USAspending Federal Awards Scraper — Contracts, Grants & Recipients API

Search and export US federal award records from the official USAspending.gov API — the US Treasury's authoritative record of every federal contract, grant, loan, and direct payment. Get the award ID, recipient name and UEI, award amount, awarding agency, NAICS/PSC/CFDA code, place of performance, and dates, and optionally the recipient's mailing address and business categories. Filter by keyword, recipient, awarding agency, industry code, program, recipient/place-of-performance state, dollar amount, and date, then download clean JSON, CSV, or Excel.

This Actor reads the official USAspending.gov API (api.usaspending.gov) — no account, no API key, no rate-limit application. It is the post-award companion to federal opportunity feeds: SAM.gov tells you what the government wants to buy; USAspending tells you who actually got paid, how much, and for what — the data you need for competitive intelligence, subcontractor targeting, and grant research.

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)

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.

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

This Actor uses pay per result: you are charged one award-record event per award returned, and only for records actually delivered. Suggested price $0.003 per record ($3.00 / 1,000 awards).

Why this price: USAspending competitors on the store charge $0.001–$0.009 per record (most add an actor-start fee on top). At $0.003/record with no start fee, this Actor undercuts the "intelligence"-tier incumbents ($0.005+) while delivering more per record — normalized contract and assistance awards in one schema, plus optional recipient-address enrichment that the cheap scrapers do not provide. Start low; you only pay for the awards you keep.

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 incumbents cover only one; this Actor merges every award category with 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.