A field guide
How to read this data.
Need a quick definition instead of the methodology? The Glossary defines every term on these pages — committed dollars, set-aside, IDV, NAICS, and the rest — in a sentence each.
The three measures
Three ways to count a government's money
Federal money can be counted three different ways, and they don’t mean the same thing. Every page here leads with the first. Knowing which is which is the difference between reading these numbers right and stacking two figures that were never the same.
Committed — the headline on every page here. The moment the government signs a contract or awards a grant, the money is committed: a binding promise to pay. Federal accounting calls this an obligation. We record it the day the award is signed, and count it in the year each action happened — because that’s when the decision actually gets made, and it’s the number journalists and oversight bodies track.
Paid on awards— the cash that has actually left the Treasury against those awards. A commitment and its payments aren’t the same day: a five-year contract is committed up front but paid out over five years. How fast the gap closes depends on the kind of award. Direct payments — Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits — are committed and paid almost in the same breath: the check follows within the month. Contracts and multi-year grants are the slow side, promised now and paid out over years. Where the government reports what it has actually paid out on awards — comprehensively in File C of agency submissions from FY2022 on — we draw a paid line right next to committed. The gap between them is the pipeline: money promised that hasn’t gone out the door yet.
Total federal spending— every dollar the government actually paid out in a year, award or not. This is the roughly $7 trillion figure you’ve probably seen in a headline: Treasury’s net outlays, the whole of government — the awards on these pages plus interest on the debt, federal payroll, and the day-to-day cost of running the place. Only a slice of it flows through the awards we track.
So don’t stack them. Committed is not a share of total federal spending— they’re different measures (a promise made this year versus cash that left this year) at different scopes (the award universe versus the whole government). The one honest subtraction is total federal spending minuspaid on awards: what’s left is the non-award side of government — interest, payroll, operations. That’s the comparison the numbers actually support.
The colors
Every bar is colored by how the money moves
Committed money reaches the world in five shapes, and every bar on these pages is colored by which one — so an agency’s mix reads at a glance, and a single bar tells you not just how much but how.
Direct paymentsgo straight to people — Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits. The single biggest thing the government does.
Grants fund states, universities, and nonprofits to carry out a public purpose — no deliverable owed back.
Contracts buy a specific good or service, competed and priced, that the government gets back.
Insurance covers a defined risk — flood, crop, deposits — paid out when a loss occurs. Loans are credit the government extends or guarantees; only the subsidy cost scores as committed money.
The biggest line
"Multiple Recipients" is you, and millions of others
The single biggest line in the awards on these pages isn’t a contractor — it’s the checks that go straight to individuals: Social Security, Medicare, SSI, and veterans’ disability. The government reports these as one aggregated recipient, labeled “Multiple Recipients,” because naming the tens of millions of people who receive them would be a privacy breach.
So you can’t drill it down to a person — that’s by design, not a gap in our data. But you can read it by program: which entitlement, in which state. That’s the right way to understand it. When you see “Multiple Recipients” at the top of a leaderboard, read it as a program, not a company.
On the names
Recipient names come straight from the filings
We show recipient names exactly as they appear in federal filings, and the government doesn’t standardize them. The same company can show up under a handful of spelling and punctuation variants — “Inc.” vs “Incorporated,” a comma here, an old division name there.
We don’t silently merge those variants, because guessing wrong would put one company’s money under another’s name. When you’re sizing up a single recipient, it’s worth checking for near-duplicate spellings.
Where it lands
We count the prime award, not the pass-through
A prime recipient — a big contractor or a state government — often passes a chunk of its award down to subcontractors and sub-grantees. These figures count the money where it first lands, with the prime recipient.
We don’t roll those sub-awards back up into the prime’s total, and we don’t attribute them to the firms further down the chain — the source’s pass-through reporting is known to be incomplete, so stacking it on top would double- count. What you see is the first hop of the money.
Year by year
Each dollar counts in the year it happened
A single award can run for years and get amended dozens of times, and the simplest way to total it — the one a lot of tools use — dumps the award’s entire lifetime valueinto a single fiscal year: the year of its most recent action. A ten-year, $10 billion contract that got a small tweak last month lands the whole $10 billion in this year — overstating it, and starving the years the money was actually committed.
We count each action in the year it actually happened instead. A five-year contract shows up as five years of commitments, not one giant lump in whichever year it was last touched. It’s the honest annual total — and it’s why our by-year figures can run lower than a headline you’ve seen elsewhere that still uses the lumpy method.
And once a fiscal year closes, its total stays put. We don’t quietly rewrite last year to smooth this year’s line — a closed year is a closed year. The exception is the year we’re still living through: it’s year-to-date, still filling in, not final. On the by-year chart it’s a striped band with a dashed line — everything left of the dashes is a closed, complete year; the dashed tail is the current one.
Going negative
Sometimes a year's total is negative — that's real money un-committing
A commitment can be walked back. A contract that only draws down $9,000 of a $10,000 commitment gets a –$1,000 correction — a de-obligation— recorded the same way a new commitment is, just with a minus sign. Enough of these in one year can push that year’s total negative, even if the underlying program is completely legitimate.
This shows up most clearly in the long tail of a program that’s winding down or been discontinued: old multi-year contracts keep getting closed out, adjusted, or partially cancelled for years after the program stopped accepting new ones, with nothing new coming in to offset it. When you see a by-year chart dip below the $0 line, that’s what you’re looking at — not an error, and not us hiding anything. We draw the dip instead of clipping it off the chart, because a program’s real history includes the years it committed nothing new and only closed old business out.
The coverage
How far back each number goes
Different series start in different years. Each one begins where its data becomes trustworthy, not where it would look tidiest — and we never pad a series backward to line it up with another.
The by-year chart starts at FY2008. Award records reach back to about FY2000, but the early years were still ramping onto electronic reporting, so we begin where the annual totals are complete.
Agency, recipient, program, and pairing pages start at FY2018. Full financial-assistance reporting — grants and direct payments — settled that year; earlier rows are a coverage artifact, not real spending.
Paid on awards starts at FY2022. That’s the first year every agency itemized award payments; FY2020–21 covered only COVID relief, so drawing them would read as a collapse that never happened.
Total federal spending runs from FY2015. Treasury’s net-outlay reference line on these pages covers closed years back to there.
Two counting conventions ride along. An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, no matter how many times it was amended, never a count of the individual transactions inside them. And a fiscal-year award listmeans “awards active in that year” — every award with at least one action in it, shown at its full lifetime value. That’s a different lens from the by-year dollar totals above, which split each award across the years its money was actually committed — so a single award on a year’s list can be larger than that year’s committed total.
As of
Every page is a snapshot, and the books keep moving
Every spending page is stamped with the date of the USAspending release it’s drawn from — the as-of line near the top. That’s your freshness marker: it tells you exactly which snapshot of the federal books you’re looking at.
Federal awards aren’t frozen the day they’re signed — they get modified, extended, re-priced, and closed out for years afterward, and we refresh from the source on a regular cycle. So a figure you bookmarked can shift a little between snapshots as those corrections land, and even a closed year can tick up or down as late paperwork settles.
That’s the records correcting themselves, not us changing our minds — the government revises its own books for years after the fact. Every figure traces back to a primary-source record at USAspending.gov ↗, the federal government’s official spending portal, so you can always drill into any agency, recipient, or award and see the current state for yourself.
Source