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How to cite a figure from this site, what the data is and is not, how to tell us about an error, and how to put a state or district summary on your own page.

Who publishes this

TheFiscalFinder is published by 137 Finder LLC. Other 137 Finder sites: PolitiFinder (U.S. elections and the people who run in them), JudicialFinder (the U.S. judiciary), GravityFinder (a relational explorer of the universe), and MoleculeFinder (the molecules behind everything).

TheFiscalFinder is a free public reference built from public-domain federal records. It has no accounts and no paywall. The operator is 137 Finder LLC; contact is by email only, at support@thefiscalfinder.com.

How to cite a figure

Every page has a Copy citation button that writes this line with the page's own title and the date you copied it. The form is:

TheFiscalFinder, "{page title}", data derived from USAspending.gov, accessed {date}.

For example, with today's date filled in when you copy it:

TheFiscalFinder, "Largest U.S. government contractors FY2026: top federal contractors ranked", data derived from USAspending.gov, accessed {today}.

A page's URL is permanent: one page per contractor, agency, award, place and category, with every loaded fiscal year on it. Quote the fiscal year with the figure, and quote the year's state as the page states it: a year in progress is “year to date”, a year that ended on September 30 is “data still posting” until the following January, and only a “complete year” is final.

What the data is, and is not

It is federal award obligations as USAspending.gov records them: contracts, grants, loans and direct payments, each with a recipient, an awarding agency and a place of performance. The source is the U.S. Treasury's USAspending.gov (public domain, 17 U.S.C. 105), joined to the public congressional roster and to FEC filings for the political layer.
It is not a budget, an appropriation or an outlay figure, and it is not a tax calculator. An obligation is money an agency committed to an award; it is not what was spent that year, and it is not the whole of federal spending (interest, salaries and most benefit payments to individuals are not awards).
Coverage. The site loads the largest recipients and awards of each fiscal year, not every one: 3,166 recipient pages; agency and place totals cover every agency. The current data is FY2026, as of 2026-11-01. DoD contract data posts to USAspending about 90 days after award.
Labels. Every figure carries a label: Source for a value taken straight from a filing, Computed for a total or share we calculated, Inferred for a link we derived (a corporate parent, a congressional district from an address, a connection between records). An inferred link is never an assertion of wrongdoing, and the political layer shows public-record proximity, not causation.
A weekly action is not a whole award. The weekly posts list actions: a new award, or a modification that added money to an existing one. A modification's amount is what that action obligated, not the award's total value.

The full account is on the methodology page: sources, entity resolution, the fiscal-year rule, and what each label means.

Corrections

If a figure, a name or a link is wrong, write to support@thefiscalfinder.com with the page's URL and what you expected to see. A correction that the source data supports is made in the next publish; where the source itself is wrong, the page says so rather than changing the figure.

The figures as data

Every ranking is a CSV file on the data page, one per ranking and fiscal year, and all of them in one zip with a manifest, licensed CC BY 4.0. Suggested credit:

"Federal spending rankings" by TheFiscalFinder (https://thefiscalfinder.com/data), licensed CC BY 4.0.

Two feeds: This week (the ten largest actions of each week, every Monday; RSS) and What changed (one edition after each monthly data load; RSS).

Embed a state or district summary

Every state and congressional district page has an Embed this button that gives you an iframe: a 600 by 400 pixel summary with the headline figure, the top five recipients and the fiscal-year label, linking back to the full page. It loads no scripts, sets no cookies and carries no tracking; the summaries are not indexed on their own. The URLs are /embed/states/<state> and /embed/districts/<district>, with the same code the page uses. California, for example:

<iframe src="https://thefiscalfinder.com/embed/states/ca" width="600" height="400" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" title="Federal spending in California, from TheFiscalFinder"></iframe>

The summary is rebuilt with every publish, so it shows the same figures as the page it links to on the day you load it.