joined personal names, family trusts, estates, "doing business as" trade names without a legal form) and anything on a manual block list. Award descriptions that appear to name a person are withheld. Removed amounts stay in the totals as "recipients not shown". If a person's name has slipped through, the corrections page explains how to have it removed at once.

Counties, districts and states

• Geography follows the primary place of performance, by fiscal year and award type, from USAspending's spending-by-geography endpoint. Awards with only a state-level location count in the state but in no county or district; awards performed abroad count in no state.
• Per resident: FY2025 obligations divided by the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimate (counties and states) or the population USAspending returns for the district. The national rate divides obligations performed in the 50 states and DC by their combined population.
• Cross-tabulations (which agencies, programs and NAICS sectors fund a county or district; recipients by district) cover the four closed fiscal years FY2022–FY2025 and the 24 largest agencies, 40 largest listings and 20 sectors.
• County–district overlap uses the Census relationship file for the 119th Congress, by land area.

Agencies, industries and programs

Agency totals are the awarding-agency view by fiscal year and award type. Competition mix uses the FPDS "extent competed" codes as reported, over the closed-year window. NAICS and assistance-listing totals come from the same category endpoints; their top recipients from a closed-year cross-tabulation (the largest 320 of each) or, failing that, from the $1.0M-plus award list. State figures for an industry or program come from each state's top-100 table and can miss small amounts.

Monthly award lists

State-month pages list prime contracts, grants, loans and other assistance awards of $1.0M or more with a base obligation date in the month and a primary place of performance in the state. Direct-payment records are excluded because they are aggregates. Modifications to existing awards are not new awards and are not listed.

Thresholds

Agency pages need $10M over five years to be indexed; sub-agency pages $50M; industry and program pages $25M and at least three organisation recipients; state-month pages at least three awards. Recipient pages listed for a single year with no $1.0M-plus award are kept out of search engines but still built for links.

Sources and licence

USAspending.gov data is released under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. Census population estimates and cartographic boundary files are US government works. See data sources.