The shape of the federal year
The federal government does not commit money evenly across its year. In FY2025 contracts peaked in September, at 19.1% of the year's contract obligations, while grants peaked in January at 23.9% of the year's grants. A total that averages the instruments describes none of them.
American Factbook Research
Share of the instrument's own FY2025 obligations, by month
Breaks in comparability
- October: The federal fiscal year starts in October and ends in September. The publisher numbers these months 1 to 12 on that basis; they are named here for the calendar months they are, so October is the first point and not the tenth.
- Insurance and other: This endpoint publishes no separate insurance figure: it folds insurance in with award types 11 and -1. That combined group is not the “Other” on the award types page, which excludes insurance — in FY2013 the difference between the two readings is $1.36 trillion.
Direct payments
| Period | percent of the instrument’s own year |
|---|---|
| October | 7.9% |
| November | 10.0% |
| December | 6.3% |
| January | 10.1% |
| February | 7.9% |
| March | 6.0% |
| April | 8.5% |
| May | 11.2% |
| June | 5.9% |
| July | 8.8% |
| August | 10.9% |
| September | 6.4% |
Grants
| Period | percent of the instrument’s own year |
|---|---|
| October | 19.3% |
| November | 2.6% |
| December | 4.3% |
| January | 23.9% |
| February | 0.5% |
| March | 1.1% |
| April | 15.0% |
| May | 2.0% |
| June | 2.8% |
| July | 19.0% |
| August | 3.6% |
| September | 5.8% |
What this data cannot show
- This is FY2025, the most recent fiscal year whose reporting is finished. The open year is not drawn, and not only because it is unfinished: agencies submit monthly and the record lags behind them, so its most recent months hold a small fraction of what they will eventually hold. Drawing them would show a collapse in spending that is a gap in reporting.
- Loans is not drawn. Its FY2025 obligations came to $502.0 million net, small enough that one month reached 359.9% of the year. Obligations and deobligations very nearly cancel over a year for this instrument, so there is no annual scale for a month to be a share of, and the figure would be arithmetically correct while describing nothing.
- Each series is a share of its own instrument’s year, not of the federal total. That is what makes a several-hundred-billion instrument and a several-billion one readable on one page, and it means the series cannot be added together.
- Obligations are recorded when a commitment is made. A month with a large figure is a month of large commitments, not a month of large payments.
- A month’s figure is net of deobligations recorded in it, so a month in which more was released than committed can be negative.
Related
Sources
- USAspending API v2 — dimension aggregations — U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service · U.S. Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · retrieved September 19, 2026
Last updated