USAspending.gov — Federal spending by NAICS

It is the United States government's own accounting of who receives federal money, published under the DATA Act and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act - and Datadory delivers it as structured, analysis-ready rows.

The corpus holds every federal award transaction: definitive contracts and indefinite-delivery vehicle task orders, grants, loans, direct payments and other financial assistance, plus account-level obligations and outlays tying program budgets to the awards drawn against them. Each record carries a recipient name with its Unique Entity Identifier, the awarding agency and subagency, place-of-performance geography, product-service codes, and a NAICS classification drilling to six digits.

That NAICS axis is why this record matters to research and consulting teams. Code 5416 splits management consulting into its five published children - 5411x administrative and general management consulting (541611), human resources (541612), marketing (541613), process and logistics (541614), other (541618) - and 5417 carries scientific research and development services. Fiscal year 2024 contract obligations under 5416 alone aggregated to roughly $23.9 billion. Summed, filtered or ranked, those numbers are the federal consulting market, measured rather than estimated. Get a sample of this dataset scoped to your NAICS lines.

Three real contract rows cut to NAICS 5416, then one rollup - the two shapes the corpus arrives in:

# three real contract rows cut to NAICS 5416 - one per scale of buy

AWARD ID      W91YTZ24F0248
RECIPIENT     PZI INTERNATIONAL CONSULTING, INC.
AMOUNT        $247,473.00          (obligated, USD)

AWARD ID      W91WFU24F0045
RECIPIENT     TETRA TECH INTERNATIONAL INC. ZWEIGNIEDERLASSUNG DEUTSCHLAND
AMOUNT        $238,343.82

AWARD ID      W91CRB24F0371
RECIPIENT     CBEYONDATA LLC
AMOUNT        $22,350,307.11       (a single task order, larger than most agencies' annual consulting line)

# rollup view - the same corpus collapsed to industry x fiscal year:
NAICS         5416                 FISCAL YEAR 2024
OBLIGATIONS   ~$23,850,783,940     (all management consulting contract obligations)

Read the three award rows as a lesson in dispersion. Two sit near a quarter million dollars - ordinary task-order scale, invisible in headlines but the bulk of transaction count. The third is a twenty-two-million-dollar single order, ninety times the others, sitting inside the same six-digit industry code. Any average computed naively across this corpus describes nothing; the distribution is the finding. That is also why delivered extracts keep award identifiers beside every amount - the outliers stay inspectable instead of dissolving into a sum.

Eight fields carry the verified core, doing four jobs:

• Identity - Award ID, the PIID or FAIN a human can quote, and Recipient Name, the legal business name registered against the awardee's Unique Entity Identifier.
• Money - Award Amount, the obligated dollars that sum to market size.
• Join surface - generated_internal_id, the surrogate key linking a transaction to its parent award, its subawards and its recipient profile; without it, multi-year vehicles double-count and recipient histories fragment.
• Slice controls - naics_codes at two- through six-digit depth, time_period bounding action dates, award_type_codes separating contracts from the assistance families, and aggregated_amount for the collapsed time-series view.

Definitions were checked against the published field documentation during the August 2026 research pass, so what lands in your warehouse matches the dictionary above, column for column.

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The core dictionary answers who got how much for what. The extensions below fold into additional fields on request, because each opens a different question:

1. Place-of-performance geography - state, county and congressional district resolution, turning a national ledger into a local-economic one.
2. Product and service codes - the PSC vocabulary running alongside NAICS, catching what an award actually bought when the buyer's self-classification wobbles.
3. Subaward tables - first-tier subcontractors beneath each prime, where a meaningful share of consulting delivery happens out of the headline's sight.
4. Competition fields - extent competed, number of offers, solicitation procedure - the inputs to a competitiveness score per NAICS line.
5. Account-level obligations and outlays - the budget-side twin of the award-side ledger.
6. Assembled panels - multi-year series with recipient-name normalization done once, so spelling variants do not split one firm into three.

Name them when requesting the sample; scope locks at that point.

• Geography: all United States federal awards, wherever performed - domestic and overseas operations alike - with place-of-performance detail reaching county level on request.
• Temporal: fiscal years 2007 forward, current through FY2026, with arbitrary date ranges supported inside that window. Eighteen-plus fiscal years is long enough to carry consulting demand through full budget cycles, sequestration, pandemic surge and the correction after it.
• Granularity: transaction-level records, rollable to award, recipient, agency, subagency, NAICS industry, PSC and geography. Six-digit NAICS is the ceiling here too - most secondary sources report consulting spend as one undifferentiated professional-services block, which is precisely the distinction this corpus refuses to make.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

The delivery step earns its keep because the underlying platform answers questions rather than shipping markets. A team that wants "all management consulting obligations by agency since FY2015" would otherwise assemble it query by query, then defend a homegrown deduplication script forever. Delivered extracts arrive with that assembly already done: NAICS code lists resolved, transactions reconciled against parent awards, recipient names normalized, fiscal windows aligned to budget documents. Cadence is yours to set - daily for monitoring, weekly or monthly for analysis, hourly if a pipeline needs it.

Market sizing with receipts. Strategy teams anchor the federal consulting TAM on summed obligations under 5416 and its children - roughly $23.9bn in FY2024 - quoting award-backed numbers instead of vendor estimates.

Winner tracking. Competitive teams rank recipients within a NAICS line, watch share migrate between incumbents and entrants, and catch vehicle-level shifts quarters before they reach earnings calls.

Capture planning. Business-development teams map which agencies buy which services at what sizes, and set pipeline targets against observed deal counts rather than hunches.

Rate benchmarking. Consultants and procurement sides reference observed award amounts by service line and buyer during pricing negotiations.

Accountability work. Journalists and researchers trace specific dollars to specific awards, with identifiers that survive citation.

Market Researchers & Consultants get their own market measured from official obligation records - the federal consulting sector sized and segmented without a survey in sight.

Sales & Go-To-Market Teams get named buyers, named competitors and observed deal sizes, which is territory planning with evidence attached.

Investors & Quant Researchers get revenue-exposure signals for listed government-services firms derived from obligation trends, ahead of the filings that confirm them.

Data Scientists & ML Engineers get a coded, dimensional panel - recipient, agency, NAICS, fiscal period - that joins onto company registers and CRM exports cleanly.

Measure note - obligations are commitments made, not invoices paid; outlay-side figures answer a different question. Pick one per analysis and label it.

Classification note - NAICS reflects how the buyer classified the requirement. Where self-classification looks shaky, cross-check against PSC codes before treating a six-digit trend as gospel.

Where to go next - the rail below collects the R&D statistics siblings, the Census services revenue view, the source profile and the scored ranking, each a different lens on the same professional-services economy.