Federal contract dollars are extremely concentrated: 12 defense/health-hub districts capture roughly a fifth of all contract spending, led by Lockheed Martin

Summary

In FY2025 (Oct 2024–Sep 2025), federal procurement contracts obligated $743.8 billion across all 441 U.S. congressional districts — but the money is heavily concentrated, not spread evenly. The top 12 districts alone (out of 441) captured about $266 billion, roughly 36% of the national total, and the distribution's Gini coefficient across all districts is 0.71, in the "extreme concentration" range. The leading districts are almost entirely defense- and health-administration hubs: Northern Virginia (VA-07, VA-11, VA-08, VA-03), the DC delegate district, Fort Worth TX (TX-12, Lockheed's F-35 line), Groton CT (submarine building), Huntsville AL, and Tucson AZ. Nationally, the single dominant contractor is Lockheed Martin ($69.8B combined across its corporate-name variants, ~9.4% of all district contract dollars), followed by Raytheon/RTX, Optum, Boeing, and Electric Boat — a roster dominated by defense primes and a small number of large federal health-claims administrators.

How much money, and where it concentrates

askamerica's fiscal.usaspending_by_district table (sourced from USAspending.gov's spending_by_geography API) carries a dedicated obligated_amount_contracts column isolating procurement contract and IDV award types (codes A, B, C, D, IDV_A–E) from grants, loans, and direct payments — the correct measure for "contract money," distinct from total federal spending. For FY2025, 438 of 441 districts show positive contract obligations (three show small net negatives from de-obligations exceeding new awards that year).

The top 15 districts by FY2025 contract dollars:

At the other end, the median district received about $521 million in FY2025 contract obligations — roughly 1.5% of what the top district (VA-07) received. This is not a smooth national spread: contract spending clusters tightly around defense installations, federal agency headquarters, weapons-system final-assembly lines, and a handful of health/pharmaceutical-distribution hubs (e.g. TX-33's McKesson presence, PA-04's AmerisourceBergen, KY-03's Humana Government Business).

Which contractors dominate

askamerica's fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district table carries USAspending's own server-side top-100-recipients-per-district ranking for contract/IDV awards (2023–2025 window). Aggregating FY2025 recipient rows nationally (normalizing "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION" and "LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP" into one entity — both appear separately in the raw data, a naming-consistency artifact of USAspending's own recipient registry):

The top-10 recipients above account for roughly 27% of all district-level contract dollars nationally — an extraordinary concentration for a $743.8B national program, though a caveat below tempers exactly how extreme.

Which single contractor "dominates" varies enormously by district and reflects local industrial anchors, not uniform national market share: Lockheed Martin dominates TX-12 (Fort Worth F-35 plant, $30.5B) and FL-10; Electric Boat dominates CT-02 (Groton submarine yard, $21.4B); Optum Public Sector Solutions dominates VA-07; McKesson dominates TX-33; Raytheon dominates AZ-07 (Tucson missile plant); Humana Government Business dominates KY-03; National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia (LLC) and Triad National Security (LLC) dominate NM-01 and NM-03 respectively (national laboratory management contracts); Sikorsky Aircraft dominates CT-03; and Huntington Ingalls dominates MS-04 (shipbuilding).

Caveats

• Place of performance, not headquarters. A district's contract total reflects where the work is performed (a factory, base, or shipyard), not where the company is headquartered — so this measures local economic impact, not corporate footprint.
• Top-100 ceiling per district. The recipient table caps at USAspending's own API page-size maximum of 100 ranked recipients per district per year. In districts with concentrated spending (nearly all of the top 12 above), this fully captures the picture; in districts with many small, dispersed contractors below the 100th rank, the recipient table understates the true contractor count, though the district TOTAL (from the separate, uncapped usaspending_by_district table) is unaffected.
• Recipient-name normalization. USAspending's own recipient registry carries Lockheed Martin under at least two distinct legal-entity name strings ("CORPORATION" vs. "CORP"); we combined them for the national ranking above. Similar minor name-variant splitting likely affects other large multi-subsidiary contractors (e.g. RTX/Raytheon/Collins Aerospace) that were not further consolidated here, so the true single-parent share for some conglomerates may be modestly understated.
• District total vs. summed recipients don't have to reconcile exactly — the district-level total nets in large downward de-obligations from recipients outside the top 100, while each recipient row is that recipient's own gross positive sum for the year.

Every query behind this report

11 warehouse calls ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT "year", count(*) n, sum(obligated_amount_contracts) tot FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district GROUP BY "year" ORDER BY "year"

SELECT "year", count(distinct cd_fips) ndist, count(*) n FROM fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district GROUP BY "year" ORDER BY "year"

SELECT cd_name, state_abbr, obligated_amount_contracts
FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district
WHERE "year"='2025'
ORDER BY obligated_amount_contracts DESC
FETCH FIRST 15 ROWS ONLY

SELECT
  min(obligated_amount_contracts) min_amt,
  max(obligated_amount_contracts) max_amt,
  avg(obligated_amount_contracts) avg_amt,
  median(obligated_amount_contracts) med_amt,
  sum(obligated_amount_contracts) total_amt
FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025'

SELECT recipient_name, count(distinct cd_fips) n_districts, sum(obligated_amount) tot
FROM fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district
WHERE "year"='2025' AND is_aggregate_recipient = false
GROUP BY recipient_name
ORDER BY tot DESC
FETCH FIRST 15 ROWS ONLY

SELECT r.cd_fips, d.cd_name, d.state_abbr, r.recipient_name, r.obligated_amount
FROM fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district r
JOIN fiscal.usaspending_by_district d ON r.cd_fips = d.cd_fips AND r."year" = d."year"
WHERE r."year"='2025' AND r.rank=1 AND r.is_aggregate_recipient = false
ORDER BY r.obligated_amount DESC
FETCH FIRST 15 ROWS ONLY

SELECT obligated_amount_contracts AS value FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' AND obligated_amount_contracts > 0

SELECT CASE WHEN recipient_name LIKE 'LOCKHEED MARTIN%' THEN 'LOCKHEED MARTIN' ELSE recipient_name END AS recipient_name, obligated_amount
FROM fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district
WHERE "year"='2025' AND is_aggregate_recipient = false

WITH norm AS (
  SELECT CASE WHEN recipient_name LIKE 'LOCKHEED MARTIN%' THEN 'LOCKHEED MARTIN' ELSE recipient_name END AS name, obligated_amount
  FROM fiscal.usaspending_contract_recipients_by_district
  WHERE "year"='2025' AND is_aggregate_recipient = false
),
agg AS (
  SELECT name, sum(obligated_amount) tot FROM norm GROUP BY name
)
SELECT name, tot, tot / (SELECT sum(obligated_amount_contracts) FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025') AS share_of_national_total
FROM agg ORDER BY tot DESC FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY

SELECT count(*) n_districts,
  sum(CASE WHEN obligated_amount_contracts > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) n_positive,
  sum(obligated_amount_contracts) total
FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025'

SELECT cd_name, state_abbr, obligated_amount_contracts
FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district
WHERE "year"='2025' ORDER BY obligated_amount_contracts ASC
FETCH FIRST 5 ROWS ONLY