How to Use USASpending.gov to Track Federal Funds

To use USAspending.gov to track federal funds, gather a few identifiers about the recipient or agency you’re researching, then run an Award Search filtered by fiscal year and award type. The site is free, requires no account, and covers trillions of dollars in federal spending for fiscal year 2026.¹ Most searches take only a few minutes once you know what to type in and which filters to apply.

What to Gather Before You Search

Vague searches produce thousands of loosely related records. A few minutes of prep saves real frustration:

Unique Entity ID. A twelve-character alphanumeric code assigned to every organization registered to do business with the federal government. It replaced the old nine-digit DUNS number in April 2022. If you don’t already have one, look it up on SAM.gov, where registered entities can view their assigned code.²³
Exact legal name. Small differences matter. An ampersand instead of “and” can be enough to miss records.
Fiscal year. The federal fiscal year runs October 1 through September 30 and is named for the calendar year in which it ends. FY2026 began October 1, 2025, and ends September 30, 2026. Searching by calendar year pulls the wrong records.⁴
Agency or sub-agency. Knowing whether the money came from, say, the Forest Service versus the broader Department of Agriculture narrows results dramatically.
Place of performance. The city, state, or zip code where the work was done helps filter when multiple entities share similar names.

One detail people miss: SAM.gov registrations expire after 365 days.³ If an organization let its registration lapse, its older awards still appear on USAspending.gov, but you may not find its current Unique Entity ID through a SAM.gov lookup. Search USAspending.gov directly by name if that route comes up empty.

Running an Award Search

Award Search is where most people start. Enter a Unique Entity ID or recipient name in the search bar, then use the sidebar filters to select fiscal years, agencies, and award types. The results table updates as you add filters, showing the award amount, transaction date, and awarding agency for each match. Click any individual award to open its full summary page, which includes transaction history, place of performance, and the Treasury account that funded it.

Toggle the award type filters early. A single organization might hold contracts, grants, and loans at the same time, and mixing them in one view makes the numbers harder to read. If you’re researching defense spending, note that Department of Defense procurement data has a 90-day delay before it appears on the site.⁵ Very recent DOD contract awards will not show up yet. Once you have what you need, export the results to CSV, TSV, or pipe-delimited text for offline analysis.

Reading the Numbers Correctly

Obligations vs. Outlays

Two terms trip people up. An obligation is a legal commitment to spend, recorded the moment an agency signs a contract or awards a grant. An outlay is the actual cash leaving the Treasury to pay that commitment. An agency might obligate billions in a given year but disburse only a fraction of it during that same period, with the rest flowing out over months or years as work gets done and invoices come in. When a large dollar figure appears in a result, check whether it’s an obligated amount or an outlay. They tell different stories about the same money.

Award Types

Federal money flows through several instruments, and each one shows up differently in the database:

Contracts. The government buys something for its own direct use, such as equipment, construction, or consulting services. Contracts are governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation and make up the single largest category of discretionary awards.⁶
Grants. The government transfers money to a state, local government, or organization to carry out a public purpose, such as building affordable housing or running a job training program. The government does not receive a product or service in return.⁷
Loans. The government provides capital that must be repaid. These are common in housing and small business programs.⁸
Direct payments. Money paid directly to individuals, like Social Security benefits or veterans’ pensions. These are ongoing entitlements established by statute, not project awards.

When Award Search Isn’t the Right Tool

Spending Explorer

Instead of looking up a specific recipient, Spending Explorer lets you browse total federal spending from the top down. View spending by budget function (what the money is for), by agency (who spent it), or by object class (what type of goods or services were purchased). Use this when you want the big picture, such as how much went to national defense versus health care, or how one agency’s spending compares to others. The data here draws from agency budget submissions rather than individual award records, so it captures spending that does not involve outside recipients, including federal employee salaries.

The Public API

For journalists, researchers, and developers who need to pull data programmatically, USAspending.gov offers a free public API with no registration required.⁹ It provides the same data available on the website but allows custom queries, automated repeated searches, and integration into your own tools or dashboards. For one-off research, the website is easier. For tracking spending across dozens of agencies over multiple years, the API saves enormous time.

Bulk Downloads

Two bulk download options exist for people who need large datasets. The Award Data Archive provides pre-built files of award transaction data for major agencies, filtered by agency, award type, and fiscal year; these files update by the 15th of each month. Full files contain all data for a given fiscal year up to the preparation date, while delta files contain only records added, modified, or deleted since the previous month.¹⁰ The Custom Award Data tool builds more targeted downloads by award type, agency, location, and date range, though date ranges are limited to one-year spans.⁵ Data going back to fiscal year 2001 is available through custom downloads.

Tracking Sub-Awards

Federal awards often involve layers. A prime recipient (the organization that received the award directly from the government) frequently passes a portion of the funds to sub-recipients. Under federal regulations, prime recipients must report any sub-award of $30,000 or more through the FFATA Subaward Reporting System.¹¹ That system feeds directly into USAspending.gov, where each sub-award appears linked to its parent award.¹²

Only first-tier sub-awards get reported. If a sub-recipient passes funds to yet another organization, that third layer does not appear in the database. Sub-contract and sub-grant data can be downloaded separately through the Custom Award Data tool for analysis across agencies or programs.

Where the Data Falls Short

USAspending.gov is the most comprehensive public window into federal spending, but it has real limits worth knowing before treating any search result as definitive.

The Government Accountability Office has consistently found that data quality varies across agencies. In a report covering fiscal year 2023 procurement data, the GAO found that only 36 of 70 reporting agencies confirmed they had completed the required data quality reviews. Nearly a quarter of agencies either did not complete a quality report or did not respond to GAO inquiries about it.¹³ Among those that did submit reports, several failed to certify that data had been entered on time, and some lacked proper sampling methods for verifying accuracy.

Earlier GAO work found that known data limitations were not being clearly communicated on the site. The 90-day lag for Defense Department procurement data was not disclosed to users for years, until Treasury added a notice in early 2021.¹⁴ If you’re using the data for reporting, research, or decision-making, cross-reference large figures against agency budget documents or Treasury reports when precision matters. The database is excellent for identifying what awards exist and their approximate scale. Treat exact dollar amounts with some skepticism, especially for recent transactions that agencies may not have fully reconciled.

The site pulls from two datasets that originate in different systems. File C comes from audited agency financial systems. Files D1 (procurement) and D2 (financial assistance) come from separate award-reporting systems. Some awards appear in one dataset but not the other because they lack a shared award ID, and those unlinked awards may be missing recipient information or a full summary page.¹ If a record looks suspiciously incomplete, that mismatch is the most likely explanation.

1
USAspending.gov. Government Spending Open Data
2
General Services Administration. Implementing the Unique Entity ID
3
SAM.gov. Entity Registration
4
Congressional Research Service. Basic Federal Budgeting Terminology
5
USAspending.gov. Custom Award Data
6
U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual. 14 FAH-2 H-120 The Acquisition Environment
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 31 USC 6304 – Using Grant Agreements
8
U.S. Department of the Treasury. Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990
9
USAspending.gov. USAspending API
10
USAspending.gov. Award Data Archive
11
eCFR. 2 CFR Part 170 – Reporting Subaward and Executive Compensation
12
Federal Transit Administration. FFATA Subaward Reporting Information
13
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Actions Needed to Help Ensure Procurement Data Quality
14
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Data Act: Quality of Data Submissions Has Improved but Further Action Is Needed to Disclose Known Data Limitations