USAspending Scraper - Federal Contract Awards

What does USAspending Scraper do?

Export US federal contract and grant awards from USAspending.gov — with the winner's address, UEI and socioeconomic status attached.

No login. No API key. No proxies.

The field that makes this different

Award lists are easy to find. What they don't tell you is what kind of company won.

Federal primes carry subcontracting obligations toward small businesses — 8(a), HUBZone, woman-owned, service-disabled-veteran-owned. Finding a company that has already won work in your NAICS code and qualifies as a small business is the whole teaming problem, and it is not something a raw award feed answers.

This Actor looks up every distinct winner and attaches:

Field	Example
recipientUei	ZE6ZM6NKSV43
recipientAddress, recipientCity, recipientState, recipientZip	500 W Main Street, Louisville, KY
smallBusiness	true / false
womanOwned, veteranOwned, serviceDisabledVeteranOwned
hubZone, minorityOwned, nativeAmericanOwned, alaskanNativeOwned
nonprofit, higherEducation
recipientTotalAwarded, recipientTransactions	lifetime federal volume
businessTypes	the full raw list

smallBusiness distinguishes a measured no from missing information: USAspending publishes other_than_small_business explicitly, so a false here means the government says so, not that the field was empty.

A real result. Contracts in NAICS 541512 (computer systems design), small-business winners only: 20 companies kept, 201 filtered out — Anduril Industries, Synergy Business Innovation & Solutions, Veterans EZ Info — each with a full address and a track record in the code you care about.

Output

One row per award:

awardId, recipientName, awardAmount, awardingAgency, awardingSubAgency, contractType, startDate, endDate, description, naicsCode, naicsDescription, pscCode, pscDescription, placeOfPerformanceState, usaspendingUrl, plus every enrichment field above.

Input

{
  "keywords": ["cybersecurity"],
  "awardType": "contracts",
  "startDate": "2026-01-01",
  "endDate": "2026-12-31",
  "enrichRecipient": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Field	Default	Notes
keywords	—	Searched across descriptions and recipients
awardType	contracts	Contracts, grants, direct payments, loans, other
startDate / endDate	2026	Award period
enrichRecipient	true	Adds address, UEI and business status
smallBusinessOnly	false	Keeps only small-business winners
maxItems	50 in the form, 300 if omitted via API	Up to 20,000
naicsCodes	—	e.g. 541512
agency	—	e.g. Department of Defense
states	—	Place of performance, e.g. CA, VA
minAmount	—	Filters out small awards

Run it with no changes and it returns 50 enriched cybersecurity contracts from the last thirty days, in about a minute. Raise maxItems for more: winner profiles are fetched six at a time and cached within a run.

Use cases

• Teaming and subcontracting — find small businesses already winning in your NAICS code, with their address and UEI.
• Competitive intelligence — see who wins from which agency, at what size, over what period.
• Market sizing — total obligated value by industry, agency or state.
• Capture planning — track incumbents and contract end dates to time a recompete.
• Supplier due diligence — lifetime federal volume and transaction count per company.

Running this as a scheduled watch

New federal awards are published continuously, and each one names a winner you may want to reach — as a competitor, a supplier, or a prime looking for small-business subcontractors.

{
  "keywords": ["cybersecurity"],
  "awardType": "contracts",
  "awardedWithinDays": 30,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Thirty days rather than seven: award data reaches USAspending with a lag, so a shorter window returns very little.

Why not fixed startDate / endDate? A schedule replays the same input every time. A fixed range returns the same awards at every run and charges for them again. awardedWithinDays overrides both dates and moves the window on its own.

---

Notes and limits

• Enrichment costs one lookup per distinct winner, cached within a run. A query spanning many companies takes longer; turn enrichRecipient off for a fast, thinner export.
• smallBusinessOnly filters after enrichment, so the Actor may read several pages to fill your limit — in testing, 221 awards were examined to return 20 small-business winners. That is the point, but plan the runtime.
• Grants carry no NAICS code; those fields come back empty for them.
• Status reflects what was registered at award time and can go stale — a company may outgrow its small-business size standard.
• Amounts are as published, including very large multi-year vehicles that can dominate a sort by amount.
• Requests are paced out of courtesy to a free public service.
• Not affiliated with USAspending.gov or the US government.

How much does it cost?

You pay per award returned: $0.006 each, that is $6.00 per 1,000. There is no start fee, and subscription plans pay less per award.

The example input below asks for up to 50 awards, so it costs $0.30 at most.

If a run reaches the spending limit you set, the output stops at that limit and never goes past it. You are never charged for rows that were not delivered.

Use USAspending Scraper as an API

Call it from your own code with the Apify client, here in Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("DataIO/usaspending-federal-awards").call(run_input={
    'keywords': ['cybersecurity'],
    'awardType': 'contracts',
    'awardedWithinDays': 30,
    'maxItems': 50,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

It also works from JavaScript, Make, Zapier, n8n, and from AI agents through the Apify MCP server.

Other actors you might like

• UK Contracts Finder Scraper: Tenders & Awards
• TED Tenders Scraper: EU Public Procurement
• Federal Register Scraper: Comment Deadlines

FAQ

Is it legal to use this data?

The actor reads public data from its official source, without logging in and without bypassing any access control. What you do with the data, for example contacting people listed in it, is your responsibility under the laws that apply to you, such as GDPR in Europe.

Can I run it on a schedule?

Yes. See Running this as a scheduled watch above: use the rolling-window setting so each run returns only what is new.

Can AI agents use it?

Yes. It is available through the Apify MCP server, and every input field is described in its input schema, so an agent can call it directly.