🇺🇸 USAspending Federal Contracts & Grants Scraper (No API Key)

Overview

USAspending Federal Awards Scraper turns USAspending.gov (the US government's official spending database) into clean, structured JSON. Search every federal contract, IDV, grant, direct payment, loan, and other assistance by keyword, awarding agency, NAICS code, recipient, place of performance, dollar amount, and date. No API key, no login, no pagination glue on your side.

Built for government-contracting intelligence, GovCon competitive research, grant discovery, and B2G lead generation. You pay only for awards actually delivered.

✅ No login | ✅ No API key | ✅ All award types | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Full text search across award title, description, and recipient fields. Filter by award type (contract, IDV, grant, direct payment, loan, other). Filter by awarding agency and sub-agency for a clean per-agency feed. NAICS, PSC, recipient, place of performance, dollar range, and date filters. Structured fields with direct URL back to the USAspending award page.

How it works

USAspending exposes a public REST API at api.usaspending.gov that indexes every federal obligation reported since 2008. Driving it well means composing nested filter objects, walking cursor pagination, and shaping the award payload into something flat. This actor wraps all of that. Give it a filter block and it returns one clean record per award, with recipient, amount, NAICS, PSC, agency, and dates already lifted to the top level.

The output is procurement-ready. There is no HTML in the records, no nested subaward blobs, and no per-page parsing on your side. Pipe straight into a CRM for a GovCon pipeline, a data warehouse for market intelligence, or a RAG index for a policy copilot.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "keywords": ["artificial intelligence"],
  "awardType": ["contract", "grant"],
  "agencies": ["Department of Defense"],
  "recipientSearch": "",
  "naicsCodes": ["541511"],
  "placeOfPerformanceState": "VA",
  "minAmount": 100000,
  "maxAmount": null,
  "dateFrom": "2025-01-01",
  "dateTo": "2026-12-31",
  "maxResults": 500
}

📤 Output format

{
  "award_id": "FA862118F6251",
  "recipient_name": "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION",
  "recipient_id": "ea75ddee-2d00-ac7f-5e72-6f42d7c88c8c-C",
  "awarding_agency": "Department of Defense",
  "awarding_sub_agency": "Department of the Air Force",
  "award_amount": 632998084.56,
  "award_type": "DELIVERY ORDER",
  "award_category": "contracts",
  "naics": "336413",
  "psc": "J069",
  "start_date": "2018-02-08",
  "end_date": "2027-01-31",
  "place_of_performance_state": "FL",
  "description": "IGF::OT::IGF AFSOC ACTS AWARD OF CONTRACT FOR CLS, ENGINEERING, INSTRUCTION, CYBERSECURITY, DMO",
  "award_url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA862118F6251_9700_FA862115D6276_9700",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T04:20:00.000Z"
}

This is a real Air Force delivery order to Lockheed Martin, pulled from a cybersecurity keyword search on contracts, shaped to the fields this actor returns.

Every award record contains these fields:

Field	Description
🆔 award_id	USAspending internal award identifier
🏢 recipient_name	Recipient legal name
🆔 recipient_id	Internal USAspending recipient identifier (a hash based ID, not a DUNS or UEI number)
🏛️ awarding_agency	Top level awarding agency
🏛️ awarding_sub_agency	Sub agency or bureau
💰 award_amount	Total obligated award amount in USD
🏷️ award_type	contract, IDV, grant, direct payment, loan, other
🗂️ award_category	USAspending award category
🔢 naics	NAICS industry code
🔢 psc	Product Service Code
📅 start_date	Award start date
📅 end_date	Award end date
🗺️ place_of_performance_state	State where the work is performed
📝 description	Award description text
🔗 award_url	Direct link to the award page on USAspending
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

Government contracting intelligence Watch every DoD or DHS contract in your NAICS above a dollar threshold and route new awards to Slack. Benchmark your win rate and average award size against direct competitors.

GovCon and B2G lead generation Build a target list of federal recipients in a state or NAICS, then match to your ICP. Track the sub-agency and PSC combinations that best match your capabilities.

Grant discovery and research Filter by award type grant and agency to find funding programs relevant to your work. Assemble a database of every federal grant flowing to a research area.

Policy and public interest reporting Trace how a federal program's dollars flowed by recipient, state, and time. Feed structured award data into a public interest dashboard or story.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and set keywords or leave empty to scan by filters alone.
2. Set awardType (contract, IDV, grant, direct payment, loan, other) to focus the run.
3. Add agencies, naicsCodes, placeOfPerformanceState, and dollar or date bounds as needed.
4. Set maxResults to cap volume.
5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull it via API or MCP.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The USAspending API is fully open, and the actor handles filters, pagination, and retries for you.

How current is the data? USAspending updates on a rolling basis as agencies report obligations, typically weekly.

Can I combine multiple filters? Yes. All filters are AND-composed, so you can slice by agency AND NAICS AND state AND minimum dollar amount in one run.

How much does it cost? $3 per 1,000 award records delivered, and the first 10 records on every account are free for life. Empty runs cost nothing.

Can I use it inside an AI agent? Yes. It is exposed as an MCP tool. See below.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/usaspending-federal-awards

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/usaspending-federal-awards').call({
  keywords: ['artificial intelligence'],
  awardType: ['contract'],
  agencies: ['Department of Defense'],
  minAmount: 100000,
  maxResults: 500,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

🛠️ Complete your GovTech pipeline

Pair this actor with the rest of the themineworks government-data suite:

• Federal Register Scraper: pull the rulemakings and executive orders that shape federal spending.
• NIH RePORTER Grant Scraper: pull NIH biomedical grants alongside general federal awards.
• CourtListener Federal Court Scraper: track federal court opinions and dockets tied to award activity.

Typical flow: usaspending shows the awards, federal-register captures the rules that authorised them, courtlistener surfaces the resulting litigation.

Questions or need a custom field set? Reach out through the Apify profile.