Open government tenders by state

How to read this map

Shading is logarithmic, not linear. The spread between the busiest state and the quietest runs to better than a thousand to one, and on a linear scale that leaves forty states sharing a single indistinguishable tint. The legend names real counts at each step so the colour can be read back to a number.

A federal notice is placed where the contracting office sits, not where the work does. That is how the source publishes it: only about a third of SAM.gov notices carry a usable place of performance, and the rest fall back to the buying office's own address. It has a visible effect here — Pennsylvania and Ohio rank far above their share of actual construction work because the Navy's Mechanicsburg and Philadelphia supply depots and DLA Columbus post nationwide supply contracts from those addresses. The numbers are real solicitations, genuinely open, and the count on each state matches what you get when you click it. They are not a ranking of where the work happens.

The “federal $ awarded” view is the answer to that. Federal obligations are recorded against the place of performance, so switching the shading to dollars shows where the work actually is rather than where it was bought from. The two views disagree, and the disagreement is the point — each state's profile page carries the full seven-year history behind the second one.

15 open notices are not on this map. Federal work is posted overseas as well as at home, and those notices carry foreign subdivision codes — Japanese prefectures, German states, British counties — alongside the military's APO and FPO regions and a residue of notices whose location the source never published. There is no honest state to put them in, so they are counted here instead of being quietly assigned to one.

The full source list behind these numbers — which feed carries which state, and which of them describe awards rather than open work — is in the states Offra covers.