Federal contract dollars flow overwhelmingly into a small set of defense- and health-contracting districts, led by Lockheed Martin and Northern Virginia

Summary

Federal procurement contract dollars are extremely concentrated by congressional district. In FY2025, the 441 U.S. House districts (place-of-performance basis) received a combined $743.7 billion in contract/IDV obligations, but the top 10 districts alone captured roughly $237 billion (32%) of that total, and the Gini coefficient across all districts is 0.71 ("extreme concentration" in the 0-1 scale, where 1.0 means a single district holds the entire total). The top districts are dominated by defense and federal-health contracting hubs: Virginia's 7th and 11th districts (Northern Virginia/Pentagon-adjacent), Texas's 12th (Lockheed's Fort Worth F-35 line) and 33rd (Dallas-Fort Worth), the District of Columbia's at-large seat, and Connecticut's 2nd (Electric Boat submarine yard in Groton). Nationally, the largest single contractor is Lockheed Martin (~$69.5B across its two USAspending name variants), followed by Raytheon/RTX, Optum's public-sector unit (TRICARE managed care), Boeing, and General Dynamics' Electric Boat subsidiary.

How much money, and where

Using fiscal.usaspending_by_district's obligated_amount_contracts column (procurement contracts and IDV awards only, excluding grants/loans/direct payments), FY2025 (the most recently complete fiscal year loaded, Oct 2024-Sep 2025) obligations totaled $743.7B nationally versus $2.83T across all federal award types (contracts are about 26% of total federal spending landing in districts; the rest is grants, loans, and direct payments like Social Security and Medicare).

At the other end of the distribution, a cluster of mostly rural or non-defense-adjacent districts (parts of upstate New York, Michigan, Alabama, Illinois) show contract obligations in the single-digit millions or even net-negative figures for the year — negative values occur where downward re-estimates of IDV/loan-adjacent contract subsidy costs exceeded new obligations, not an accounting error.

Which contractors dominate

USAspending's own top-100-recipient-per-district ranking (fiscal.usaspending_recipients_by_district), summed across all 441 districts for FY2025 and excluding the "MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS" aggregation bucket USAspending uses for sub-reporting-threshold transactions, shows a small set of firms winning across dozens of districts simultaneously:

This confirms the pattern visible in the district ranking: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon/RTX, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman — the traditional "Big Five" defense primes minus General Dynamics's corporate parent (which shows up here through its Electric Boat subsidiary) — dominate both nationally and in nearly every high-value district. A cross-check against public reporting on FY2025 USAspending data (Visual Capitalist/GovSpend coverage) puts Lockheed Martin's total FY2025 federal award value at roughly $73.7B nationally and the top 15 contractors' combined share at about 35% ($287.7B) of total federal contract obligations — consistent with (slightly higher than, reflecting a broader all-agency, all-geography scope than this district-level recipient ranking) the figures computed here.

Caveats

• Contract vs. all-award mismatch at the recipient level. fiscal.usaspending_by_district isolates contract/IDV obligations cleanly (obligated_amount_contracts), but fiscal.usaspending_recipients_by_district's obligated_amount column covers ALL award types (contracts, grants, direct payments) because USAspending's recipient-ranking endpoint does not offer a contracts-only filter at that grain. For the districts and firms above (Lockheed, Boeing, Electric Boat, Raytheon, Northrop) this is not a meaningful distortion — these firms' federal business is overwhelmingly procurement contracts — but it does inflate figures for recipients like Optum, TriWest, and McKesson, whose totals may include some non-contract federal health-program payments.
• Recipient table is capped at the top 100 per district per year (USAspending's own API page-size ceiling), so a district with many small, dispersed contractors below rank 100 is undercounted relative to a concentrated one — this affects the completeness of a full national contractor total, not the ranking of the largest firms shown here.
• DC-98 and other delegate districts (Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., code "98") are non-voting congressional districts, included here as the API reports them, not full voting House seats.
• FY2025 is the most recently complete fiscal year in this dataset (Oct 2024-Sep 2025); the source publishes roughly one year behind real time.

Every query behind this report

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

SELECT year, COUNT(*) n, SUM(obligated_amount_contracts) total FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district GROUP BY year ORDER BY year DESC LIMIT 5

SELECT year, COUNT(*) n FROM fiscal.usaspending_recipients_by_district GROUP BY year ORDER BY year DESC

SELECT SUM(obligated_amount_contracts) total_contracts, SUM(obligated_amount) total_all_awards FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025'

SELECT cd_name, state_abbr, district_number, obligated_amount_contracts, obligated_amount FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' ORDER BY obligated_amount_contracts DESC LIMIT 15

SELECT cd_name, state_abbr, obligated_amount_contracts FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' ORDER BY obligated_amount_contracts ASC LIMIT 10

SELECT cd_fips, obligated_amount_contracts FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' AND obligated_amount_contracts > 0

SELECT recipient_name, SUM(obligated_amount) total, COUNT(DISTINCT cd_fips) n_districts FROM fiscal.usaspending_recipients_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' AND is_aggregate_recipient = false GROUP BY recipient_name ORDER BY total DESC FETCH FIRST 15 ROWS ONLY

SELECT r.state_abbr, r.district_number, r.recipient_name, r.obligated_amount, d.obligated_amount_contracts
FROM fiscal.usaspending_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 d.cd_fips IN (
  SELECT cd_fips FROM fiscal.usaspending_by_district WHERE "year"='2025' ORDER BY obligated_amount_contracts DESC FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY
) ORDER BY d.obligated_amount_contracts DESC