Index › Federal series
Federal contracting since 2004
1,313,281 published awards worth $1.21T, recomputed from the compiled corpus: the full yearly series, the value-band distribution, and what both say about how the government buys.
The yearly series
The series spans 23 fiscal years. Annual value has swung between $22.8B (2004) and $112.7B (2017) — a five-fold range — while the count of awards roughly tripled between 2004 and its 2018 peak of 91,398, then plateaued in the 80,000–91,000 range. The value peaks of 2014 and 2017 were driven by a thin layer of very large commitments: the top of the vendor table is dominated by shipyards and defence primes whose multi-year programs land in single recorded years.
Read with the no-tender series, the picture is one of administrative expansion: many more, mostly small, awards — 95% of them under $1 million — with competition weakening at the margin since 2018.
Value bands: a small-ticket market
The distribution is heavily right-tailed. 95.3% of banded awards fall under $1 million and 46.0% under $25,000, while only 9,098 contracts (0.7%) exceed $10 million. The mean award is $923K, but the median sits in the $25K–$100K band. In count, federal contracting is a small-ticket business; in value, it concentrates in a thin upper band — the vendor concentration page quantifies the same skew from the supplier side.
Full yearly table
| Fiscal year | Award value | Awards | Mean award |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | $22.8B | 14,121 | $1.6M |
| 2005 | $23.8B | 24,344 | $977K |
| 2006 | $14.9B | 19,747 | $756K |
| 2007 | $34.1B | 23,253 | $1.5M |
| 2008 | $38.7B | 27,715 | $1.4M |
| 2009 | $30.1B | 37,722 | $798K |
| 2010 | $21.3B | 44,036 | $485K |
| 2011 | $35.3B | 53,456 | $661K |
| 2012 | $17.9B | 48,957 | $366K |
| 2013 | $43.3B | 47,000 | $921K |
| 2014 | $95.5B | 51,073 | $1.9M |
| 2015 | $58.0B | 56,951 | $1.0M |
| 2016 | $40.2B | 60,452 | $665K |
| 2017 | $112.7B | 82,899 | $1.4M |
| 2018 | $92.5B | 91,398 | $1.0M |
| 2019 | $94.8B | 86,061 | $1.1M |
| 2020 | $53.2B | 79,100 | $673K |
| 2021 | $67.3B | 83,897 | $802K |
| 2022 | $80.8B | 91,103 | $887K |
| 2023 | $55.3B | 88,256 | $626K |
| 2024 | $77.1B | 80,915 | $953K |
| 2025 | $61.5B | 81,629 | $753K |
| 2026 | $10.9B | 39,034 | $280K |
2026 covers records published through the compilation cut-off of 3 October 2026 and is incomplete. Values are as published and are not inflation-adjusted.
Live opportunity tracking built on this award series: PubSec.Pro.