Where federal contract money moved
Federal contract obligations rose +40% between Feb–May 2024 and Feb–May 2026. The federal government did not spend less after January 2025 — it spent more, on different things, bought by different agencies, from a partly different set of firms.
USAspending.gov, all federal contract obligations by action date · Feb–May 2024 vs Feb–May 2026 · snapshot 2026-09-24
The federal government spent +40% more — $225B to $314B on contracts after January 2025. Defense grew +46% in its own right; Homeland Security grew +254% from a far smaller base, and international development all but stopped.
Which agencies gained, and which stopped buying
The total went up sharply, so this is not a spending cut showing up unevenly. Nor is it a redistribution away from defence: the Department of Defense, which is most of the chart by volume, grew +46% in its own right — around $62.1B of new obligations, more than three times the next largest increase. The falls are concentrated and they are policy-shaped: the Agency for International Development, wound down over the period, is the largest of them.
| Agency | Relative change, as a bar | Relative change | Feb–May 2024 | Feb–May 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Homeland Security | +254% | $7.4B | $26.2B | |
| Department of Veterans Affairs | +52% | $13.0B | $19.7B | |
| Department of Defense | +46% | $135B | $197B | |
| Social Security Administration | +35% | $518M | $701M | |
| Department of Transportation | +34% | $3.1B | $4.1B | |
| Department of Education | +22% | $952M | $1.2B | |
| Department of Energy | +20% | $22.7B | $27.3B | |
| General Services Administration | +20% | $7.2B | $8.7B | |
| Department of Labor | +14% | $526M | $600M | |
| Department of the Interior | +5% | $2.3B | $2.4B | |
| Department of Justice | +3% | $3.6B | $3.7B | |
| Department of Commerce | −6% | $1.5B | $1.4B | |
| Department of Agriculture | −8% | $3.4B | $3.2B | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | −8% | $5.1B | $4.7B | |
| Department of Health and Human Services | −16% | $7.4B | $6.3B | |
| Department of the Treasury | −29% | $2.9B | $2.1B | |
| National Science Foundation | −32% | $208M | $141M | |
| Securities and Exchange Commission | −33% | $248M | $167M | |
| Department of State | −33% | $3.5B | $2.4B | |
| Environmental Protection Agency | −39% | $596M | $364M | |
| Department of Housing and Urban Development | −41% | $259M | $154M | |
| Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation | −41% | $111M | $65M | |
| Smithsonian Institution | −45% | $150M | $83M | |
| Office of Personnel Management | −66% | $160M | $54M | |
| Agency for International Development | −76% | $1.9B | $448M |
Agencies obligating under $100M in both windows are omitted: below that a percentage describes one contract rather than a pattern. The list itself is complete — an agency absent from it obligated nothing in either window, not merely too little to rank.
When it turned
Monthly obligations, January 2023 to May 2026. The annual shape dominates — every September is the fiscal-year close and every October is the trough after it — which is exactly why the windows on this page are matched February to May. Read against that rhythm, the first full year of this administration is close to flat, and the step is in its second.
The series stops at May 2026 rather than at the present because Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers withhold contract actions for 90 days — see the note on the defence hold. Months after that read near zero for defence, which is an embargo and not a decline.
peak $92B/mo
peak $12B/mo
peak $16B/mo
peak $14B/mo
peak $9.9B/mo
peak $5.7B/mo
peak $1.9B/mo
peak $4.0B/mo
peak $588M/mo
peak $1.9B/mo
The figure beside each agency compares its average month after January 2025 with its average month before — a different span from the inauguration-to-date window comparisons elsewhere on this page, and so a different number.
Who gets paid
The largest defence primes still lead the table, but not in the order they did. What moves is underneath them. Three firms in the current top twelve were nowhere in the 100 largest recipients of Feb–May 2024 at all — they are the highlighted rows below — and six of the firms that led the baseline window have dropped out of the top twelve altogether. Two of the arrivals are construction firms, which is the whole of the construction study in one line.
| Recipient | Rank Feb–May 2024 | Feb–May 2024 | Rank Feb–May 2026 | Feb–May 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION | #1 | $10.0B | #1 | $26.6B |
| THE BOEING COMPANY | #2 | $7.1B | #2 | $10.8B |
| RAYTHEON COMPANY | #26 | $1.2B | #3 | $9.4B |
| ELECTRIC BOAT CORPORATION | #16 | $1.8B | #4 | $7.7B |
| BARNARD CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, INCORPORATED | outside the top 100 | — | #5 | $5.5B |
| TRIWEST HEALTHCARE ALLIANCE CORP | #20 | $1.4B | #6 | $5.1B |
| MCKESSON CORPORATION | #7 | $2.8B | #7 | $5.0B |
| OPTUM PUBLIC SECTOR SOLUTIONS, INC. | outside the top 100 | — | #8 | $4.6B |
| HUNTINGTON INGALLS INCORPORATED | #3 | $3.7B | #9 | $4.0B |
| FISHER SAND & GRAVEL CO | outside the top 100 | — | #10 | $3.8B |
| NORTHROP GRUMMAN SYSTEMS CORP | #11 | $2.2B | #11 | $3.3B |
| TRIAD NATIONAL SECURITY, LLC | #5 | $3.2B | #12 | $3.3B |
Names are the source's own, which is why they are shouting. Recipients are rolled up from its per-UEI rows — the largest parent here is eight of them — because reading those rows as published understates every large contractor several times over; see the methodology note.
The same churn, drawn as ranks
- held a place in both
- rose from 13–100
- outside the top 100
- left the top 12
Amber lines converge from “outside the top 100”: three firms absent from the 100 largest recipients of Feb–May 2024 altogether. Blue lines rise from the band under the divider — three that were ranked in Feb–May 2024 but below the top twelve, each shown at the place it actually held, which is the rank the table above gives it. The dashed lines are the six firms that dropped out of the top twelve. That is not the same as leaving the federal record: most are still ranked, simply lower than they were.
Where the work moved
Change in contract obligations by place of performance, Feb–May 2024 to Feb–May 2026. Texas absorbs the largest share of the increase by a wide margin. What is striking is how few states lose anything at all: when the total rises this much, the story is where the growth concentrates rather than where it is taken from.
- DC −$441M
- PR +$1.2B
- VI +$1M
- GU −$345M
- AS −$1M
- MP +$14M
| State or territory | Feb–May 2024 | Feb–May 2026 | Change | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | $16.8B | $50.2B | +$33.5B | +200% |
| Virginia | $27.6B | $39.6B | +$12.0B | +43% |
| Arizona | $3.7B | $11.5B | +$7.9B | +216% |
| California | $20.1B | $27.0B | +$6.9B | +34% |
| Florida | $8.6B | $14.0B | +$5.4B | +62% |
| Washington | $4.6B | $9.7B | +$5.0B | +109% |
| Connecticut | $6.7B | $11.2B | +$4.5B | +68% |
| Massachusetts | $4.0B | $7.4B | +$3.4B | +83% |
| Pennsylvania | $8.3B | $10.6B | +$2.3B | +28% |
| Maryland | $12.2B | $13.7B | +$1.4B | +12% |
| South Carolina | $3.6B | $4.9B | +$1.3B | +35% |
| New Jersey | $3.0B | $4.2B | +$1.2B | +39% |
| Puerto Rico | $398M | $1.6B | +$1.2B | +297% |
| Georgia | $2.4B | $3.5B | +$1.1B | +46% |
| Illinois | $4.2B | $5.1B | +$870M | +21% |
| Missouri | $4.6B | $5.4B | +$800M | +18% |
| Louisiana | $1.2B | $1.8B | +$689M | +60% |
| Oregon | $384M | $1.0B | +$660M | +172% |
| Ohio | $2.8B | $3.4B | +$641M | +23% |
| Indiana | $1.5B | $2.1B | +$570M | +38% |
| Tennessee | $5.0B | $5.5B | +$474M | +10% |
| Kansas | $808M | $1.2B | +$417M | +52% |
| Wyoming | $114M | $427M | +$313M | +275% |
| Oklahoma | $1.8B | $2.1B | +$295M | +17% |
| Alaska | $1.2B | $1.5B | +$274M | +22% |
| Colorado | $5.0B | $5.3B | +$273M | +5% |
| New Hampshire | $630M | $870M | +$240M | +38% |
| Nebraska | $332M | $512M | +$180M | +54% |
| Montana | $246M | $422M | +$176M | +72% |
| Nevada | $1.3B | $1.5B | +$143M | +11% |
| Alabama | $6.7B | $6.9B | +$119M | +2% |
| New Mexico | $7.0B | $7.1B | +$105M | +2% |
| Rhode Island | $345M | $440M | +$95M | +28% |
| Mississippi | $3.3B | $3.4B | +$67M | +2% |
| North Dakota | $326M | $372M | +$46M | +14% |
| Iowa | $667M | $688M | +$21M | +3% |
| Northern Mariana Islands | $52M | $66M | +$14M | +27% |
| U.S. Virgin Islands | $7M | $8M | +$1M | +14% |
| American Samoa | $2M | $1M | −$1M | −50% |
| Delaware | $127M | $97M | −$30M | −24% |
| New York | $4.3B | $4.2B | −$34M | −1% |
| Maine | $2.4B | $2.4B | −$36M | −1% |
| Vermont | $229M | $191M | −$38M | −17% |
| South Dakota | $355M | $297M | −$58M | −16% |
| West Virginia | $596M | $533M | −$63M | −11% |
| Idaho | $1.5B | $1.4B | −$79M | −5% |
| Arkansas | $425M | $260M | −$165M | −39% |
| Michigan | $2.8B | $2.6B | −$170M | −6% |
| Minnesota | $926M | $753M | −$173M | −19% |
| Utah | $3.3B | $3.1B | −$274M | −8% |
| North Carolina | $2.1B | $1.8B | −$314M | −15% |
| Guam | $894M | $549M | −$345M | −39% |
| District of Columbia | $11.2B | $10.8B | −$441M | −4% |
| Kentucky | $5.0B | $4.5B | −$457M | −9% |
| Hawaii | $2.2B | $1.6B | −$551M | −25% |
| Wisconsin | $2.7B | $1.4B | −$1.3B | −47% |
What the money buys now
Two views of the same dollars: the industry the recipient is classified in, and the product or service code the government bought. Note the second row of the industry table — commercial and institutional building construction is now among the largest industries in federal contracting, which two years ago it was not.
Largest industries
| NAICS industry | Feb–May 2024 | Feb–May 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Guided Missile and Space Vehicle Manufacturing | $6.7B | $23.9B |
| Commercial and Institutional Building Construction | $7.7B | $22.5B |
| Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology) | $14.1B | $20.7B |
| Aircraft Manufacturing | $13.2B | $20.4B |
| Engineering Services | $16.3B | $20.4B |
| Facilities Support Services | $18.0B | $18.8B |
| Ship Building and Repairing | $9.5B | $15.2B |
| Direct Health and Medical Insurance Carriers | $7.9B | $15.0B |
| Computer Systems Design Services | $10.1B | $10.1B |
| Other Computer Related Services | $7.4B | $7.8B |
Largest product & service codes
| PSC | Feb–May 2024 | Feb–May 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Guided Missiles | not in top 20 | $15.8B |
| Combat Ships and Landing Vessels | $8.3B | $15.3B |
| Aircraft, Fixed Wing | $5.1B | $12.8B |
| Medical- Managed Healthcare | $6.5B | $12.2B |
| Support- Professional: Engineering/Technical | $10.9B | $11.5B |
| Operation of Miscellaneous Buildings | $10.4B | $11.0B |
| Construction of Other Non-Building Facilities | not in top 20 | $10.8B |
| Support- Professional: Other | $8.7B | $9.5B |
| Drugs and Biologicals | $5.2B | $8.5B |
| IT and Telecom - Business Application/Application Development Support Services (Labor) | $6.3B | $7.4B |
Construction rose +166% over these windows against +40% for federal contracting as a whole — $12.8B to $34.0B, or 5.7% of every federal contract dollar rising to 10.8%. That is its own study.
Sector by sector
Five sectors have their own report, each built from the same snapshot on the same windows. Two of them — construction (+166%) and manufacturing and supplies (+59%) — grew faster than federal contracting as a whole (+40%); professional services (+16%), IT services (+7%) and facilities and support services (+5%) trailed it. Together they are 88% of federal contract dollars in Feb–May 2026. The rest — health care, insurance, wholesale trade, transport and others — is not broken out.
Construction
$34.0B Feb–May 2026
+166% from $12.8B in Feb–May 2024
10.8% of federal contract dollars
Reserved for small business: 17.9% → 9.0%
Professional services
$62.8B Feb–May 2026
+16% from $54.1B in Feb–May 2024
20.0% of federal contract dollars
Reserved for small business: 9.1% → 7.4%
IT services
$30.4B Feb–May 2026
+7% from $28.4B in Feb–May 2024
9.7% of federal contract dollars
Reserved for small business: 16.6% → 15.3%
Facilities & support services
$28.2B Feb–May 2026
+5% from $26.8B in Feb–May 2024
9.0% of federal contract dollars
Reserved for small business: 7.1% → 6.7%
Manufacturing & supplies
$119B Feb–May 2026
+59% from $74.8B in Feb–May 2024
38.0% of federal contract dollars
Reserved for small business: 3.2% → 2.5%
Small-business dollars rose more slowly than everything else
Obligations on contracts reserved for small business went from $17.3B to $18.7B — +8%, against a total that rose +40%. As a share of all contract dollars, set-asides went from 7.7% to 6.0%. The dollars did not fall; they were outgrown.
That is the dollars. The opportunity count is a different story, and it is the one worth acting on. Of the 7,446 federal solicitations open on SAM.gov right now, at least 2,424 — 33% — are explicitly reserved for small business.
- 1,867 Small business
- 270 Veteran-owned
- 218 Women-owned
- 31 8(a)
- 25 HUBZone
- 13 Tribal & Native
“At least”, because 4,190 of those 7,446 notices — most of them — do not publish a set-aside field at all, and are counted here as unreserved rather than guessed at. Among the 3,256 that do state a status, 74% are reserved for small business. The true figure is somewhere between the two, and neither end of that range is small. Open-notice counts confirmed Oct 1, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC.
So the work a small firm can bid is still there in volume. What shrank is the share of the money attached to it — which makes the practical question less can we qualify and more which of these is worth the bid.
What this means if you bid
This section is our reading of the figures above, not a finding of the data: the award record describes what happened, and this is what we would do with it. Every number here is computed from the same snapshot as the rest of the page.
Larger firms and primes
The buyers adding the most: Department of Defense (+$62.1B), Department of Homeland Security (+$18.8B) and Department of Veterans Affairs (+$6.8B). Falling most: Agency for International Development (−$1.5B) and Department of Health and Human Services (−$1.2B).
Point capture effort at the gaining agencies. A contract with a falling buyer is the one most likely to be cut back, merged or not recompeted.
The ten largest recipients took 26% of the dollars in Feb–May 2026, up from 18% in Feb–May 2024.
The money is concentrating into fewer, larger awards. A seat on the large contract vehicles — or a teaming agreement with a firm that holds one — matters more than it did.
Three of the ten largest recipients in Feb–May 2026 were outside the top hundred in Feb–May 2024.
Incumbency is not protecting the leaders here. Firms positioned on the growing requirements reached the top of this table between Feb–May 2024 and Feb–May 2026, so an incumbent is beatable.
The work grew most in Texas (+$33.5B), Virginia (+$12.0B) and Arizona (+$7.9B), by place of performance.
For work done on site, that is where people, subcontractors and local suppliers are worth having in place before the solicitation drops.
Small businesses
Contracts reserved for small business were 6.0% of the dollars in Feb–May 2026, from 7.7% in Feb–May 2024 (−1.7 pts) — $17.3B to $18.7B.
Reserved work was outgrown, not cut: the growth landed on unreserved contracts. Reach it through the primes winning them — large primes on big contracts must file small-business subcontracting plans and need partners to meet them — or bid it together through a joint venture or a mentor-protégé agreement.
Right now at least 2,424 of the 7,446 open solicitations on SAM.gov (33%) are explicitly reserved for small business.
The shrinking dollar share and the count of opportunities are different things: the reserved work is still there in volume. The practical question is which of it is worth the bid.
The agencies adding the most here: Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Each has an Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization and publishes a procurement forecast. Both exist to connect small firms with upcoming buys, and both cost nothing to use.
The product and service codes growing fastest: “Aircraft, Fixed Wing”, “Combat Ships and Landing Vessels” and “Medical- Managed Healthcare”. New to the top twenty: “Guided Missiles”, “Construction of Other Non-Building Facilities” and “Construction of Highways, Roads, Streets, Bridges, and Railways”.
Make sure the codes on your SAM.gov registration and your capability statement match what is being bought now, not what was bought when you registered. That is what search and matching read.
How this was measured
Every figure comes from USAspending.gov's own aggregation endpoints, queried directly. No estimate, model or projection is involved, and any number here can be reproduced against the same source. Snapshot taken 2026-09-24.
- Every sector, and five broken out separately
- This page is whole-of-government: no industry filter is applied anywhere on it. Five sectors have their own report, built from the same snapshot on the same windows — construction, professional services, IT services, facilities and support services and manufacturing and supplies — defined by NAICS code so that no dollar lands in two of them. Together they are most, but not all, of federal contracting: health care, insurance, wholesale and transport are not broken out.
- Obligations, not contracts signed
- Amounts are contract obligations by action date, which includes money added to awards signed in earlier years. It measures where federal dollars went in a period, not how many new contracts were let. Award types A, B, C and D only — definitive contracts, purchase orders, delivery orders and BPA calls. Grants, loans and direct payments are a different question and are excluded.
- Matched February–May windows
- The federal year ends 30 September and the quarter before it is always the largest of the year by a wide margin, so any comparison that includes September in one year and not another is measuring the calendar. February is also the first full month after a 20 January inauguration. May is the ceiling, for the reason in the next note.
- The defence hold, and why it bounds every window here
- The Department of Defense and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers withhold contract actions from the Federal Procurement Data System — and so from USAspending — for 90 days after the action, under an operational-security rule that applies to no civilian agency. Nothing in the data marks it. A month inside the hold simply shows almost no defence activity, and nothing distinguishes that from a real collapse except knowing the rule exists. For scale, defence obligated a median of $39.8B a month across the most recent eighteen months charted here; a month still inside the hold reads at a small fraction of that, then fills in as the actions are released. Every window and the monthly series on this page therefore stop at May 2026, the most recent month for which the defence record is complete, rather than at the present. Anyone reproducing these figures over a more recent period should expect defence to look absent there, and should not read that as a decline. Because the Army Corps is one of the largest federal construction buyers, the effect lands twice on anything measuring construction.
- Recipients are rolled up from per-UEI rows
- The source returns one row per registered entity, not one per company — LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION alone comes back as eight separate rows. They are summed here by normalised legal name, so a parent's total is the sum of its registered entities. Reading the rows as published would understate the largest contractors several times over.
- “Outside the top 100” does not mean zero
- Each ranking is read 100 rows deep. A firm described as arriving from outside that list had no place in it, which is not the same as having had no federal work at all.
- Place of performance is where the source says the work happens
- Not where the benefit lands, and not always where the work physically occurs. Federal records skew toward the contracting office — the same bias described on our coverage map, where Navy supply depots in Mechanicsburg and Philadelphia and DLA Columbus post nationwide contracts from their own addresses.
- Recent months are provisional
- Separately from the defence hold, obligations for recent months revise upward for several weeks as modifications post, so the right-hand end of the monthly series will grow slightly after this snapshot was taken. Both effects push the same way: the most recent figures here are floors.
- Grants are excluded, so the infrastructure law is invisible here
- This matters more than it sounds. Money from the 2021 infrastructure act mostly reaches contractors as grants and formula funds passed to state departments of transportation, which then let their own contracts. None of that is a federal prime contract, so none of it appears anywhere on this page. Its absence here is a fact about the measure, not about the spending. The Census Bureau's construction series is the instrument for that channel.
- What is not claimed
- This is a description of the award record, not an explanation of it. Appropriations, procurement lead times and contract vehicles all sit between a policy and a number on this page, and none of them are visible here.
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