USAspending Scraper — Federal Contract Awards & Recipients

What this Actor scrapes

USAspending.gov publishes every federal contract award, but its Award Search API expects a precise POST body — a non-empty, enum-validated award_type_codes list is mandatory or the whole request 422s, paging has no total-count field so you must stop on hasNext == false, and a narrow filter combination legitimately returns zero rows rather than an error. This Actor builds that request correctly, pages until the API says there is nothing left, and flattens each award — recipient, amount, agency, dates — into one billable row with a ready-made USAspending.gov profile link.

What we handle for you

• 🧵 Pagination done right — we page on USAspending's page/limit cursor and stop exactly on hasNext == false, never on an assumed page count.
• 🛡️ A bad award type code never reaches the API — validated against the live-confirmed enum before your run is charged a cent.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 429 / 5xx, honouring Retry-After — up to 5 attempts per page.
• 🧱 Zero matches is a clean success, not a failure — a narrow filter combination finishes SUCCEEDED with a status message, never a false FAILED run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, stable award IDs, ready-made USAspending.gov profile links.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset.

Use cases

• Govcon lead generation — find which contractors are winning awards from a target agency.
• Competitive intelligence — track a competitor's federal contract wins by recipient name.
• Market sizing — pull the biggest awards in a date window and agency to size a federal market.
• Journalism and watchdog research — follow the money on a keyword or agency across a time period.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "recipientSearchText": [
    "Lockheed"
  ],
  "awardTypeCodes": [
    "A",
    "B",
    "C",
    "D"
  ],
  "timePeriodStart": "2024-01-01",
  "timePeriodEnd": "2024-12-31",
  "maxResults": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

award_idrecipient_nameaward_amountawarding_agencyawarding_sub_agencystart_dateend_dateusaspending_url

{
  "award_id": "N0001917C0001",
  "generated_internal_id": "CONT_AWD_N0001917C0001_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-",
  "recipient_name": "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION",
  "award_amount": 35135514910.2,
  "awarding_agency": "Department of Defense",
  "awarding_sub_agency": "Department of the Navy",
  "funding_agency": "Department of Defense",
  "award_type": "DEFINITIVE CONTRACT",
  "start_date": "2017-11-17",
  "end_date": "2031-03-31",
  "description": "LRIP LOT 12 ADVANCE ACQUISITION CONTRACT",
  "agency_slug": "department-of-defense",
  "usaspending_url": "https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_N0001917C0001_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Prime-award level only in v1 — no sub-award (subcontractor) drill-down.
• No recipient or agency profile enrichment — fields come from the award search response itself.
• Deep pagination beyond 10,000 results requires a cursor-based approach USAspending documents separately; this Actor caps maxResults at 10,000.