Top government contractors

What this data cannot show

• An obligation is a binding commitment to pay, not money paid. Outlays are reported separately and the two are never equal in the same year.
• A company can hold more than one registration with the government, and the publisher reports each separately. 21 rows here share a name with another row under a different UEI, and each says how many registrations share its name; its record page names its UEI. No single row is such a company’s total, and the sum of the rows sharing a name is not one either: it assumes that an identical name means one company, which the award record does not say.
• Contracts only. Grants, loans, direct payments and insurance are not in these figures, which is why the organizations that receive the most federal money overall are largely absent from this table.
• This is the prime recipient named on the award. A prime contractor that subcontracts most of the work still appears here for the whole of it, and the subcontractors do not appear at all.
• A parent company and its subsidiaries register separately. This table ranks registrations, not corporate groups, and rolling them up would mean asserting a corporate structure the award record does not carry.
• This is the largest 100 of hundreds of thousands of registrations. A company absent from it is one outside the top of the list.