USASpending Federal Awards Scraper

USASpending Federal Awards Scraper: who got federal money, how much and for what

Give it a keyword, an agency, a state, an industry code or a recipient, and it searches the federal awards published on USASpending.gov: contracts, grants, loans, direct payments and the rest. Each row is one award with its id, the recipient and their UEI, the amount, the awarding and funding agency, the period of performance, where the work was done and a link to the public award page. Two things surprise people: this is money already awarded, not a list of work you can still bid on, and the date filter follows when money moved, so a contract signed in 2008 and amended last month is a correct hit for last month.

🔍 What USASpending Federal Awards Scraper does

Federal spending is filed in six families: contracts, grants and cooperative agreements, indefinite-delivery vehicles, loans, direct payments, and insurance and other assistance. USASpending will not mix them in one search. So each family you pick is searched on its own, your row budget is shared between them, and whatever one family leaves unused goes to the next.

Where the work was done comes back separately from where the recipient is registered. "Work done in Texas" and "company registered in Texas" are two different filters here.

Every row is checked against your filters before it is charged. A row from the wrong agency, state, amount band or code is dropped, and a free row says how many and why. A row that cannot be checked, such as a state filter on an award that records no state, is dropped the same way rather than guessed at.

📥 What you give it

{
  "agencies": ["Department of Energy"],
  "placeOfPerformanceStates": ["TX", "NM"],
  "awardTypes": ["contracts"],
  "minAwardAmountUsd": 1000000,
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
  "maxItems": 200
}

An input that only picks award types, or has nothing in it at all, returns one free sample row. That is deliberate: award types on their own would mean every federal contract since 2007.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run for solar, sorted by amount, with the description cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "charged": true,
  "recordType": "award",
  "awardId": "NNG09HR00C",
  "awardUniqueKey": "CONT_AWD_NNG09HR00C_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-",
  "awardTypeGroup": "contracts",
  "awardType": "DEFINITIVE CONTRACT",
  "recipientName": "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP",
  "recipientUei": "FYHNA5WC8XD7",
  "recipientCity": "LITTLETON",
  "recipientState": "CO",
  "recipientCountry": "UNITED STATES",
  "awardAmountUsd": 2032829134.57,
  "totalOutlaysUsd": 306532392.81,
  "loanSubsidyCostUsd": null,
  "awardingAgency": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration",
  "awardingAgencyCode": "080",
  "awardingSubAgency": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration",
  "awardingSubAgencyCode": "8000",
  "fundingAgency": "Department of Commerce",
  "fundingSubAgency": "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration",
  "periodOfPerformanceStart": "2008-12-04",
  "periodOfPerformanceEnd": "2039-04-30",
  "placeOfPerformanceCity": "LITTLETON",
  "placeOfPerformanceState": "CO",
  "placeOfPerformanceZip": "80125",
  "placeOfPerformanceCountry": "UNITED STATES",
  "naicsCode": "336414",
  "naicsDescription": "GUIDED MISSILE AND SPACE VEHICLE MANUFACTURING",
  "pscCode": "AR35",
  "pscDescription": "R&D- SPACE: FLIGHT (OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT)",
  "assistanceListingNumber": null,
  "assistanceListingTitle": null,
  "description": "THE GOVERNMENT IS PROCURING THE NEXT-GENERATION GEOSTATIONARY OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL SATELLITES (GOES) SERIES TO CONTINUE ITS MISSION THROUGH NEW REQUIREMENTS SPECIFIED IN THE GOES-R LEVEL I REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT AND MISSION REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT (MRD). …",
  "baseObligationDate": "2008-12-04",
  "lastModified": "2026-07-27 15:48:00",
  "url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_NNG09HR00C_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-30T02:38:01.767Z"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can share a dataset, and charged is the field that separates them.

The sample row also says recordType: "award", so filter on charged == true, not on recordType.

NO_RESULTS and NETWORK are the pair to tell apart. The first means nothing is there. The second means nobody looked.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open USASpending Federal Awards Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put a keyword in Search terms, or clear it and use the filters instead. The form arrives with solar in it. 3. Tick the Kinds of award you want, and narrow it with Awarding agency, Work performed in (state) or From date. 4. Set Maximum rows, low on a first run, and choose an Order. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as CSV, JSON or Excel.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.50 per 1,000 awards, which is $0.0005 a row, flat on every Apify plan. A thousand awards comes to fifty cents.

You pay for award rows and nothing else per row. The sample row and every diagnostic row are free, and so are rows dropped for not matching your filters and repeats inside one run. A backwards date window or amount band stops the run before anything is searched. If you set a maximum charge on the run, it stops at that figure instead of going past it.

💡 What people use it for

• Working out who already holds the work before bidding on the recompete: filter by agency and industry code, sort by amount, read the top twenty names.
• Following one company across the whole government, every contract, grant and loan it received, in one table.
• A reporter adding up the federal money spent on work in one state over a year, agency by agency.
• A monthly feed of new business, with dateType set to new_awards_only and rows compared on awardUniqueKey.

🚧 What it does not do

• Awards, not opportunities. No deadline, no eligibility, no application link, because the money is already committed. For grants you can still apply for, see the table below.
• Federal only. State, county and city spending is not in this data.
• Nothing before 2007-10-01. Older awards exist, but this search cannot reach them.
• One row per award, not per transaction. A contract amended fourteen times is one row carrying the current total.
• No sub-awards. A prime recipient who subcontracts most of the work still shows the whole amount.
• No street addresses or contact details. City, state and country are on the row. Nothing is joined against other sources. Sole traders and individuals do appear under their own names, because the government publishes them that way.
• Place of performance is thin on some families. In one 3,000-row run, none of the 1,000 indefinite-delivery vehicles had a state or a city for the work, and 287 of the 1,000 grants had a city.
• Figures are as current as USASpending. An agency that has not filed a modification leaves a stale total, and the row repeats it.

🧭 Which US government data scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Is this a list of contracts I can bid on? No, and it is the most common mix-up. Every row is an award already made, with a recipient and an amount and no deadline.

Why does a row start years ago when I asked for this month? The window follows when money moved, not the period of performance. Awards get modified for years after signing. Set dateType to new_awards_only if you only want awards first signed inside the window.

Why is place of performance empty on some rows? The government does not record it for those award types. If you filter on a state and tick a family with no state on it, those rows are dropped uncharged.

Do I need an account or an API key? No. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to paste.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. A daily schedule with a recent dateFrom and dateType set to new_awards_only, compared on awardUniqueKey, shows only what is new.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page and send the run ID with the input you used. The errorCode and details on a diagnostic row usually name the reason already.