Market Intelligence
Notes and reports measured on the same federal contract record the platform runs on. Every figure is dated to the data release it came from, and every piece carries the query behind it. When a week has nothing worth reporting, we don’t publish one.
Sources: USASpending, FPDS, SAM.gov, GSA eLibrary. Refreshed monthly.
GSA's current OASIS+ roster lists 2,338 companies. 283 of them have received a task order. In FY2026, the vehicle's first full year, task orders under their contracts reached $1.04 billion, and ten companies took 42% of the October–May dollars. Here is how the orders spread across the pools, and how fast they are growing.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release
In FY2025, half of the $487.3 billion the federal government obligated for services went through 53 contracting offices, out of 2,341 that bought any. Thirteen offices handled half of all civilian services dollars. Here is the list, and how steady the pattern is.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release
When a federal agency competed a new stand-alone services contract in FY2025, only one company bid 29.8% of the time. The share has barely moved in six years. It is highest in IT and R&D, lowest in construction and transportation, and it does not fall away on big contracts.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release
The monthly read of the federal contract record, as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release. Civilian agencies signed 136,119 new contracts and orders in August worth $13.5 billion at signing — about the same money as August 2025 (up 17% once recurring Veterans Affairs payment orders are set aside in both years), on 12% fewer awards, most of that difference in General Services Administration small orders. The fiscal year's larger movement sits at one department: Homeland Security's contract obligations are running at 3.8 times last year's pace. Defense figures in this issue stop at May, for a reason explained below.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release (USASpending / FPDS prime contracts)
Small businesses have drawn more federal contract money this fiscal year than in any comparable stretch of the last six years. Their share of the total is the lowest over the same six years. Both are true because everything else grew faster. Here is where the small-business money went, including how much went to SBA mentor-protégé joint ventures, where the mentor can be a large business: less than 1% of it, and about 4% for every joint venture we can identify.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release
Every federal agency has to publish, contract by contract, how many contractor labor hours it bought and what it was invoiced against them. Almost nobody reads the file. Here is what it shows for FY2025 — starting with why the number everyone calls a labor rate is not one, which turns out to be the most useful thing about it.
Data as of the Service Contract Inventory FY2016–FY2025, acquisition.gov, as loaded 2026-08-06; figures re-verified 2026-09-15
Other transaction authority exists so the government can build a prototype fast and then buy the working version without starting over. Whether that second half actually happens is the central argument about OTAs — and it is usually argued without numbers. Here is what a decade of the government's own Other Transaction record shows, including the three ways the obvious calculation gets it wrong.
Data as of the 2026-08-07 SAM.gov Other Transaction extract
Federal services buying is not seasonal at the margins. It is concentrated into a single month, and half of that month lands in its final week — a pattern that has held in all six of the last completed fiscal years without a single exception. Here is the shape of it, who runs hardest into it, and what the government's own paperwork says about how the money goes out.
Data as of the 2026-08-06 federal data release
Federal services obligations are up by a fifth this fiscal year. The number of awards carrying them fell 16.5%. The losses sit almost entirely in small and zero-dollar awards — while the count of $100M-plus awards grew, and those awards now carry nearly half of all services dollars.
Data as of the 6 September 2026 federal data release