Data sources / Filings and registries

USAspending.gov

Published federal spending records, including contracts and financial assistance. Coverage, reporting detail and attribution depend on award type, reporting requirements and the selected search filters.

Last reviewed 14 October 2026 · report an error

Publisher: U.S. Department of the Treasury
Access: Free
Coverage: Published federal spending records, including contracts and financial assistance. Coverage, reporting detail and attribution depend on award type, reporting requirements and the selected search filters.
Identifiers: Award identifier; UEI where reported; Recipient identifier
Freshness: varies
Official URL: https://www.usaspending.gov/

What it can establish

Use USAspending.gov for a defined acquisition-research question. Match each record to the right entity using its identifiers (Award identifier, UEI where reported, Recipient identifier) before accepting its contents, and keep U.S. Department of the Treasury's own scope and attribution on the finding.

Reported recipient, agency, award and transaction information for the selected record and reporting period.
A public lead about government-customer exposure or contracting activity that can be connected to the correct legal recipient.

What it cannot establish

Recognized revenue, cash received, profit, backlog quality or the share of a target's total revenue represented by federal work.
That an award ceiling is committed spending, or that a parent-level award belongs to the specific operating business under review.

A search that returns nothing in USAspending.gov describes the search performed. Coverage here is published federal spending records, including contracts and financial assistance, so a missing record becomes a negative finding only where that coverage reaches the company in question and the evidence standard supports the inference. Otherwise the question stays open.

How Docket uses it

Your acquisition criteria become the agents' questions. USAspending.gov can support some of them and leave others unanswered; its freshness (varies) is weighed answer by answer and it receives no blanket reliability score.

Triage. Matches the award recipient to the target using identifiers rather than a brand-name resemblance.
Scout. Preserves the award type, transaction label and date when collecting evidence of government contracting activity.
Audit. Checks for double counting between award summaries and transactions, and removes unsupported revenue interpretations.

Scout records typed answers from a fixed list with verbatim quotations from retained pages. Audit reviews only the retained material, with every fetch tool denied. It settles supported contradictions, strikes unquotable answers and leaves gaps visible. See the research-agent method and screening criteria guide for the surrounding workflow.

Pitfalls and review questions

Obligations, outlays and potential award values are different measures. State which field the retained record actually reports.
Recipient subsidiaries, subawards and reporting corrections complicate comparisons. An apparent concentration signal needs validation against the target's own disclosures or diligence materials.

What the data is

USAspending.gov publishes federal award data reported by agencies, under a law that requires public reporting of federal spending. Records include prime awards of contracts, grants, loans and other assistance, with the awarding agency, recipient, amounts, dates, place of performance and descriptions, and, where reported, subawards. The site's data dictionary defines each field and its source system, and bulk download files allow analysis beyond the search interface.

Amounts need careful reading. An obligation is a commitment of funds, an outlay is a payment, and a potential value includes unexercised options. A contract's headline ceiling is not what the recipient earned. Modifications change amounts and dates over time, so the record is a history, and its latest state may differ from earlier ones.

Resolving the recipient

Recipient names in award records are as reported by agencies and may differ in spelling and suffix from registration records. Match by the unique entity identifier, and use the parent fields with caution since they depend on what the recipient reported. Recipients that are joint ventures, or small businesses that subcontract, may not appear as prime recipients, and subaward data is less complete than prime data.

The data covers federal awards only. A company that sells to state and local governments or to private customers will have no record for that work. The absence of awards does not mean the business has no public-sector customers, only that no federal prime award is recorded for that entity under that identifier.

Illustration (fictional)

A researcher examining customer concentration signals for Paper Lantern Maintenance finds, using its identifier, four awards from two agencies over three years. The researcher records obligation amounts by year, notes that one award accounts for most of the total, and states that the data shows only federal prime awards, so concentration across all customers cannot be concluded.

Filings and registries

SAM.gov

Publicly available registration identity, identifiers and business information as reported in the relevant entity record.

Filings and registries

SEC EDGAR

The statements a registrant made in a particular filing, including disclosed acquisitions, subsidiary relationships and material agreements.

Company-published

Company websites

What the identified company publicly says about its services, footprint, customers or ownership on a retained page.

Sources and further reading

About USAspending.gov, U.S. Department of the Treasury. What federal spending data the site publishes and where it comes from.
USAspending data dictionary, U.S. Department of the Treasury. The field-level definitions needed to read a contract or grant award record correctly.
Award data archive, U.S. Department of the Treasury. Bulk files for analysis beyond the search interface.
USAspending.gov, U.S. Department of the Treasury. Federal contract and grant awards by recipient. A revenue line you can read without asking.
SAM.gov entity registration, U.S. General Services Administration. Any entity that wants federal money registers here, exposing legal name, address and NAICS codes.

These links identify research contexts to investigate, rather than conclusions about sector attractiveness. Ask how USAspending.gov would be used on your list or return to the complete source directory.

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