Data & Methodology
Federal contract and award data sourced from government procurement systems — including FPDS-NG, SAM.gov, and related federal data repositories. PrimeRFP SCOUT ingests, normalizes, and continuously updates records as agencies publish them. Reporting timelines vary by agency; some components (particularly DoD) carry a 60–90 day lag relative to award execution.
Dataset coverage — ≥ $100K floor
All intelligence on this page and within SCOUT is filtered to federal contract awards whose current total award value is $100K or more. PrimeRFP applies this floor at the award level (on current_total_value_award), not per-transaction, so large awards split across many mid-size obligation lines are retained in full. PrimeRFP's own empirical sampling against the raw USASpending dataset shows this threshold captures 98%+ of total federal contract dollars while excluding a long tail of micro-purchases, small modifications, and administrative actions — the trade-off that makes market intelligence tractable without distorting the dollar picture. Coverage: 560,000+ active contract awards and 2.5M+ unique awardees, including small-business set-asides, task orders, and mid-market opportunities.
Award identification: Each record is keyed by federal Award ID (PIID). Task orders recorded as independent awards appear as separate rows. IDIQs and their task orders are tracked distinctly.
Why SCOUT dollar figures differ from published annual totals: Per-agency dollar figures on SCOUT intelligence pages aggregate all USASpending transaction records — including base contract awards, task orders, delivery orders, and modifications to existing contracts. Annual federal contract obligation figures cited in industry reports (e.g., FY2025: $833.8B per Bloomberg Government) count only new prime award actions in the fiscal year, excluding mods. An IDIQ vehicle (like OASIS+) carries no obligation at award — only task orders issued against it are counted. SCOUT's transaction-level aggregates are larger because they capture the full activity picture across a contract's lifecycle, making them useful for competitive analysis and pipeline sizing rather than year-over-year spending comparison.