How to look up federal contracts by company.

USAspending.gov is the public side of the federal financial reporting pipeline (FFATA / DATA Act). Coverage runs FY2008 to present, all award types: contracts (codes A, B, C, D), IDVs (IDV_A through IDV_E), grants and other financial assistance (codes 02 through 11), direct loans, loan guarantees, direct payments.

Source feeds: FPDS-NG for procurement, agency financial systems for assistance and outlay actuals. This is the official record but it is not real-time. The data loads on roughly a monthly cadence with a 30 to 90 day lag relative to FPDS-NG transactional data, per USAspending's own "About the Data" documentation.

For real-time procurement context, see SAM.gov entity registration; for the integrity-record layer, see FAPIIS / R/Q records; for sanctions screening, see the Consolidated Screening List guide.

Step 1

Navigate to usaspending.gov/recipient.

Step 2

The search box accepts legal business name, UEI, or DUNS (legacy). Recommend UEI first, it survives renames and acquisitions.

Step 3

Clicking a result loads usaspending.gov/recipient/{recipient_hash}-{level} where level is P (parent), C (child), or R (other). Large primes have one parent profile and many child entities under different UEIs.

Step 4

Tabs to read in order: Recipient Information (location, business types), Award History (totals + filters by FY), Subawards (first-tier only).

For pulls beyond the UI's row limits, bulk monitoring, comparative analysis, journalism-grade research, the API is the right tool. POST to https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/. Required body: filters (must include award_type_codes) plus a fields array.

Working curl example:

curl -X POST https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "filters": {
      "award_type_codes": ["A","B","C","D"],
      "recipient_search_text": ["ACME DEFENSE LLC"],
      "time_period": [{"start_date":"2020-10-01","end_date":"2025-09-30"}]
    },
    "fields": ["Award ID","Recipient Name","Recipient UEI",
               "Awarding Agency","Award Amount","Total Outlays",
               "Start Date","End Date","NAICS","PSC","Description"],
    "limit": 100,
    "page": 1,
    "sort": "Award Amount",
    "order": "desc"
  }'

Pagination uses default limit of 10. Combined with sort, page drives Elasticsearch deep-pagination. The API rejects page numbers that exceed the underlying ES window, page through narrower time windows rather than asking for page 1000. Auth: none, public.

Obligated

USAspending glossary, verbatim: "A legally binding agreement that will result in outlays, immediately or in the future." The moment the government is on the hook. api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/references/glossary

Outlayed

Per OMB Circular A-11 §20: "Payments made to liquidate an obligation." The moment Treasury actually cuts the cash. The USAspending glossary itself does not have a standalone "outlay" entry, the authoritative definition lives at OMB. fedspendingtransparency.github.io/whitepapers/outlay

In plain English

Obligated = promised. Outlayed = paid. A 5-year IDIQ obligated at $50M on day one might show $0 outlayed for months and may never reach $50M outlayed if task orders are descoped or contracts terminated for convenience.

Plain-English gloss for each field returned by the API, in the order they appear on a UI award page:

Award ID

PIID for contracts, FAIN for assistance, URI for some IDVs.

Recipient UEI / DUNS

UEI is the live identifier; DUNS retired April 2022 but historic awards still surface a DUNS.

Awarding Agency / Sub Agency

Who signed the award.

Funding Agency / Sub Agency

Who paid for it. Diverges on interagency agreements (e.g., GSA awards for DOD funding).

NAICS

What kind of work the recipient does (industry classification).

PSC

What was bought (product/service classification, more specific for services).

Start / End Date

Period of performance, not budget period.

Award Amount vs Total Outlays

See section 4.

Description

Agency-written, free text, often opaque. Useful for keyword filtering, not narrative.

Last Modified Date

Proxy for data freshness, not award activity.

• Searching by Recipient Name instead of UEI.Names mutate (M&A, DBAs, agency typos). Always pivot to UEI once you have one match.
• Confusing fiscal year and calendar year. Federal FY runs Oct 1 - Sep 30. The API time_period takes calendar dates, but agency budget context is FY. Be explicit in narrative.
• Trusting same-week data.USAspending's posture is monthly load with 30-90 day lag from FPDS-NG. For "did this contract just get signed" questions, use FPDS-NG or SAM.gov contract data, not USAspending.
• Ignoring parent / child UEI rollups.A prime's true footprint requires aggregating its parent recipient page and its child entities.
• Treating Total Outlays as final.Outlays accumulate across years; a 10-year contract's outlay total today is interim, not closeout.
• Forgetting subawards. First-tier subaward data is reported separately and toggled with subawards: true or spending_level: "subawards". Lower tiers are not visible at all.

USAspending is the source of truth for federal performance context, but reconciling it with SAM.gov registration status, exclusion records, and entity-graph parentage by hand takes hours per vendor. DiligenceDesk pulls the spending_by_award API, joins UEI to SAM.gov entity registration, runs the parent / child rollup, and flags obligation-versus-outlay variance and time-lag risk in a single report.

See the methodology page for the verdict ladder and Step 4 of the contractor due-diligence checklist for where federal performance fits in the workflow. Cross-link to SAM.gov registration for confirming the UEI is current before using award history for a procurement decision.