How we count the figures on this site

The two figures as the homepage shows them right now.

Winning bids analyzed

One winning bid is one firm's award on one tender: a public record saying that a named supplier won a named contract. A tender split between three firms counts three times, once per winner. We count only records that name a winner. Losing bids are not in this figure, even from the sources that publish them.

The award records come from public registries:

• Federal: USAspending.gov contract awards, from October 2020 (the start of fiscal year 2021) onward, plus SAM.gov award notices for the solicitations we track.
• State and city: the award ledgers published by Texas (TxDOT), Virginia (eVA), Washington, Oregon (ODOT and OregonBuys), California (SCPRS), New York City (City Record) and Washington, DC.

That coverage window is where the homepage's "5 years of public procurement records" comes from. The state ledgers start at different points, most around 2020, and like every other figure here the number of years is rounded down.

Public contracts analyzed

This is the total award value of the tender records in the same warehouse. Amounts are summed in U.S. dollars. The few non-dollar amounts are converted at the exchange rate the warehouse stores. Public records sometimes carry data-entry errors in their amounts. An amount that is implausibly large for its source, which is usually an ID number typed into the amount field, is held out of the total until someone reviews it. Smaller errors stay in, because we do not rewrite what a government published.

Three rules that apply to both figures

1. Always rounded down. Bids are rounded down to the nearest hundred and dollars to the nearest billion. A figure that runs slightly behind the truth can never overclaim. One rounded up could.
2. They never go down. The warehouse is rebuilt from every source twice a day. If one portal is unreachable during a rebuild, its records drop out of that build. Showing the smaller total would announce a drop that did not happen. So we keep the highest figure we have seen. The cost is that, until the missing portal is back in a rebuild, a figure can run slightly ahead of what the latest build holds.
3. Refreshed every six hours. If our data service cannot be reached, the homepage shows an older, lower figure rather than nothing.

Open tenders

The open-tender count and the list of portals under the homepage figures are live. They name every source we currently read, including SAM.gov and the state and city bid boards, and they are updated daily. Offra is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of these portals.

Our research

The federal contracting study is built from USAspending.gov directly, not from the counts above. It has its own methodology section, covering the comparison windows, the 90-day reporting delay on Department of Defense contracts and how each recipient's registrations are combined under one legal name.

What we never use

None of these figures uses anything a customer uploads. Customer documents are never used to build benchmarks or statistics, and never used to train AI models. The privacy policy and our data-source FAQ set this out in full.

Questions about a figure, or a record you think is wrong? Write to info@offra.cc.