Federal Contract Finder: See Who Is Winning US Government Work

Search every US federal contract and grant award by what the work is, which agency paid for it, or which company won it. You get the recipient, the money, the agency, the period of performance and a link to the award — and on every run after the first, what is new and what has grown.

Built for teams selling into the US government, and for anyone who currently finds out a competitor won a recompete when it is already too late to bid.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A["Keywords, agencies<br/>or competitor names"] --> B["USAspending API"]
    B --> C["Awards with money,<br/>agency and dates"]
    C --> D{"Seen last run?"}
    D -->|no| E["new-award"]
    D -->|amount moved| F["amount-increased"]
    D -->|same| G["unchanged"]
    E --> H[("Award feed")]
    F --> H
    C --> I["Top recipients<br/>by money won"]

No scraping and no API key. This reads USAspending.gov, the US Treasury's own open data API, so it does not break when a website is restyled and it needs no proxy or browser.

Built for

• Government sales and capture teams tracking spend in their category
• Bid and proposal teams watching a recompete before the RFP drops
• Competitive intelligence following what a rival wins, from whom, and for how much
• Investors and analysts sizing a company's federal revenue
• Journalists and researchers following public money

Input

{
  "keywords": ["cybersecurity"],
  "agencies": ["Department of Homeland Security"],
  "minAmount": 1000000,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Setting	What it does
keywords	Words in the award description — the main search
agencies	Limit to agencies, spelled as USAspending spells them
recipientSearch	Limit to companies by name — watch a competitor
awardTypes	contracts, grants, directPayments, loans, other
lastDays / dateFrom / dateTo	The period to search
minAmount / maxAmount	Keep only awards worth your time
recipientExcludes	Drop the primes you cannot compete with
onlyNew	Return nothing on a quiet run
timeBudgetSecs	How long a run may spend paging before returning what it has

Output

{
  "awardId": "FA862118F6251",
  "recipient": "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION",
  "amount": 666315748.84,
  "outlays": 242708.65,
  "agency": "Department of Defense",
  "subAgency": "Department of the Air Force",
  "awardType": "DELIVERY ORDER",
  "startDate": "2018-02-08",
  "endDate": "2027-01-31",
  "description": "AFSOC ACTS AWARD OF CONTRACT FOR CLS, ENGINEERING, INSTRUCTION, CYBERSECURITY, DMO",
  "url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA862118F6251_9700_FA862115D6276_9700",
  "changeType": "amount-increased",
  "previousAmount": 651315748.84,
  "amountChange": 15000000,
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-21T17:40:12.101Z"
}

endDate is the one to sort on: a contract ending in nine months is a recompete you can still prepare for.

Awards grow. A federal contract is not static — a modification raises the obligated amount on an award you have already seen. That is reported as amount-increased with the exact delta, rather than being buried as unchanged, because a contract quietly doubling is usually the more interesting signal.

Turn it into a recompete alert

{
  "keywords": ["cloud migration"],
  "recipientSearch": ["Booz Allen"],
  "onlyNew": true
}

Schedule it weekly. The first run records the landscape without alerting; every run after returns only awards that landed or grew.

Run it as an API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/arched_friend~federal-contract-finder/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "keywords": ["drone"],
    "agencies": ["Department of Defense"],
    "minAmount": 5000000
  }'

Pricing

You pay $0.002 for each award returned. A run that finds nothing new costs nothing.

Tracking a category weekly	Monthly cost
Reading USAspending by hand	hours per week
GovWin, Bloomberg Government and similar	$1,200 to $20,000 per year
This Actor	around $1.60 per month at 200 awards a week

Common questions

Is this opportunities or awards? Awards — money already committed. That tells you who is winning, what agencies actually buy and when a contract ends. For the notice before the award, watch the agency's own postings.

Why did the first run return everything? A first run has no baseline, so alerting on years of history would be noise. Those rows are labelled first-run; the run after is when new-award starts meaning something.

Why is awardType sometimes worded oddly? It is passed through exactly as USAspending publishes it — DELIVERY ORDER, PROJECT GRANT (B) and so on — rather than reworded into something that no longer matches the source.

How current is the data? USAspending is updated as agencies report, typically within days for contracts. It is the same feed that powers usaspending.gov.

Do I need an API key? No. USAspending is open and keyless.

Related products

• EU Tender Monitor for the European public-sector side of the same pipeline
• Company Hiring Monitor to see a competitor staffing up for the work they just won
• SEC Filing Monitor for the public-company view of the same contractors
• Regulation Change Monitor for the rules that create the spending in the first place