🏛️ USASpending.gov Federal Awards Scraper — US Contracts, Grants & Awards to JSON & CSV

The full firehose of US federal spending — contracts, grants, loans and direct payments — pulled straight from the official USASpending.gov API. No login, no API key, no scraping fragility. Hundreds of thousands of records per run, with recipient, dollar amount, agency, dates and place of performance. Built for GovCon business development, federal contractor lead generation, watchdog journalism and GovTech product builders.

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🔎 What this scraper does

The USASpending.gov Federal Awards Scraper is an Apify Actor that wraps the U.S. Department of the Treasury's official open data API and returns clean, flat records for every federal award that matches your filters. That covers:

• Federal contracts — every IDIQ, BPA, definitive contract and task / delivery order
• Federal grants — competitive grants, formula grants, block grants
• Direct payments — Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits, ag subsidies
• Loans & loan guarantees — SBA, USDA, DOE, HUD, FHA
• "Other" financial assistance — cooperative agreements, insurance, more

You set the date range, the award types and an optional keyword, hit Run, and the Actor paginates through the entire USASpending search API for you. A single run can return hundreds of thousands of records — and because it talks to the official API, the data is authoritative and won't break when usaspending.gov restyles its frontend.

This is the workhorse data feed for anyone who needs to know who is being paid by the US federal government, for what, when and where — turned into something you can drop into a CRM, a BI dashboard or a researcher's spreadsheet in minutes.

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✨ Key features

Feature	What you get
🏛️ Official Treasury API	Authoritative data from USASpending.gov — never blocked, never stale
🔑 No API key needed	Just configure filters and run — no signup, no quotas
💰 Full coverage	Every contract, grant, loan, direct payment and "other" award type
📋 Rich per-award fields	Award ID, recipient, amount, outlays, type, description, dates, agency, sub-agency, place of performance, USASpending URL
🔎 Powerful filters	Award type, action-date range, free-text keyword on recipient / description / agency
🎯 Flexible cap	maxAwards = 0 = everything matching; cap for quick samples
📊 Fully paginated	One run can return hundreds of thousands of records
⏰ Schedule-friendly	New awards post daily — rolling date range keeps an always-fresh dataset
📤 Export-ready	JSON, CSV, Excel, XML out of the box
🔗 Direct USASpending URL	Every record carries a link to its detail page on usaspending.gov
🌎 Geographic data	Place-of-performance state and country for spatial analysis
🧱 Flat schema	No nested mess — drops straight into SQL, Sheets, or pandas

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🎯 Built for these use cases

1. Government contractor research (GovCon BD) — see exactly who is winning federal contracts, with which agency, for how much, on what timeline. Build account plans for the top 50 awardees in your vertical.
2. Federal budget analytics — track agency-level spending trends quarter over quarter. Roll up by sub-agency, NAICS code (via the description text) or place of performance for portfolio-level views.
3. Grant tracking — monitor new grants in your domain (cybersecurity, biotech, climate, AI, defense, education) the day they're announced. Build alerts on awardees, programs and dollar thresholds.
4. Lobbying & policy intelligence — correlate awards with congressional districts, lobbying disclosures and policy initiatives. Surface which firms are winning awards tied to specific legislation.
5. B2B sales & contractor lead-gen — federal contract awardees are pre-qualified prospects for cybersecurity, cloud, staffing, professional services, GovTech, fintech and compliance vendors.
6. Policy & academic research — study procurement patterns, geographic distribution, recipient diversity, small business set-asides and historical trends across administrations.
7. GovTech product building — power your federal spending dashboard, RSS-style award alert app or analytics SaaS with a free, authoritative data feed.
8. Watchdog & investigative journalism — surface unusual awards, large outlays, sole-source contracts and contractor concentration patterns at scale.

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📥 Inputs

Field	Type	Required	Description
awardTypes	array	✅ Yes	Which award types to pull: contracts, grants, direct-payments, loans, other. Pre-filled with ["contracts"].
startDate	string	No	Earliest award action date in YYYY-MM-DD. Leave empty for the last 12 months.
endDate	string	No	Latest award action date in YYYY-MM-DD. Leave empty for today.
keyword	string	No	Free-text filter applied to recipient / description / agency. Leave empty for all.
maxAwards	integer	No	Cap on total awards saved. 0 = all matching (can be hundreds of thousands).

Example input — every cybersecurity contract + grant in 2025

{
  "awardTypes": ["contracts", "grants"],
  "startDate": "2025-01-01",
  "endDate": "2025-12-31",
  "keyword": "cybersecurity",
  "maxAwards": 0
}

Example input — all AI-related federal spending YTD

{
  "awardTypes": ["contracts", "grants", "direct-payments", "loans", "other"],
  "startDate": "2026-01-01",
  "endDate": "2026-05-16",
  "keyword": "artificial intelligence",
  "maxAwards": 5000
}

Example input — every grant in the last 90 days (rolling daily schedule)

{
  "awardTypes": ["grants"],
  "startDate": "2026-02-15",
  "endDate": "2026-05-16",
  "keyword": "",
  "maxAwards": 0
}

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📤 Output

One Apify dataset record per federal award. Records are flat JSON and can be exported to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, or pulled via the Apify API. A pre-built Federal Awards dataset view shows the key columns in a sortable table.

Field reference

Field	Type	Description
awardId	string	Federal award identifier (PIID, FAIN or URI)
recipientName	string	Name of the award recipient (company, university, agency, individual)
awardAmount	number	Total obligated award amount in USD
totalOutlays	number	Total outlays paid out so far in USD
awardType	string	Award type (contract, grant, loan, direct payment, other)
description	string	Award description / purpose
startDate	string	Award period of performance start date
endDate	string	Award period of performance end date
awardingAgency	string	Federal department / agency that issued the award
awardingSubAgency	string	Sub-agency / bureau that issued the award
placeOfPerformanceState	string	State (US) where work is performed
placeOfPerformanceCountry	string	Country where work is performed
url	string	Link to the award detail page on USASpending.gov
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 scrape timestamp

Sample output — Department of Defense contract

{
  "awardId": "W56JSR23C0001",
  "recipientName": "EXAMPLE DEFENSE SYSTEMS INC.",
  "awardAmount": 24500000,
  "totalOutlays": 9800000,
  "awardType": "contract",
  "description": "ENGINEERING SUPPORT SERVICES FOR ADVANCED RADAR PROGRAM",
  "startDate": "2025-03-01",
  "endDate": "2028-02-28",
  "awardingAgency": "Department of Defense",
  "awardingSubAgency": "Department of the Army",
  "placeOfPerformanceState": "VA",
  "placeOfPerformanceCountry": "UNITED STATES",
  "url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_W56JSR23C0001",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-16T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Sample output — NIH research grant

{
  "awardId": "R01AI123456",
  "recipientName": "UNIVERSITY OF EXAMPLE",
  "awardAmount": 1850000,
  "totalOutlays": 612000,
  "awardType": "grant",
  "description": "Vaccine immunogenicity study — Year 1 of 5",
  "startDate": "2025-09-01",
  "endDate": "2030-08-31",
  "awardingAgency": "Department of Health and Human Services",
  "awardingSubAgency": "National Institutes of Health",
  "placeOfPerformanceState": "MA",
  "placeOfPerformanceCountry": "UNITED STATES",
  "url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI123456_7530",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-16T12:00:00.000Z"
}

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⚙️ How it works

1. Input parsing — the Actor reads your award types, date range, keyword and max-award cap.
2. API request building — for each selected award type, the Actor constructs a POST to USASpending.gov's official search/spending_by_award endpoint with the right filter object.
3. Pagination loop — USASpending returns results page-by-page; the Actor walks every page until either (a) no more results, or (b) maxAwards is reached.
4. Per-award enrichment — each record is normalized into a flat schema with consistent field names across all five award types.
5. Dataset push — records are pushed to the Apify dataset in real time, so you can start exporting before the run finishes.
6. Politeness & retries — the Actor backs off on transient API errors and retries automatically.

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⚡ Performance

Workload	Approx. runtime	Notes
1,000 awards	< 2 minutes	Single award type, narrow date range
10,000 awards	10–20 minutes	Default pagination
100,000 awards	1–3 hours	Multiple award types, wide date range
1,000,000+ awards	8–18 hours	Set maxAwards = 0 and split by month if needed

The USASpending API is responsive and unauthenticated — the bottleneck is purely pagination throughput, not blocking. For maximum throughput on very large pulls, split your date range across multiple parallel runs (e.g. one run per calendar month).

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💰 Cost model

Because the Actor talks to a free, unauthenticated government API and uses no proxies and no headless browser, runs are extremely cheap in Apify Compute Units. The dominant cost is dataset size for very large pulls. Run a small maxAwards = 1000 test first to estimate per-record cost in your account, then scale up with confidence.

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🔄 Schedule for continuous monitoring

USASpending posts new awards every business day. Pair this Actor with Apify Schedules to:

• Daily contractor feed — pull yesterday's contracts in your vertical with a rolling 1-day window, then push new awardees straight into a CRM via Apify Integrations.
• Weekly grant digest — awardTypes = ["grants"], last-7-days window, keyword in your space → ship to Slack / email every Monday morning.
• Monthly competitive intel — full pull on a keyword (e.g. competitor names) → diff against last month to find new wins.
• Quarterly market sizing — wide pull across all award types in a 90-day window → load into BigQuery for analysis.

Use Apify Integrations (Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks, Make, Zapier, S3, Snowflake) to wire the dataset straight into your existing stack.

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🛠️ FAQ

Is this Actor allowed / legal? Yes. USASpending.gov publishes federal award data as public information through an official open API, and this Actor reads only that public data. Use freely and responsibly.

Do I need an API key or login? No. The USASpending.gov API is public and unauthenticated — no API key, no login, no proxy required.

How much data can I get in one run? The Actor is fully paginated and can return hundreds of thousands of records per run. Set maxAwards = 0 for everything matching your filters, or cap it for a faster sample.

Which award types can I scrape? Contracts, grants, direct payments, loans and "other" — pick any combination via the awardTypes input.

Can I filter by date or keyword? Yes — use startDate / endDate to bound the award action date range and keyword for free-text filtering on recipient, description and agency text.

Can I track only new awards going forward? Yes — schedule the Actor with a rolling 1-day or 7-day window. Combine with Apify webhooks to push only the latest delta into your downstream system.

How does this compare to SAM.gov? SAM.gov shows active solicitations and contract opportunities (what's available to bid on). USASpending shows what has already been awarded and to whom. They're complementary — this Actor handles the awarded side at full historical scale.

What about FPDS (Federal Procurement Data System)? USASpending consolidates FPDS contracts plus FFATA grants/loans/direct-payments into one schema — so this Actor gives you a superset of the FPDS data in a single normalized format.

Are sub-awards and contract modifications included? Award records are at the prime award level. Modifications roll into the existing award's totals. For deep sub-award analysis, run this Actor first to get the prime awards, then pull sub-award details from USASpending separately.

What currency are amounts in? United States Dollars (USD).

Can I get place-of-performance at the city or county level? This version returns state + country. For deeper geo analysis, the awardId plus url give you a direct link to the full record on usaspending.gov.

What output formats are supported? Every run produces a structured dataset you can export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or pull through the Apify API.

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📚 Related scrapers

Build a complete public-data + corporate-data intelligence stack by combining this Actor with:

• UK Companies House Bulk Scraper — UK corporate registry data, equivalent to USA company filings.
• SEC EDGAR Form D Scraper — private placements & startup fundraising disclosures.
• GLEIF LEI Scraper — global Legal Entity Identifier data for cross-border entity resolution.
• FDA Data Scraper — FDA drug approvals, recalls and enforcement actions.
• NPI Registry Scraper — US healthcare provider directory.
• ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper — registered clinical trials data, often funded by NIH grants.
• OpenStreetMap Business POI Scraper — geo-located businesses for site / market analysis.

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🔑 Keyword cloud

Core: USASpending scraper, federal awards data, federal spending API, government contractor data, federal contracts scraper, federal grants scraper, USASpending.gov API, federal procurement data, government spending dataset, GovCon data, federal contract awards CSV, treasury spending data.

Niche: SAM.gov alternative, FPDS scraper, FFATA data, federal grants tracker, NIH grants scraper, DOD contract data, federal loans data, direct payments data, place of performance analysis, federal sub-agency spending, award outlays data.

Use case: GovCon business development, federal contractor lead generation, B2B prospecting for federal awardees, grant tracking, federal budget analysis, lobbying intelligence, contract competitive intelligence, market sizing federal, GovTech product data feed, watchdog journalism, academic policy research, procurement analytics.

Audience: GovCon BD teams, capture managers, federal sales reps, grants research teams, market intelligence analysts, GovTech founders, policy researchers, investigative journalists, university research offices, federal compliance consultants, lobbying firms, defense industry analysts.

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Changelog

• 2026-06-01 — Maintenance & reliability pass: pulled the latest source and rebuilt the Actor on the current base image; build verified.

• 2026-05-25 — Maintenance & reliability pass: pulled the latest source and rebuilt the Actor on the current base image; build verified.

• 2026-05-20 — Maintenance pass: reviewed the input schema and default values for a smooth one-click start, and rebuilt the Actor on the latest base image.

Last reviewed: 2026-06-01.