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Federal buyers · Contract award records

Federal agencies and what they buy

Every federal agency we hold contract award records for. Open one to see how much it has awarded, where that work is performed, the most recent contracts it has started, and any of its solicitations that are open for bid right now.

Federal buyers on file
75
Award records across them
35,881,047
States and districts the work is in
51

Measured August 21, 2026: every figure on this page describes the award records we held at that moment, not the corpus as it stands right now.

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Pick a buyer before you pick a bid

Most contractors work backwards. They find a solicitation, spend two weeks on a proposal, and lose to an incumbent who has held the work since before they registered. The contractors who win pick a buyer first: one agency, sometimes one contracting office, whose purchases match what they already do — then they learn that buyer's cycle until the next solicitation is something they have been preparing for rather than something they discovered.

Award history is how you pick. It is permanent public record, and it tells you three things a solicitation never will: how often this agency buys work like yours, roughly what it pays for it, and who is holding the contract today. The third is the one people skip. The current holder is your competition if you bid prime and your customer if you subcontract, and a subcontract is how most small firms get their first past performance on a federal job.

Then watch the calendar. A contract with an end date twelve to eighteen months out is a recompete in the making, and the agency begins market research long before anything is posted. That quiet window — after the incumbent's option years are visibly running out, before a solicitation exists — is when a capability statement and a call to the contracting office are worth more than any proposal you could write afterwards.

Every federal buyer on file

75 agencies, listed by name with the award records we hold for each. Departments are filed under their own name rather than under “Department of” — Veterans Affairs under V, the Navy under N.

A

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

V

Where these numbers come from

  • Source. Federal prime contract awards published by USAspending.gov, the government's official spending record. Public record, free, no data vendor in between. Every award listed on an agency page links back to its page there so you can check it yourself — a leaf shows that buyer's most recent contracts, not one card per award.
  • How a buyer is identified. By the awarding agency recorded on the award, resolved to a readable name: the source writes some organisations back to front (“JUSTICE, DEPARTMENT OF”) and some contracting offices as bare codes. Where we can verify what a code stands for, we show the verified name; where we cannot, the record is left out of this directory instead of appearing under a number nobody searches for.
  • What the figures cover. Award records whose place of performance is one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia. Work performed overseas, or with no place of performance recorded, belongs to no state and is in none of these counts.
  • When it was measured. Measured August 21, 2026: every figure on this page describes the award records we held at that moment, not the corpus as it stands right now. The figures are folded from the stored records in batch, not counted again on every page load, so what you see is the result of that fold rather than a live tally.
  • Scope. Contract awards only. Grants, loans and direct payments are excluded — they are not work a contractor competes for. State, county and city purchasing is not federal award data at all, though state solicitations do appear in the live bid feed.
  • Missing values. Where the source records no amount, we leave it out rather than filling it in. An award with no reported amount is still counted as an award but enters no total or average, which is why a buyer's record count can outrun its dollars.

Federal buyers — common questions

Which federal agency awards the most contract dollars here?
Department of Defense, with 24,737,974 award records worth $5,368,705,934,372 in this dataset. That is a ranking of the records we hold, not of the whole federal budget: agencies that buy heavily through other agencies' contract vehicles appear smaller here than their spending suggests.
Why does it matter which agency buys my work?
Because buyers are creatures of habit. An agency reuses the same contracting offices, the same clause sets, the same solicitation templates and very often the same incumbents, and it recompetes the same requirement on a predictable cycle. Learning one buyer well — what they purchase, what they pay, who currently holds the work — beats chasing every open bid badly, and it is the single biggest difference between contractors who win and contractors who write proposals.
Is the awarding agency the same as the office I would deal with?
Not usually. The awarding agency is the top-level department on the award record — the Department of Veterans Affairs, say — while the office that writes the solicitation and answers your questions is a contracting office inside it. Some award records name that office directly, as a code rather than a name; where we can verify what a code stands for we show the verified name, and where we cannot we leave the record out of this directory rather than guess at it.
Do I have to be a large company to win federal contracts?
No. Federal buyers are required to place a substantial share of their purchasing with small businesses, and set-aside contracts are competed only among firms that qualify. What you do need is an active SAM.gov registration with a UEI, the right NAICS code for the work, and any socioeconomic certification the set-aside calls for. All of those are free, and missing one is the most common reason a ready contractor is disqualified on a technicality.
Where do these agency figures come from?
Federal prime contract awards published by USAspending.gov, the government's own spending record — public record, free, with no data vendor in between. We fold them by awarding agency and publish only what we actually hold. Grants, loans and direct payments are excluded because they are not work a contractor competes for, and state, county and city purchasing is not federal award data at all.

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