The Federal Teaming Review

Intelligence Behind Federal Contracting.

Research methodology

Last updated October 31, 2026

Most of our original analysis uses public federal spending records. Each article states its own data window and the date its figures were computed. This page describes what is common to all of them.

Sources

  • Prime contract awards from USAspending.gov, which publishes contract actions reported to the Federal Procurement Data System.
  • First-tier subcontract awards from USAspending.gov, as reported by prime contractors under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA). Reporting moved from FSRS.gov to SAM.gov in March 2025.
  • Entity registrations and contract notices from SAM.gov.
  • Agency documents: acquisition forecasts, small-business program pages and contract lists published by the agencies themselves.
  • Rules and oversight: the Federal Acquisition Regulation on acquisition.gov, the U.S. Code and reports from the GAO.

The FedSub dataset

Where an article analyzes many records at once, we use the copy of USAspending data loaded by FedSub, which is operated by this publication's owner (see ownership). In that dataset:

  • Prime contracts are loaded when their obligations are $250,000 or more. Smaller contracts are not included, so counts of prime contractors are lower bounds.
  • Subawards are first-tier contract subawards reported from fiscal year 2022 onward. A subaward is linked to its prime contract by the prime award's identifier.
  • Companies are matched across records by their Unique Entity ID (UEI). A company's “small” flag is its own SAM.gov size self-certification for its primary NAICS code, not an SBA size determination.
  • Records with action dates in the future, which occasionally appear in the source data, are excluded from our counts.

Known limits

  • First tier only. Federal rules require prime contractors to report their first-tier subcontracts, not the subcontracts below them.
  • Reporting gaps. Some primes do not file FFATA subaward reports at all, and reported data contains duplicates and errors. Absence of a subaward record does not mean no subcontracting happened.
  • Amounts as reported. Dollar values are what reporters entered. Prime contract amounts are obligations on the award, which for long contracts can span many years.
  • Records, not intentions. A past award shows who did work, not who will bid next time.

Reproducing our figures

Every figure we publish from our own analysis names its source fields, filters and data date, so it can be checked against USAspending.gov. Readers who find a discrepancy can tell us.