Market Note · 24 August 2026
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.
Intelligent Win · Market Intelligence — measured on intelligent.win’s contract corpus.
From 1 October through 31 May, federal agencies obligated $323.7 billion across 363,403 distinct services awards. Over the identical window a year earlier: $268.4 billion across 435,156 awards.
A fifth more money. 71,753 fewer awards. A 16.5% drop in a single year.
Matched calendar window, 1 October–31 May, both fiscal years.
The first thing we did was try to break it. The award-count decline survived every test. Excluding construction: −17.2%. Excluding construction and R&D: −18.0%. Counting only awards that netted positive dollars — stripping out deobligations and closeouts entirely — −13.8%. The last cut is narrower for a reason worth knowing: half of the decline (35,993 of the 71,753 fewer awards) is in awards that received zero or negative net dollars in the window. The direction holds under every definition; the size of the drop depends on whether you count awards that moved no money.
Grouping every award that received positive net dollars in the window by how much it received produces a clean gradient. The losses are steepest at the bottom and fade as awards get larger — and the two largest bands did not lose awards at all. They gained them, and they gained dollars.
| Award size (net obligated) | FY25 awards | FY26 awards | Change | FY26 dollars vs FY25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $10K | 96,696 | 77,227 | −20.1% | −22.0% |
| $10K – $25K | 36,459 | 28,638 | −21.5% | −19.3% |
| $25K – $250K | 73,599 | 66,230 | −10.0% | −9.6% |
| $250K – $1M | 27,703 | 26,811 | −3.2% | −3.5% |
| $1M – $10M | 21,792 | 21,239 | −2.5% | −0.6% |
| $10M – $100M | 3,316 | 3,607 | +8.8% | +9.0% |
| $100M+ | 321 | 374 | +16.5% | +40.5% |
Size bands assigned on dollars received within the window, not total contract value or ceiling. Awards that netted zero or negative dollars in the window (175,270 in FY25, 139,277 in FY26) are not in the table; with them, the totals are 435,156 and 363,403.
That bottom row is the story. Awards over $100 million went from 41.6% of all services dollars to 48.4% — a nearly seven-point shift in twelve months.
Roughly one award in a thousand carries nearly half the money.
How much the money grew depends on what you call services. The standard cut — any award whose product-or-service code begins with a letter — includes construction. Construction obligations more than doubled this year, from $19.9B to $52.4B, driven heavily by border-barrier work at DHS, whose services dollars rose 256% ($10.0B to $35.6B). Strip construction out and services dollars are still up 9.2%, on 17.2% fewer awards. So the honest version is: fewer awards either way, and more money either way — but more than half of the dollar growth ($32.5B of $55.3B) is construction.
The decline is not one department’s. DoD services awards fell 15.9% (162,419 to 136,537) while DoD services dollars rose 13.7%. Outside DoD, awards fell 16.8% while dollars rose 27.8%. DoD accounts for about 36% of the government-wide drop in awards — roughly in line with its 37% share of the award base. The shape is the same on both sides.
The monthly shape is uneven. Award counts fell year-over-year in seven of eight months. October (−33.0%) and November (−32.6%) were the steepest; December was roughly flat (+1.4%); January through May ran between −8.2% (February) and −24.1% (April), with May at −19.0%.
Between 28 July and 3 August, the VA placed seven first obligations against its Community Care Network — six to Optum Public Sector Solutions totalling $5.49B, and one to TriWest Healthcare Alliance at $984M. Seven awards. $6.48B. Every one a first obligation on a new order under an existing Community Care indefinite-delivery vehicle.
That is what an award the size of the top row of the table above looks like on a calendar. Not seven new contracts — seven orders, on vehicles already in place, each close to a billion dollars.
The data shows consolidation of transactions, not necessarily of suppliers — this analysis counts awards, not companies, and says nothing about who won them. What a capture team might reasonably take from it: the count of awards is falling by about a sixth year-over-year while the dollars per award climb more than 40%, the number of $100M-plus awards is rising, and the share of money riding on them is rising faster. In that shape, a pipeline built around a steady volume of small and mid-size opportunities is chasing a pool that is shrinking, and position on the large vehicles where the $100M-plus orders land matters more than it did last year. Whether that pattern persists past the September close is not something this data can tell you.
This analysis counts awards, not companies. It supports no claim about supplier consolidation or market share, and says nothing about who won the work. The comparison window ends 31 May because Department of Defense contract records are published roughly 90 days after they are signed; in this release they run through 5–6 June 2026, so no later month can be compared on equal terms across both years.
These numbers came out of the platform, not a spreadsheet.
The same contract corpus behind this note — 2.6 million contracts, reconciled against the government’s own published totals before anything publishes — is what the product runs on. If you want to see how it’s assembled and checked, that’s written up in full.