Where federal construction contract money moved

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.

Everything on this page is NAICS sector 23

Every chart, table, map and share here is filtered to construction — all of sector 23, which is building construction, heavy and civil engineering, and the specialty trades, and which the source accepts as a prefix so no subsector is left out. The map, the industry and product-code tables, the monthly timeline, the small-business share and the count of open solicitations are all filtered the same way. The same study across all federal contracting is a separate page.

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.