Find awarded government contracts without misreading the dollars.

To find awarded US federal contracts, use SAM.gov Contract Awards for the detailed procurement action and USAspending for award-level discovery, transaction history, obligations, recipient analysis, and account context. Do not add the totals from the two systems: they expose related federal procurement data through different models.

The distinction became more important in 2026. Public FPDS.gov search was retired, and GSA moved its public-facing contract-award functionality into SAM.gov on 24 February 2026. USAspending remains the public spending-transparency layer, combining procurement attributes with other federal award and financial data. (SAM.gov: Contract Awards transition; USAspending data sources)

The practical rule is simple:

• begin in SAM.gov when the question is about the reported contract action, modification, competition method, set-aside, product or service classification, contracting office, or exact procurement identifier;
• begin in USAspending when the question is about a supplier’s federal award history, obligations over time, agency or geographic trends, transaction history, or linked federal-account context; and
• use both when a conclusion must be auditable.

Where to find awarded government contracts: the short answer

There is no single row called “the government contract.” Federal reporting separates the procurement instrument from the actions that create or change it, then USAspending builds an award-level view from those transactions.

For a quick manual search:

1. Search the Contract Awards domain on SAM.gov using a solicitation ID, Procurement Instrument Identifier, supplier name, Unique Entity Identifier, CAGE code, agency, date, NAICS, PSC, place of performance, or competition field.
2. Search USAspending Advanced Search, select Contracts and Contract IDVs, then filter by recipient, awarding agency, time period, NAICS, PSC, award ID, location, set-aside, or competition field.
3. Confirm that the PIID, awarding or contracting agency, supplier, parent IDV, action date, and description refer to the same procurement.
4. Read the transaction history before quoting a dollar value.

For repeatable collection, use the SAM.gov Contract Awards API or the USAspending API and download routes. Keep the raw records and the query definition because the answer changes with the selected action types, dates, award grain, and amount field.

This guide concerns US federal contract awards. It does not cover grants, state and local contracts, every subcontract, or current bid opportunities. For pre-award discovery, use the SAM.gov, TED and UK tender-source comparison. For the wider opportunity-to-award-to-supplier model, use the government contracts database guide.

An award is not one row or one dollar amount

Most errors begin by treating “award,” “contract,” “action,” and “spending” as synonyms.

Contract action

The Federal Acquisition Regulation defines a contract action as an action resulting in the purchase, rent, or lease of supplies, services, equipment, or construction using appropriated dollars above the applicable micro-purchase threshold, plus modifications to those actions regardless of value. It excludes grants, cooperative agreements, real-property leases, requisitions from federal stock, training authorizations, and other non-FAR transactions from that definition. (FAR 4.601)

Agencies report covered unclassified contract actions to the federal procurement system. A base award can therefore be followed by funding actions, option exercises, scope changes, administrative corrections, de-obligations, and closeout actions. One PIID can have many reported transactions.

Prime award and award summary

USAspending describes a prime award as an agreement between the federal government and a non-federal recipient. For usability, it creates an award-level holder that groups related transaction records into an award history. Its contract prime-award summary is therefore a derived view across transactions, not another independent government purchase. (USAspending Analyst’s Guide; USAspending data reformatting)

An indefinite delivery vehicle adds another level. A government-wide acquisition contract, indefinite-delivery contract, Federal Supply Schedule, blanket purchase agreement, or other IDV can sit above many orders. The vehicle ceiling, an order’s obligation, and the combined obligations across all orders answer different questions.

Obligation, outlay, current value, and potential value

An obligation is a government promise to spend funds. A positive action increases that promise; a negative action de-obligates money. An outlay is an actual payment. A reported current value and a potential value can include different assumptions about options or ceilings. None should be labeled simply “contract value” without the source field and cutoff date.

USAspending’s transaction file exposes federal_action_obligation; award summaries expose total_obligated_amount. Outlay data are linked through financial-account reporting and follow different reporting schedules. (USAspending Federal Spending Guide)

Before answering “how much was awarded?”, choose one of these questions:

• How much did the base action obligate?
• How much did all actions obligate through a stated date?
• What is the current reported contract value?
• What is the potential value if options or ceiling capacity are used?
• How much has actually been paid?
• How much did one agency obligate in a fiscal period?

The correct aggregation depends on that choice.

Use SAM.gov for the procurement record

SAM.gov Contract Awards now contains the public contract-data search and reports formerly associated with FPDS.gov. GSA says FPDS ezSearch was decommissioned on 24 February 2026 and public-facing contract-award search moved to SAM.gov. The underlying agency reporting workflow continues through the contract-awards management environment. (SAM.gov: Contract Award Data)

What SAM.gov is best at

SAM.gov exposes procurement-specific fields at the contract-action level. Useful fields include:

• PIID, modification number, transaction number, solicitation ID, and referenced IDV PIID;
• award or IDV type and reason for modification;
• contracting and funding department, subtier, and office;
• signed, effective, completion, and last-date-to-order fields;
• legal business name, UEI, CAGE code, business size, and socioeconomic fields;
• NAICS and Product or Service Code;
• place of performance;
• extent competed, set-aside, offers received, and other competition attributes;
• action obligation, total obligation, current value, and potential value fields; and
• description and legislative or acquisition flags where reported.

Those fields make SAM.gov the better starting point for questions such as “Which modification added funding?”, “Was this action competed?”, “Which office signed it?”, “Was it issued under an IDV?”, or “Which PSC was reported?”

Public coverage is broad, not universal or immediate

FAR 4.603 requires executive agencies to maintain publicly available information about covered unclassified contract actions and modifications. That does not mean every purchase, classified action, grant, non-FAR transaction, or subcontract is present. (FAR 4.603)

Public Department of Defense contract data also have a 90-day disclosure delay. The Contract Awards API defines “revealed” public data as civilian actions plus DoD actions whose signed date is at least 90 days old; more recent unrevealed DoD data require the appropriate federal access. USAspending documents the same 90-day source delay for DoD and the US Army Corps of Engineers. (SAM.gov Contract Awards API; USAspending data sources)

Recent defense searches can therefore look incomplete even when the collector is functioning correctly. Preserve the query date and rerun the same window after the disclosure period.

Search, reports, API, and extracts

The SAM.gov website requires a signed-in account to view public Contract Awards search results and run most DataBank reports. No special role is required for public data. Standard and ad hoc reports can be filtered, displayed, and exported. (SAM.gov Contract Data; SAM.gov DataBank)

The public Contract Awards REST API requires a SAM.gov API key. The synchronous search defaults to 10 records and allows up to 100 per page. It exposes only the first 400,000 matches, so broad collection must be partitioned by stable filters such as date and agency. An extract mode creates asynchronous JSON or CSV downloads. The API can also return contracts deleted within the previous six months through its deleted-record route. (SAM.gov Contract Awards API)

Published default daily API limits vary by account: 10 calls for a non-federal personal key with no SAM.gov role, 1,000 for qualifying personal or non-federal system access, and up to 10,000 for a federal system account. Design a feed around the documented allowance instead of assuming interactive queries will scale to a backfill.

Use USAspending for award and spending analysis

USAspending is the federal spending-transparency layer. It includes contracts, IDVs, grants, loans, direct payments, and other award categories, so contract research must explicitly select contract award types.

Why the same procurement looks different

USAspending ingests procurement award and awardee attributes as File D1, historically sourced from FPDS and now the federal contract-award reporting stream. It also receives account-level information from agency financial systems. File C links obligations and outlays to federal accounts, program activities, object classes, and awards where shared identifiers allow a match. (USAspending data sources; Agency submission methodology)

The cadences differ. Procurement D1 data can publish up to daily, while File C is submitted and published monthly or quarterly. An award can appear before its full account context, and some records remain unlinked because the two submissions do not share a usable award ID. USAspending publishes agency statistics for unlinked contract awards rather than hiding the limitation.

USAspending is therefore strongest for:

• finding a recipient’s portfolio of prime federal contracts;
• grouping actions into an award history;
• comparing agencies, suppliers, NAICS, PSC, location, and time periods;
• measuring obligations and de-obligations at transaction or award grain;
• distinguishing awarding and funding agencies;
• connecting awards to federal accounts and program activities where linked;
• exploring IDVs and child orders; and
• downloading filtered or fiscal-year research datasets.

Search and machine access

Advanced Search supports contract and Contract IDV filters along with recipient, agency, date, place, NAICS, PSC, set-aside, extent competed, award amount, and award ID filters. Search results can be downloaded at either award or transaction level. (USAspending Advanced Search; USAspending Federal Spending Guide)

The USAspending API is public and does not require a SAM.gov key. Its endpoints power award search, transaction history, spending totals, categories, recipient views, and generated downloads. For larger reuse, USAspending offers custom award downloads, prebuilt full and delta contract files by fiscal year, and PostgreSQL database snapshots. The full database is documented as exceeding 1.5 terabytes, so it is an engineering dataset rather than a convenient first download. (USAspending API endpoints; USAspending Federal Spending Guide)

Use the API for targeted analysis, generated downloads for bounded extracts, fiscal-year files for repeatable bulk ingestion, and database snapshots only when the complete relational model is genuinely required.

SAM.gov vs USAspending: field and access comparison

The most important difference is grain. A SAM.gov result commonly represents a reported procurement action. A USAspending search result can represent an award summary, while its transaction route exposes the underlying actions. Always record whether a query, export, or endpoint returned awards or transactions.

Choose SAM.gov first when you need

• the detailed contract-action record;
• a modification number or reason for modification;
• exact contracting-office and competition fields;
• the reported relationship to an IDV;
• procurement-system extracts or DataBank reports; or
• a direct check against the current federal contract-data interface.

Choose USAspending first when you need

• a supplier’s award portfolio;
• award summaries and transaction history in one research workflow;
• aggregate obligation analysis by agency, supplier, geography, NAICS, or PSC;
• funding-agency, federal-account, program-activity, object-class, or outlay context;
• contract and non-contract award comparisons; or
• open API access and prepared bulk files without a SAM.gov API key.

Use both when the result will drive a decision

A sales team researching incumbents, a policy analyst comparing vendors, or a data product publishing award totals should reconcile the procurement action with the spending view. Differences often come from timing, aggregation, parent-child relationships, source corrections, or the chosen amount field—not from one portal being wrong.

How to find a specific awarded government contract

1. Start from the strongest identifier

The best starting clues, from strongest to weakest, are usually:

1. PIID plus awarding or contracting agency;
2. referenced IDV PIID plus order PIID;
3. solicitation ID;
4. supplier UEI or CAGE plus agency and date;
5. exact supplier legal name plus a narrow time window; and
6. buyer, NAICS or PSC, location, description text, and approximate date.

Names and titles are discovery fields, not proof of identity. A supplier can change names, operate through subsidiaries, or appear under historical identifiers. A generic description can recur across years and offices.

2. Search SAM.gov Contract Awards

Select the Contract Awards domain, then narrow by the known identifier. If the solicitation ID is present, it can connect the pre-award notice to the resulting procurement action. Do not assume that field is populated or that one solicitation creates one award: competitions can create multiple awards, orders, lots, or vehicles.

Capture the PIID, agency hierarchy, supplier identifiers, signed date, action type, modification number, referenced IDV, NAICS, PSC, description, and amount fields. Inspect later modifications rather than stopping at the base action.

3. Open the USAspending award history

Search the PIID or supplier, select only Contracts and Contract IDVs, and verify the awarding agency. Open the award profile and transaction history. USAspending’s transaction endpoint returns the action amount, action type, action date, modification number, and description for a selected award. (USAspending transaction API)

Check whether the record is a definitive contract, purchase order, delivery or task order, BPA call, or IDV. If it is an order, follow the parent award. If it is a vehicle, do not treat the ceiling as obligated spending.

4. Resolve mismatches explicitly

If the results differ, test these explanations:

• one view is an award summary and the other is one action;
• a modification was signed after the selected cutoff;
• a negative obligation reduced the total;
• the query used action date in one source and fiscal year in the other;
• an order was confused with its parent IDV;
• the awarding and funding agency differ;
• the supplier name changed while the UEI or CAGE remained the better clue;
• recent DoD or USACE data are still inside the 90-day delay; or
• a corrected or deleted source action has not yet propagated into the compared extract.

Document the resolution. A robust answer says, for example, “total federal action obligations across the award’s transactions through 30 June 2026,” not “contract value.”

Calculate award values without false totals

Do not sum award summaries and transactions

An award summary aggregates its related actions. Adding it to those actions counts the same procurement twice. Choose the award table for one-row-per-award analysis or the transaction table for action-level analysis.

Do not count an IDV ceiling as spend

An IDV authorizes future ordering. Its potential or ceiling value is not the same as obligations on orders issued under it. For realized spending, identify the child orders and sum the relevant obligation actions at a stated cutoff.

Include negative actions

De-obligations are part of the history. Filtering to positive values overstates the net obligation. Retain the sign and reason for modification, then show gross increases, reductions, and net change separately if that distinction matters.

Separate winner counts from action counts

One supplier can have many awards; one award can have many actions; one competition can produce multiple awards; and an IDV can have many order suppliers. State whether the metric counts unique recipients, unique prime awards, unique orders, or transactions.

Keep dates explicit

Federal fiscal year, calendar year, signed date, action date, effective date, and last-modified date are different filters. For reproducibility, publish the date field, start and end dates, timezone if relevant, and retrieval cutoff.

Distinguish primes and subawards

SAM.gov Contract Awards and the core USAspending contract view concern prime federal awards. A subcontract is an agreement between a prime recipient and another entity. Subaward reporting has its own scope, thresholds, timeliness, and quality limits; it should not be silently merged into a prime-award supplier ranking.

Build a reliable federal contract awards feed

A production feed needs an explicit model rather than a scrape of search-result cards.

Preserve source keys and relationships

At minimum retain:

• source system and retrieval route;
• PIID, modification number, transaction number, and source record ID;
• referenced IDV PIID and parent-award relationship;
• USAspending generated award and transaction identifiers;
• solicitation ID where reported;
• contracting and funding agency codes;
• supplier legal name, UEI, CAGE, and historical identifier fields;
• signed, action, effective, modified, and retrieval dates;
• raw action type and reason for modification;
• raw amount field name, value, currency, and sign; and
• source URL, query parameters, raw payload hash, and accepted-at timestamp.

Do not construct a global key from PIID alone. Use the complete source identifier rules, including agency or subtier context and parent relationships where required.

Partition extraction deliberately

SAM.gov’s 100-row page limit, 400,000-match ceiling, keyed quotas, disclosure rules, and deleted-record route all affect collection design. Partition broad pulls by non-overlapping date and agency ranges, prove pagination completion, collect deletions, and retain extract manifests.

USAspending’s filtered APIs and download jobs serve different workloads. Record the award types, spending level, time period, agencies, recipient filters, and whether the file contains award summaries or prime transactions. For bulk archives, retain the fiscal year, generated date, file version, row count, and checksum.

Monitor source lag, not only pipeline uptime

A successful request can still return an incomplete analytical period. Monitor:

• newest action and source-modified dates by agency;
• expected DoD and USACE disclosure lag;
• action, award, and unique-recipient counts;
• positive and negative obligation totals;
• parent-IDV match rate;
• File C to D1 linkage coverage when using account context;
• missing PIID, UEI, NAICS, PSC, and amount fields;
• deleted or corrected action volume; and
• reconciliation differences between source extracts and published views.

Use the data-quality framework to define acceptance checks and the monitoring runbook to handle partial or delayed source windows.

Know what WebTruffle’s public award dataset covers

WebTruffle’s free government contract awards and winning suppliers dataset currently normalizes result and award-stage notices from TED, Find a Tender, and Contracts Finder. It does not currently claim US federal SAM.gov or USAspending coverage. That dataset is useful for its published EU and UK scope; a US federal award feed requires the source model, keys, partitions, and validation described here.

The research question should choose the source and grain. Use SAM.gov to inspect the procurement action, USAspending to analyze the award and its spending history, and both when the result must survive review.

Frequently asked questions