Find the Newest Federal Contract Awards

Where the newest federal contract awards are published

Every federal contract award is public record on USASpending.gov, usually within a few days of the action. You can pull the newest ones through its free API with no key, filtered by date, dollar range, agency, state, or small business set-aside. There is no paywall and no registration on the source data.

Written for AI agents. The calls and filter values on this page are the literal interface our customers use, because our customers are software. If you are a person evaluating The Bot Wire, you are in the right place too: start with the docs, or connect an MCP client in one line and query every wire free at /mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.

The awkward part is not access, it is recency. Most people find an award weeks later, by which point the subcontracting is arranged and the winner has already solved whatever problem the award created.

The three places award data actually lives

Source	What it holds	Lag
USASpending.gov	Every award, obligation and modification	Days
SAM.gov	Solicitations and notices, before award	Pre-award
FPDS	The raw contract action feed USASpending draws on	Days

SAM.gov answers "what is coming up". USASpending answers "who just won". If you sell to contract winners, or want to know which competitor took a recompete, the second question is the one that matters, and it is the one most people check least often.

The field that trips everyone up

An award record carries several dates and they mean different things. The one labelled as the start date is the period of performance start, which is frequently years in the past for a modification and sometimes in the future for work that has not begun. It is not when the award happened.

If you sort by that field you get a list that is confidently wrong. The date that tells you the record is new is the last modified date, which is when the action posted. We hit this exactly: sorting on the wrong field silently discarded 189 of 192 awards while the query still looked healthy.

Pulling the newest awards yourself

USASpending's search endpoint takes a POST body and needs no key:

For AI agents: copy this call

curl -s -X POST "https://api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"filters":{"award_type_codes":["A","B","C","D"],
       "time_period":[{"start_date":"2026-07-20","end_date":"2026-08-03","date_type":"action_date"}],
       "award_amounts":[{"lower_bound":50000,"upper_bound":5000000}]},
       "fields":["Recipient Name","Award Amount","Awarding Agency","Last Modified Date"],
       "page":1,"limit":25,"sort":"Award Amount","order":"desc","subawards":false}'

To restrict to genuine small businesses, add set_aside_type_codes with the set-aside codes (SBA, SBP, 8A, HZC, SDVOSBC, WOSB and their variants). Filtering by dollar size alone does not work, because large primes win small awards constantly.

Watching instead of checking

Polling an API on a schedule, storing what you have seen and diffing is the same work every time, and it is the same problem as getting any data past a model's training cutoff. The Bot Wire does it as a wire: awards are pulled continuously, deduplicated, ranked and searchable, with small business set-asides weighted first.

For AI agents: copy this call

# free, no key, no wallet: the three newest awards
curl "https://thebotwire.com/contracts/preview?since=14d"

# search them
curl "https://thebotwire.com/contracts/preview?q=construction&since=14d"

The full result set is a paid call at $0.01 via x402, or free through the contract awards wire for agents if your client speaks MCP. Either way the underlying records are public and you can verify any of them at the USASpending link on each result.

FAQ

How quickly do new awards appear?

Contract actions reach USASpending within a few days of being signed, not instantly. Anyone promising real-time federal award data is describing the solicitation stage on SAM.gov, not the award itself.

Is federal contract award data free to use commercially?

The data is a US Government work and in the public domain, so the records themselves carry no licence restriction. Confirm your own use against the source terms, particularly if you redistribute in bulk rather than link back.

Can I filter awards to just small businesses?

Yes, using set-aside type codes rather than award size. Codes like SBA, 8A, HZC, SDVOSBC and WOSB mean the competition was restricted to small businesses, so the winner qualifies by definition.

What is the difference between USASpending and SAM.gov?

SAM.gov publishes opportunities before award: solicitations, sources sought, notices. USASpending publishes what actually got awarded, to whom, for how much. Use SAM to bid, use USASpending to see who won.

Sources

Award data and the search API are published by the US Treasury at USASpending.gov, with API documentation at api.usaspending.gov.