Emerging Federal Contractor Radar

For subcontracting teams, GovCon sales, capture managers and small-business advocates who want to reach new federal entrants before competitors do. One run returns new US federal contract awards, flagged by the winner's lifetime award history, so you see first-time and small emerging contractors instead of the same twenty incumbents every list already knows about. Pay-per-result: $0.025 per delivered awardee — 100 leads = $2.50. Try it free with Apify's monthly platform credit.

Federal contract award notices exist (FPDS/USAspending, SAM.gov), but they don't tell you whether a winner is brand new to federal work or a decades-old incumbent. This Actor calls USAspending's public, keyless spending_by_award search for new prime contract awards, then looks up each winner's whole-of-government lifetime transaction history to classify them as a first-time winner, a small/emerging contractor, or an established one.

Quick start (2 minutes)

1. Open the Input tab (no USAspending account or API key needed — the source is public).
2. Use this prefill for new small IT-services awardees from the VA:

{
  "sinceDays": 14,
  "stages": ["FIRST_AWARD", "EMERGING"],
  "minAwardAmount": 25000,
  "naicsCodes": ["5415"],
  "awardingAgencies": ["Department of Veterans Affairs"],
  "maxItems": 250
}

3. Click Start. Export the emerging-contractor list to CSV/JSON, or pull it via API into your CRM.

Use cases

• Subcontracting and teaming teams finding small/first-time primes who may need a subcontractor's capacity or past performance.
• GovCon sales and capture managers reaching a contractor right after their first federal win, before they've built out a vendor list.
• Small-business advocacy and outreach programs identifying genuinely new entrants to route support and resources to.
• Market researchers tracking which agencies and NAICS codes are bringing in new, non-incumbent contractors.

Run it weekly

1. Set your stages/naicsCodes/awardingAgencies filters, then click Schedule on the run page (or create one under Schedules in the Apify Console).
2. A weekly run with sinceDays: 7-14 catches civilian-agency awards quickly; DoD awards can lag up to 90 days (see Limitations), so widen the window occasionally to catch those.
3. Keep awardId as your dedupe key across runs — it's stable, so a scheduled pull never double-lists the same award.

Awardee stages — the exact cutoffs

Every row's awardeeStage is one of three values, computed from the winner's lifetime, whole-of-government transaction count and obligated dollars (from USAspending's recipient profile), not just this run's own numbers:

• FIRST_AWARD — the recipient has 1–2 lifetime federal transactions, and essentially all of its lifetime obligated dollars (≥ 99.9%) are accounted for by awards in this run's own window. In other words: this looks like the recipient's actual first (or second) federal contract, appearing for the first time in this scan.
• EMERGING — lifetime obligated dollars under $1,000,000, or 10 or fewer lifetime transactions (whichever is true), and not already classified FIRST_AWARD.
• ESTABLISHED — everyone else: an incumbent with meaningful transaction history and dollar volume.

These cutoffs are fixed and are not configurable input — they are the whole point of the Actor. stages (default FIRST_AWARD + EMERGING) lets you pick which of the three to receive; ESTABLISHED is available if you want it too.

Example input

{
  "sinceDays": 14,
  "stages": ["FIRST_AWARD", "EMERGING"],
  "minAwardAmount": 25000,
  "naicsCodes": ["5415"],
  "awardingAgencies": ["Department of Veterans Affairs"],
  "maxItems": 250
}

Example output

Real output, captured live from USAspending on 2026-09-24:

{
  "awardId": "1305M326P0406",
  "generatedInternalId": "CONT_AWD_1305M326P0406_1330_-NONE-_-NONE-",
  "usaspendingUrl": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_1305M326P0406_1330_-NONE-_-NONE-",
  "recipientName": "INTEGRATED MONITORING, INC.",
  "recipientUei": "SBZHMUVQ9CB7",
  "recipientId": "d8ab4d27-776c-5d15-a94d-4fde0ac49cca-C",
  "awardAmount": 434727.8,
  "awardingAgency": "Department of Commerce",
  "awardingSubAgency": "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration",
  "naics": {"code": "541511", "description": "CUSTOM COMPUTER PROGRAMMING SERVICES"},
  "contractAwardType": "PURCHASE ORDER",
  "startDate": "2027-01-01",
  "businessTypes": ["category_business", "corporate_entity_not_tax_exempt", "manufacturer_of_goods", "small_business"],
  "lifetimeTransactions": 1,
  "lifetimeObligatedUsd": 434727.8,
  "awardeeStage": "FIRST_AWARD",
  "awardShareOfLifetime": 1.0,
  "retrievedAt": "2026-09-24T18:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Value
recipientName	INTEGRATED MONITORING, INC.
awardAmount	434727.8
awardingAgency	Department of Commerce
awardingSubAgency	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
naics.description	CUSTOM COMPUTER PROGRAMMING SERVICES
contractAwardType	PURCHASE ORDER
lifetimeTransactions	1
awardeeStage	FIRST_AWARD
awardShareOfLifetime	1.0

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
sinceDays	7	New awards (first action, not modifications) from the last 1–30 days. Civilian agencies post within days; DoD awards can lag up to 90 days, so a short window is mostly civilian.
stages	["FIRST_AWARD","EMERGING"]	Any of FIRST_AWARD, EMERGING, ESTABLISHED — see cutoffs above.
minAwardAmount	25000	Only awards obligated at least this many US dollars.
naicsCodes	[] (all)	Optional NAICS codes of exactly 2, 4 or 6 digits — USAspending's own filter accepts no other length. A shorter code matches every code that starts with it.
awardingAgencies	[] (all)	Optional top-tier awarding agency names, spelled exactly as USAspending does (e.g. "Department of Veterans Affairs").
maxItems	250	Hard cap on delivered (and billed) rows. Also bounds the work per run: at most 8 × maxItems recipient profile lookups (capped at 2,000).

Output fields

Field	Meaning
awardId, generatedInternalId, usaspendingUrl	The award's own USAspending identifiers and a direct link to its public award page.
recipientName, recipientUei, recipientId	The winning business's name, its SAM Unique Entity ID, and USAspending's internal recipient key.
awardAmount, awardingAgency, awardingSubAgency, naics, contractAwardType, startDate	The award itself: obligated amount, awarding agency/sub-agency, NAICS code+description, contract type (BPA call, purchase order, delivery order or definitive contract), and start date.
businessTypes	The recipient's business-category tags from USAspending, used to confirm it is an organisation (see Privacy below).
lifetimeTransactions, lifetimeObligatedUsd	Derived: the recipient's whole-of-government lifetime transaction count and obligated dollars, from its USAspending recipient profile.
awardeeStage	Derived: FIRST_AWARD, EMERGING or ESTABLISHED — see cutoffs above.
awardShareOfLifetime	Derived: this award's amount as a fraction of the recipient's lifetime obligated dollars (null only if lifetime obligated is $0).
retrievedAt	When this row was fetched.

Privacy: businesses only, fail-closed

USAspending lets a contracting officer record a federal awardee as an individual or a sole proprietorship (their business_types includes tags like individuals or sole_proprietorship). This Actor excludes any recipient whose business_types:

• is missing, empty, or contains a malformed (non-string or blank) entry, or
• indicates an individual, sole proprietorship or self-employed person, or
• comes with a redacted/generic name (e.g. "REDACTED", "Multiple Recipients").

This is fail-closed: when we cannot confirm a recipient is a real organisation, it is dropped rather than delivered. One consequence, deliberate and documented here: a real small-business LLC that also self-certifies sole_proprietorship as its IRS tax classification (common in USAspending data) is excluded too, even though it is a legitimate corporate entity — we chose the safer false-negative over any risk of surfacing a natural person's contract as a sales lead.

Pricing and cost control

Pay-per-event: $0.025 per delivered emerging awardee, benchmarked against comparable USAspending-based lead-generation Actors on the Apify Store that charge per delivered row with no lifetime-history classification.

• maxItems is a hard cap on both delivered rows and the recipient-lookup work this run can do.
• Delivered rows always equal charged rows: if your run's own "Maximum cost per run" budget runs out mid-run, the Actor stops, finishes SUCCEEDED, and its status message says exactly how many awardees were delivered and that only those were charged — never a silent under-charge, and never a row delivered for free that should have been charged.
• If the Actor is not monetized (e.g. running it yourself), every matching row is delivered free.
• If a platform migration restarts the run mid-delivery, rows already delivered and charged are never delivered or charged again.

Limitations — read before you build automation on this

• DoD awards lag. The Department of Defense can take up to 90 days to post awards to USAspending; a short sinceDays window mostly surfaces civilian-agency awards.
• FIRST_AWARD is a proxy, not certainty. USAspending's recipient profile gives lifetime totals, not per-transaction dates, so "all of this run's dollars are essentially all of the recipient's lifetime dollars" (≥ 99.9% share) stands in for "this is genuinely their first award." A recipient whose only prior transaction was tiny enough to round away could be misclassified.
• Recipient lookups are capped. At most 8 × maxItems (2,000 max) new recipient profiles are looked up per run; once that cap is hit, further awards in the scanned window are excluded rather than guessed at, and the run's log/status message says so.
• A bad or unknown recipient_id (a USAspending data gap) excludes that one award rather than failing the whole run.

FAQ

Do I need a USAspending API key? No. api.usaspending.gov is public and keyless.

Why did a contractor I know about not show up? Either its award fell outside sinceDays, its business type indicates an individual/sole proprietor (excluded, see Privacy), the recipient lookup budget was reached, or it doesn't meet the stages/minAwardAmount/naicsCodes/awardingAgencies filters you set.

Can I get everything since a specific date? sinceDays covers up to 30 days per run; for a longer backfill, run it repeatedly with different windows, or schedule it daily and de-duplicate on awardId.

Does this cover subcontracts? No — only prime contract awards (award_type_codes A–D: BPA call, purchase order, delivery order, definitive contract).

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