USAspending Federal Awards Scraper — Contracts, Grants & Recipients API

See exactly what your competitors won from the federal government last year — who got paid, how much, by which agency, for what. Or find the funded prime contractors in your industry and state who now need subs and suppliers. SAM.gov tells you what the government wants to buy; this tells you who actually got the money.

Data comes from the official USAspending.gov API, the US Treasury's authoritative record of every federal contract, grant, loan, and direct payment. No account, no API key, no rate-limit application, no HTML scraping.

See real awards for 8 cents before you commit

Set maxResults to 25 and run it once. You are charged $0.003 per award record — so a 25-record look costs $0.075, and a run that matches nothing costs only Apify's fraction-of-a-cent start event.

What one record actually looks like

Real output from a live run, trimmed to the fields most people check first:

{
    "awardId": "DEAC0494AL85000",
    "category": "contract",
    "recipientName": "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP",
    "recipientUei": "FYHNA5WC8XD7",
    "awardAmount": 48063737196.35,
    "awardType": "DEFINITIVE CONTRACT",
    "awardingAgency": "Department of Energy",
    "startDate": "1993-10-15",
    "endDate": "2017-04-30",
    "naics": { "code": "561210", "description": "FACILITIES SUPPORT SERVICES" },
    "psc": { "code": "M181", "description": "OPER OF GOVT R&D GOCO FACILITIES" },
    "placeOfPerformanceState": "NM",
    "usaspendingUrl": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_DEAC0494AL85000_8900_-NONE-_-NONE-"
}

Turn on includeRecipientAddress and each record also carries the recipient's street, city, state, ZIP, county, congressional district, and business categories — which is what turns an award list into a mailing list.

What a real job costs

Pricing is $3.00 per 1,000 award records ($0.003 each), charged only on records actually returned:

What you pull	Records	Cost
A look at the output before buying	25	$0.08
A competitor's award history	500	$1.50
A capped market study	5,000	$15.00 maximum

maxResults is a hard ceiling, so a run can never cost more than maxResults × $0.003 plus Apify's fraction-of-a-cent platform events (about 0.3% on top). There is no subscription.

On very large pulls: Apify caps each run with a maximum-charge limit. If a run reaches it, the run stops early and returns fewer records than your maxResults — the run's status message will tell you when this happens. For big pulls, raise the maximum-charge setting on the run (or your plan limit) before starting it.

What data do you get?

One result per federal award:

Field	Example
awardId / usaspendingUrl	70B01C25F00001121 + direct award link
category	contract or assistance
recipientName / recipientUei	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP / FYHNA5WC8XD7
awardAmount / totalOutlays	Obligated dollars and outlays to date
awardType	DEFINITIVE CONTRACT, BLOCK GRANT (A)...
description	CONSTRUCTION OF BORDER BARRIER WALL SYSTEM.
awardingAgency / awardingSubAgency / fundingAgency	Department of Homeland Security / U.S. Customs and Border Protection
naics / psc	Industry + product/service code with descriptions (contracts)
cfdaNumber	Assistance Listing / CFDA program number (grants)
startDate / endDate	Period of performance
placeOfPerformanceState	Where the work happens
recipientAddress	Street, city, state, ZIP, county, congressional district, business categories (optional enrichment)

Why this Actor

• Official Treasury API, no key — no SAM.gov-style application, no rate-limit approval, no website scraping to break.
• Contracts and grants in one normalized schema — most alternatives cover only one; this merges every award category into a single flat record shape.
• Recipient-address enrichment — turn awards into mailing lists with one flag, straight from the award record of truth.
• Pay only for results — transparent per-record pricing, JSON/CSV/Excel export, and an MCP-ready interface for AI agents.

Use cases

• GovCon competitive intelligence — see every contract a competitor won last year, by amount, agency, and NAICS. Track who is winning in your market.
• Subcontractor & supplier lead generation — pull prime awardees in your industry and state, turn on includeRecipientAddress for mailing addresses, and build a targeted outreach list of funded primes who need subs and suppliers.
• Grant research — find every federal grant or assistance award for a program (CFDA number), agency, or recipient type; benchmark award sizes; identify active grantees.
• Market sizing & analytics — quantify federal spending by agency, industry, geography, and time for BD strategy or investor research.
• Recipient due diligence — verify that an entity actually holds the federal awards it claims, with amounts and periods of performance from the source of record.
• AI agents / MCP — a clean, filterable interface to federal spending for agent-driven research and enrichment.

How to use it

Every large construction contract performed in Texas last fiscal year, with recipient addresses:

{
    "awardTypes": ["contracts"],
    "naicsCodes": ["236220"],
    "placeOfPerformanceStates": ["TX"],
    "timePeriodStart": "2024-10-01",
    "timePeriodEnd": "2025-09-30",
    "minAwardAmount": 1000000,
    "includeRecipientAddress": true,
    "maxResults": 500
}

Every HHS grant to a university:

{
    "awardTypes": ["grants"],
    "awardingAgency": "Department of Health and Human Services",
    "recipientSearchText": ["university"],
    "timePeriodStart": "2024-10-01",
    "maxResults": 500
}

Filters: awardTypes (contracts, contract-idvs, grants, direct-payments, loans, other), keywords, recipientSearchText, awardingAgency, naicsCodes, pscCodes (contracts), cfdaNumbers (grants), recipientStates, placeOfPerformanceStates, timePeriodStart/timePeriodEnd, minAwardAmount/maxAwardAmount, includeRecipientAddress, maxResults. At least one narrowing filter is required.

For AI agents (MCP, x402, Skyfire)

Actor ID: cblu/usaspending-federal-awards-scraper · Pricing: pay-per-event, award-record at $0.003 per USAspending award record · Permissions: limited · Standby: off. No Apify account is needed to run it: agents can pay per run with x402 (USDC) or Skyfire, or use a prepaid Apify token.

Typical agent tasks this Actor answers in one call:

• list federal contracts or grants awarded to a recipient (company or organization) in a date range
• who won federal awards from an agency, in a state, or under a NAICS / PSC / CFDA code
• find federal awards above a dollar amount with recipient UEI, agency and award type
• compare competitors' federal contract revenue

Minimal call — 25 contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin in FY2026 — costs about $0.075:

{
    "awardTypes": [
        "contracts"
    ],
    "recipientSearchText": [
        "Lockheed Martin"
    ],
    "timePeriodStart": "2025-10-01",
    "timePeriodEnd": "2026-09-30",
    "maxResults": 25
}

Each row carries awardId, recipientUei, awardAmount, awardingAgency and a direct usaspendingUrl.

How to call it without an Apify account:

1. Via the Apify MCP server — connect to https://mcp.apify.com?payment=x402 (or ?payment=skyfire), search for usaspending federal awards scraper with the search-actors tool, then call cblu/usaspending-federal-awards-scraper with the JSON above. The tool result is the dataset: one JSON object per USAspending award record.
2. Via REST with a prepaid token — buy a token with x402 (Base or Solana) or MPP at https://agi.apify.com/protocols/x402/prepaid-tokens?amount=1&currency=usd ($1 minimum, expires in 14 days), then POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cblu~usaspending-federal-awards-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items with header Authorization: Bearer <token> and the JSON above as the body. The response body is the array of award records.

Budget rule: a run can never cost more than maxResults × $0.003 plus a $0.00005 start event, and you are charged only for award records actually returned. A run that matches nothing costs $0.00005. Set maxResults to your budget ÷ $0.003. Official public data; no login, no captcha, no HTML scraping — the same call returns the same shape every time.

Data source & freshness

Every run queries the official USAspending.gov API live. USAspending is refreshed from the government's financial and award systems (FPDS for contracts, FABS for assistance) on a rolling basis — typically within a day or two of the source transaction. You get whatever USAspending has at the moment of your call; no stale mirror, no monthly file. Because it reads a structured federal API rather than scraping a website, it does not break the way HTML scrapers do.

Notes on coverage: contract awards carry NAICS/PSC codes; assistance awards (grants, direct payments) carry CFDA/Assistance Listing numbers instead — so naicsCodes/pscCodes apply only to contract award types. The API paginates the top 10,000 matching awards per award-type query (sorted by amount); narrow with filters to reach beyond that.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.003 per award record ($3.00 per 1,000). You are charged per record actually returned, plus Apify's small platform events: a fraction-of-a-cent Actor start event and $0.00001 per dataset item — about 0.3% on top of the per-record price. No subscription; a run that finds nothing costs only the fraction-of-a-cent start event.