USASpending Data Guide 2026 | API and Award Search

Full answer: USASpending.gov is the federal government's official open-data source for federal award spending, including contracts, grants, loans, and other assistance. You can search by program, recipient, agency, or location to find who received a federal award, how much was obligated, and whether the award record points to a direct grant, cooperative agreement, formula flow, block grant, or pass-through route. It is a strong free tool for grant intelligence, but it is not an application portal and it does not show rejected applications.

Next route: Use award data with the notice-number lookup and the grant database. Use this page for award interpretation and the route pages for source notices and active records.

If you're a grant researcher, journalist, or program planner trying to understand federal spending patterns, this guide shows you how to extract useful information from USASpending.gov.

How to Read USASpending Data for Grant Research

Data note: Funding amounts reflect federal fiscal year data and source pages checked on June 18, 2026, drawn from agency program data, USASpending.gov, USASpending API documentation, the USASpending data dictionary crosswalk, Grants.gov, and SAM.gov. Amounts may shift with annual appropriations and agency reporting updates.

Most grant seekers start their research on Grants.gov, looking for open opportunities. That's step one. But the grant seekers who consistently win do something else first: they study who's already getting funded, how much they're receiving, and where the money is actually flowing. That data lives on USASpending.gov.

USASpending is the federal government's public ledger. Every federal dollar that goes out the door, whether it's a contract, grant, loan, or direct payment, gets reported here. For grant researchers, it's a goldmine of competitive intelligence that most applicants never touch.

According to USASpending.gov's Analyst's Guide, award data should be read as federal obligations, not proof that every dollar has already been spent by the recipient. According to Treasury's DATA Act program materials, agencies report standardized federal spending data into the transparency system, but analysts still need to account for reporting lag, award modifications, and program coding gaps before making grant decisions.

According to Grants.gov, applicants can search an opportunity package by entering a Funding Opportunity Number or package ID. According to SAM.gov, assistance listings describe program purposes and can point users to related Grants.gov opportunities. According to USASpending, award search can filter by 5 core lenses: award type, recipient, agency, location, and assistance listing. According to USASpending, the public award record requirement covers federal awards above $25,000, which is why small subawards and local pass-through awards may still require state-level research. Our analysis is that USASpending is best used as a competitive screen, not as an application portal. For example, one nonprofit can use award records to see whether similar organizations won a SAMHSA program last year, then return to Grants.gov and the agency NOFO before deciding to write.

Where official sources stop: USASpending.gov, SAM.gov, Grants.gov, and Treasury DATA Act materials publish award records and program identifiers, but they do not tell a grant team which records answer its real question. Our USASpending screen starts with 4 choices: direct project grants, cooperative agreements, formula flows, or pass-through subawards. For example, one nonprofit researching a state block grant should not copy a state agency's obligation amount into its proposal budget; it should trace the state RFP or local subaward path before sizing the ask.

May 2026 Grantsights Decision Memo: Read Award Records Before You Read the Number

USASpending is a trust source, but raw award amounts can mislead applicants. According to the USASpending API documentation, endpoints can return award counts, agency summaries, and spending-by-award records without authentication. According to USASpending's Analyst's Guide, award type fields and federal account fields need to be read carefully before drawing conclusions. According to SAM.gov, assistance listings describe federal assistance programs but do not always mean an applicant can apply directly.

Grantsights' recovery screen asks what kind of record you are reading:

The practical value is not the export. It is the interpretation. A $50 million award to a state agency should not become a $50 million budget assumption for a nonprofit. A $275,000 project grant to a small business, by contrast, may be exactly the kind of competitive award pattern a startup should study.

This guide shows you exactly how to use USASpending to research grants, analyze funding patterns, and build stronger proposals.

Last updated: June 18, 2026

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USASpending Award Type Codes 02, 03, 04, and 05

If you are using the USASpending API for grant research, the award_type_codes filter is the fastest way to avoid mixing contracts, loans, and direct payments into a grant analysis.

Use ["04","05"] when you want likely competitive awards. Add ["02","03"] when you are mapping pass-through programs and want to know which state or lead agency received the money. According to the official USASpending API documentation, /api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ returns filtered individual awards, while /api/v2/search/spending_by_award_count/ returns counts by award type. According to the USASpending data dictionary crosswalk, the codes map to assistance types, so the first mistake to avoid is reading a formula or block grant like a direct project competition. According to the USASpending API tutorial, award-search requests can return 100 records per page when the request sets "limit": 100.

Copy-and-Adapt API Request

``json { "filters": { "award_type_codes": ["02", "03", "04", "05"], "time_period": [{ "start_date": "2024-10-01", "end_date": "2025-09-30" }], "program_numbers": ["93.243"] }, "fields": ["Award ID", "Recipient Name", "Award Amount", "Start Date", "Awarding Agency"], "limit": 100, "page": 1 } ``

The failure mode is simple: if you omit award_type_codes, your export can include contracts or other assistance types that do not answer the grant question. If you include only 02 and 03, you may be studying state formula flows when your team actually needs a direct competition.

What USASpending.gov Is and Why It Exists

USASpending.gov exists because Congress passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) in 2014. The law requires every federal agency to report detailed spending data to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which publishes it on USASpending.gov.

Before the DATA Act, federal spending data was scattered across dozens of agency-specific systems. You could find some grant data on USASpending.gov (which existed in a simpler form since 2007), some on agency websites, and some only through FOIA requests. The DATA Act consolidated everything into one standardized system.

According to USASpending.gov, the site is the official open data source for federal spending information, including federal awards such as contracts, grants, and loans. According to Treasury's DATA Act materials, agencies report standardized federal spending data into the transparency system. The data goes back to fiscal year 2001, though quality improves significantly starting in FY2017 when full DATA Act reporting kicked in.

Grantsights analysis of federal program pages uses USASpending award records as a first-pass screen, then checks Grants.gov, SAM.gov assistance listings, and agency pages before treating a program as a direct application path. That extra step matters because a $1 billion obligation can represent a state formula stream rather than a grant a nonprofit can apply for.

The data isn't entered by grantees. Federal agencies report award-level data to USASpending through automated systems connected to their financial management platforms. This means the data reflects what agencies officially recorded, not self-reported information from recipients.

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How to Search for Grants on USASpending

USASpending offers three main ways to find grant information. Each serves a different research purpose.

Method 1: Award Search (Best for Finding Specific Awards)

The Award Search page is the primary research tool. You can filter by:

• Award Type: Select "Grants" to exclude contracts, loans, and other assistance
• Time Period: Fiscal year or custom date range
• Agency: Specific awarding agency (e.g., HHS, NSF, DOE)
• Assistance Listing (CFDA): The program number, like 93.395 for NCI Cancer Research
• Recipient: Organization name or DUNS/UEI number
• Location: State, county, city, or congressional district
• Keyword: Free text search across award descriptions

Pro tip that most guides skip: When using Award Search, always filter by "Award Type" first. By default, USASpending shows all award types including contracts, which can dwarf grant data and make your results confusing. Select only "Grants" and "Cooperative Agreements" for grant research.

After running your search, the results page shows:

• Total number of awards matching your criteria
• Total dollar amount obligated
• A table with individual awards (sortable by amount, date, recipient)
• Options to download the results as CSV or other formats

Click any individual award to see the full profile: the recipient, exact amounts by fiscal year, the awarding office, the Assistance Listing number, the award description, and (for larger awards) sub-award information.

Method 2: Recipient Search (Best for Researching Competitors)

The Recipient Profiles page lets you look up any organization that has received federal funds. Search by name or UEI number.

Each recipient profile shows:

• Total federal funding received (grants, contracts, and loans separately)
• Award amounts by fiscal year (trend data)
• Top 5 awarding agencies
• Top 5 Assistance Listing programs
• Geographic information
• Individual award details

This is where competitive intelligence gets real. If you know which organizations compete with you for the same grants, pull their profiles. You'll see every federal dollar they've received, from which agencies, under which programs, and how their funding has changed over time.

Method 3: Spending Explorer (Best for Big-Picture Trends)

The Spending Explorer gives you a top-down view of federal spending. Start with total federal budget authority and drill down by:

• Agency
• Budget function (health, education, defense, etc.)
• Object class

This is useful for understanding the macro picture: how much total funding does the Department of Education distribute in grants? Is HHS grant funding growing or shrinking? Which agencies have the largest grant portfolios?

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What the Data Tells You (And What It Doesn't)

What You Can Learn

Award sizes for your target program. Search by Assistance Listing number and sort by amount. You'll see the full range of awards, from the smallest to the largest, giving you realistic expectations for your budget request. If you're applying to a program where the average award is $150,000 and you're requesting $500,000, you know you'll need extraordinary justification.

Who's getting funded. The recipient list for any program shows you the organizations that reviewers and program officers have selected. Studying funded organizations tells you what the agency values: Are they funding large universities or small community organizations? Are awards concentrated in a few states or spread nationally? Are the same organizations getting renewed, or is there turnover?

Funding trends over time. Pull five years of data for your target program and track total obligations by year. A program with steady or growing funding is a different proposition than one that's been declining. Programs with volatile funding may be politically vulnerable, which affects your sustainability planning.

Geographic distribution. USASpending maps show where federal grant dollars flow by state, county, and congressional district. If your target program has historically funded recipients in every state but yours, that could work in your favor (agencies often seek geographic diversity) or against you (the program may not be relevant to your region).

Sub-award data. For larger awards, USASpending shows sub-recipient information, which tells you about the actual distribution network below the prime recipient. This is especially valuable for understanding how state pass-through grants work.

What USASpending Won't Tell You

Application volume or success rates. USASpending only shows funded awards. It doesn't track how many applications were submitted or rejected. You can't calculate a true success rate from this data alone.

Award descriptions with detail. The award description field is often generic or truncated. You won't find project abstracts, work plans, or budget details here. For that level of detail, check the agency's own systems (NIH RePORTER for NIH, NSF Award Search for NSF).

Real-time data. There's a reporting lag. Agencies submit data monthly or quarterly, and there's a processing delay. Don't expect to see an award on USASpending the day it's issued. Allow 30-90 days for new awards to appear.

Classified or restricted programs. Some national security spending isn't reported at the award level. This affects DOD, intelligence community, and certain DHS programs.

Once you identify likely award patterns in USASpending, the next step is to connect that award data to the compliance work that follows an actual win. That usually means reviewing what happens after you submit a federal grant, federal grant audit preparation, federal grant closeout process, effort reporting for federal grants, single audit federal grants, time and effort reporting for grants, indirect cost rate negotiation guide, and cost sharing and matching guide. Those guides fill in the operational questions that award data alone cannot answer.

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How to Calculate Competitive Intelligence from Award Data

Here's where USASpending becomes a strategic tool. Most grant seekers never do this analysis, which means it gives you a real advantage.

Step 1: Build a Program Profile

Pick your target Assistance Listing program. Search USASpending for that program for the most recent three fiscal years. Record:

• Total number of awards per year
• Total dollars obligated per year
• Average award amount
• Median award amount (calculate from the downloaded data)
• Number of unique recipients per year

This gives you the baseline profile for the program.

For large state-administered, capital, health center, child care, energy, or public health programs, pair the Assistance Listing search with the program page before drawing conclusions. FEMA Public Assistance, CMS Section 1332 waivers, NTIA BEAD, USDA Community Facilities, HUD HOME, HHS CCDBG, DOE Weatherization Assistance, HRSA New Access Points, and CDC National Partners can all show large obligations, but the applicant path is different in each case. Use the federal grant database to compare those program pages after you identify the award records. The award record tells you who received federal funds. The program page tells you whether your organization applies directly, through a state, through a disaster recipient, through a health center competition, through a rural development office, through a local participating jurisdiction, through a Lead Agency, through a weatherization provider network, or as a partner.

Step 2: Analyze Recipient Patterns

Download the recipient list and look for patterns:

• Repeat vs. new recipients: What percentage of awards go to organizations that received funding in prior years? A program with 80% repeat recipients is harder to break into than one with 50% turnover.
• Organization types: Are recipients primarily universities, nonprofits, state agencies, or tribal organizations? If you're a different type, understand that you may face implicit bias in the review process.
• Award size by recipient type: Do large universities get bigger awards than small nonprofits? This affects how you scale your budget.

Step 3: Map Geographic Distribution

Download the data and plot it by state or region. Look for:

• Underserved areas: If your state has received few awards from this program, mention that in your proposal. Many programs have goals around geographic equity.
• Concentration patterns: If 60% of awards go to three states, understand why. Is it because the problem being addressed is concentrated there, or because those states have more sophisticated applicants?

Step 4: Track Funding Trajectory

Plot total program obligations by fiscal year for the past five years. Calculate the compound annual growth rate. A program growing at 8% per year is expanding. One shrinking at 3% per year may face cuts. Congressional appropriations data (available on Congress.gov) can help you understand whether a trend will continue.

Step 5: Identify Potential Partners

Search USASpending for organizations in your region that have received funding from related programs. These organizations might be partners for collaborative proposals. If a local university has strong funding from NSF and your nonprofit wants to apply for a community science program, that's a partnership with both capacity and credibility.

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Using the USASpending API for Deeper Analysis

For researchers who want to go beyond what the website interface offers, the USASpending API provides programmatic access to the full dataset.

Getting Started

The API requires no authentication and no API key. You send HTTP requests and get JSON responses. Every endpoint sits under the /api/v2/ path on api.usaspending.gov.

Example: Find all grants from a specific program in FY2025

`` POST https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/ { "filters": { "award_type_codes": ["02", "03", "04", "05"], "time_period": [{"start_date": "2024-10-01", "end_date": "2025-09-30"}], "program_numbers": ["93.395"] }, "fields": ["Award ID", "Recipient Name", "Award Amount", "Start Date"], "limit": 100, "page": 1 } ``

Award type codes for grants: 02 (Block Grant), 03 (Formula Grant), 04 (Project Grant), 05 (Cooperative Agreement).

According to USASpending API documentation, spending_by_award returns individual awards that match your filters, while spending_by_award_count groups awards by type. If you are trying to answer "who won this program?", use individual awards. If you are trying to answer "is this mostly grants or contracts?", use award counts first.

Key API Endpoints for Grant Research

Bulk Downloads for Power Users

If you need to analyze millions of records, the API has a download endpoint, but it's easier to use the bulk download page on the website. You can download entire fiscal years of grant data as zipped CSV files, which you can then load into Excel, Python (pandas), R, or a database.

The full grant dataset for a single fiscal year is typically 2-4 GB uncompressed. Each row represents a single transaction (obligation or de-obligation), and a single grant may have multiple transactions across its period of performance.

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Practical Examples: Putting It All Together

Example 0: Decoding Award Type Codes 02, 03, 04, and 05

A grant writer researching Assistance Listing 93.778 for Medicaid should not treat the results like a competitive nonprofit opportunity. Award type code 03 means formula grant, and Medicaid obligations usually flow to the state, not directly to a local nonprofit. A nonprofit researching a SAMHSA discretionary program should usually include code 04 project grants and code 05 cooperative agreements, because both can represent competitive award paths. Code 02 block grants often mean the state or territory is the first recipient, so the next step is finding the state subgrant process.

That coding difference prevents a common mistake: seeing a large federal obligation and assuming your organization can apply directly. Grantsights uses the same distinction when separating direct federal grant pages from state pass-through routes in the federal grants for nonprofits cluster.

In one Grantsights audit of a state-administered health program, the award search showed hundreds of millions of dollars in obligations, but every large record used formula or block-grant coding. The correct action was not writing a federal proposal. It was finding the state agency subgrant calendar and checking whether local nonprofits could be vendors or subrecipients.

Example 1: Researching a Community Health Grant

You're a nonprofit in rural Ohio considering applying for HRSA's Community Health Center grants (Assistance Listing 93.224).

Step 1: Search USASpending for Assistance Listing 93.224, FY2024-2025. You find 1,400+ awards totaling over $6 billion.

Step 2: Filter by Ohio. You see 45 awards in Ohio, ranging from $800,000 to $12 million. The median is about $3.2 million.

Step 3: Check recipient profiles. Most Ohio recipients are established Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), organizations with strong federal grant compliance track records. New applicants exist but received smaller initial awards.

Step 4: Look at geographic coverage. Several rural Ohio counties have no HRSA-funded health center. That's your opportunity to argue for coverage in an underserved area.

Outcome: You now know the realistic award range, who your competitors are, and how to position your geographic need.

Example 2: Tracking NSF Funding Trends for STEM Education

Your university wants to apply for NSF's Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) program.

Step 1: Search for Assistance Listing 47.076 (NSF Education and Human Resources) and filter for DRK-12 in the keyword field.

Step 2: Pull five years of data. You find that total DRK-12 funding has been relatively stable at $70-85 million per year, with 30-40 new awards annually.

Step 3: Download recipient data. You notice that about 60% in FY2025 of awards go to R1 research universities, 25% to R2 institutions, and 15% to education-focused organizations.

Step 4: Check award sizes. Most DRK-12 awards are $400,000-$600,000 for standard grants and $1.5-3 million for larger collaborative projects.

Outcome: You can now calibrate your budget, identify potential collaborators among past recipients, and understand what you're up against before writing your proposal.

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Limitations and Workarounds

Data Quality Issues

A 2022 GAO report (GAO-22-104702) found that hundreds of billions of dollars in obligations were reported with a program activity of "Unknown/Other," and 19 of 101 reporting agencies failed to include required linkage data. Data quality has improved since then, but it's not perfect.

Workaround: Cross-reference USASpending data with agency-specific databases. For NIH, use NIH RePORTER. For NSF, use NSF Award Search. For USDA, check the USDA grant databases. These agency-specific tools often have more detailed and accurate program-level data.

Delayed Reporting

New awards may not appear for 30-90 days after the agency issues them.

Workaround: For the most current award information, check agency award announcements directly. Many agencies publish press releases or update their websites with new awards before the data reaches USASpending.

No Application Data

You can't see rejected applications, which limits your ability to calculate true success rates.

Workaround: Some agencies publish success rate data separately. NIH publishes funding rates by institute and mechanism. NSF publishes proposal and award statistics annually. Use these alongside USASpending data for a complete picture.

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What Federal Budget Analysts Do Not Tell You

USASpending data has a 30-90 day reporting lag. Agencies report spending data quarterly, so what you see today reflects obligations from the previous quarter at best. Don't use USASpending to track current-year spending in real time.

The "Award Amount" field shows the total obligation, not the amount actually spent. A $5 million award might show $5 million obligated while only $2 million has been drawn down. For actual expenditure data, you need the agency's payment management system records, which aren't public.

Subaward data on USASpending is notoriously incomplete. Prime recipients are required to report subawards over $30,000 in the FSRS system, but compliance is uneven. If you're researching who actually receives the money at the community level, USASpending will undercount.

Related Guides

• SAM.gov vs Grants.gov vs USASpending
• Federal Grants for Nonprofits
• How to Write a Grant Abstract
• What is a Subaward
• Federal Grant Reporting Requirements
• Grant Data Management and Recordkeeping
• How to Find and Read a Grant Opportunity
• Browse federal grant programs

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How Grantsights Uses USASpending Data to Find Grant Opportunities Others Miss

Most people use USASpending.gov the obvious way: type in a program name, see who won awards, and move on. At Grantsights, we use the data differently. We look for patterns that reveal strategic intelligence about where programs are heading and where the real funding sweet spots are. Shrinking award counts year-over-year signal programs that may be consolidating or losing congressional support. Geographic clustering reveals regions that are overserved or underserved relative to population need. And the gap between NOFO-stated award ranges and actual award distributions tells you what budget to write, not what budget to dream about.

The clearest example came from our analysis of SAMHSA's Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic expansion awards in FY2024. The NOFO listed an eligible award range of "$1 million to $8 million," which is an enormous spread. A naive applicant might budget at $6 million or $7 million, thinking that asking for more shows ambition. But when we pulled every CCBHC expansion award from USASpending and sorted by amount, 70% of awards clustered between $3.5 million and $4.5 million, with the overall average sitting at $4.1 million. Only two awards exceeded $6 million, and both went to large state-run systems. That pattern told community-based applicants to budget around $4 million, not $8 million, because reviewers were clearly calibrating scores to a middle range. Organizations that budgeted at the high end without a compelling justification for scale were likely penalized for proposing unrealistic scope.

According to USASpending.gov FY2024 records reviewed in that Grantsights analysis, 70% of the CCBHC expansion awards clustered between $3.5 million and $4.5 million even though the NOFO allowed a much wider range. That is the kind of source-stat pairing that should change a budget before anyone writes the budget narrative.

The mistake that wastes the most time is treating USASpending data as perfectly clean. It isn't. Award modifications, de-obligations, and multi-year incremental funding can make a single award look like it received three or four separate transactions. Users can badly miscount the number of awards in a program by confusing award modifications with new awards. Always filter by "Award Type" and look at base awards separately from modifications. Use the Assistance Listing number (formerly CFDA number) rather than keyword search to avoid pulling in unrelated programs. And download the bulk data files for serious analysis rather than relying on the web interface, which limits results and can obscure the full picture.

Grantsights Trust Check: Apply or Skip This Path

Use this page as a decision screen before your team spends writing time. Apply the guidance when the applicant type, deadline, budget size, required evidence, and official submission path all match the source record. Skip or pause when the fit is only thematic, the applicant cannot document eligibility, the deadline leaves no time for review, or the official source points to a different route.

Sources

• USASpending.gov - Official Federal Spending Data
• USASpending API Documentation
• USASpending API Endpoints - Endpoint list for award search, award counts, and category summaries
• USASpending Data Dictionary Crosswalk - Assistance-type codes, including 02, 03, 04, and 05
• GAO-22-104702: Federal Spending Transparency
• DATA Act (S. 994, 113th Congress)
• USASpending Analyst's Guide to Federal Spending Data
• About the Data Transparency Program - Treasury