Defense Contract Award Tracker methodology
How federal defense awards are selected, classified, and presented.
Inputs and coverage
Records come from the official USAspending award search API and are limited by configuration to Department of Defense award types used for contracts. We retain the stable award identifier, recipient, obligated amount, start and end dates, awarding agency, and description fields returned by the source. The public ledger is capped at five thousand ranked active records while MongoDB retains the full normalized snapshot.
Award method
Award size bands are calculated from the reported obligated amount using fixed thresholds displayed in the record output. Duration is the inclusive number of calendar days between reported start and end dates when both dates are valid. Average obligated value per scheduled day divides the reported amount by that duration. The calculation is descriptive and is neither an agency analysis nor a measure of daily cash payments.
Limitations
Federal award records can be corrected, extended, deobligated, or associated with multiple transactions. A displayed amount may not represent the eventual ceiling, total lifecycle cost, or amount paid. Recipient names and descriptions reflect source records. Rankings favor recent and larger records for public-page selection and should not be read as assessments of contractor performance, importance, or procurement merit.
Update schedule
The ledger checks for new source records daily. A complete staging snapshot is validated before its pointer can become active. Large unexplained row-count drops and schema drift fail closed, leaving the last successful snapshot and generated artifact available. Deleted upstream records become honest tombstones rather than disappearing immediately from permanent record URLs.