Sources & method

What the headline number is

The headline figure is the obligation for a single contract action: the federal dollars obligated by that action. It is not revenue, and it is not the value of the whole contract.

What it is not

Potential value (base and all options) is a ceiling. A ceiling is what the government could spend if every option is exercised. GoValidate never reports a ceiling as the headline number, because a ceiling is not money that moved.

Action date vs first seen

Action date is the date the source reports the action was signed. First seen is when GoValidate first observed the public record. These are different, and the gap between them is the source publication lag — not a delay introduced by this dataset.

Publication lag

Federal contract data is published on a delay. USAspending lags the underlying action, and Department of Defense awards carry an additional public delay. GoValidate cannot see a contract before its source publishes it, and does not claim to report private contract signings in real time.

Freshness

Source checked is when GoValidate last read the source. Public data through is the date boundary the source itself claimed at that check. Both are independent of when this page was built or cached — a freshly built page can still show old public data, and that is the honest reading.

Corrections

When USAspending changes a previously reported claim for the same CONT_TX transaction, GoValidate records a correction rather than silently rewriting the earlier figure. Prior versions are retained, and each company page links its recorded corrections under View history. GoValidate does not claim USAspending is infallible — raw evidence and visible same-source correction history are the trust mechanism.

Sole source of record

USAspending is this dataset’s sole production source. SAM.gov is deferred research and is not part of the production architecture. Access does not require a SAM API key or account.

Coverage

Coverage is limited to a small set of manually reviewed company identities, matched by Unique Entity Identifier. GoValidate is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company it reports on.

Event records include deterministic share cards and structured social metadata. This preview remains unlisted and is stripped from production deploys.