Biggest Government Contractors: Who Gets the Money

The federal government obligated over $700 billion in contracts in FY2024, buying everything from fighter jets to cybersecurity consulting to Medicare administration. A relatively small group of companies absorbs the bulk of that spending — the top 5 alone account for roughly 12% of the national total. Here are the 25 largest federal contractors ranked by total obligations from USAspending.gov, the official federal spending database.

Top 25 Federal Contractors by Total Obligations

The Concentration Problem

Federal contracting is heavily concentrated. The top 10 contractors capture roughly 25% of all federal contract dollars, and the top 100 capture over 50%. The pattern is most extreme in defense: five firms — Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman — account for roughly 30% of all Department of Defense spending. That concentration is structural rather than accidental. Defense procurement requires capital-intensive infrastructure (aircraft assembly lines, shipyards, missile and satellite facilities, integrated test ranges) that only a handful of firms can sustain. New entrants face a multi-decade investment to compete for prime work; the existing primes win because incumbents are exceptionally hard to displace from these programs.

Beyond Defense: IT and Healthcare

While defense dominates the top of the list, federal IT and healthcare contracting have grown rapidly. Major IT contractors — Leidos, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture Federal, CACI — have seen double-digit growth as civilian agencies modernize legacy systems and migrate to cloud platforms. The work spans cybersecurity (each major civilian agency now runs significant cyber-services contracts), software modernization (replacing decades-old mainframe systems), data analytics, and managed IT services. The same firms compete repeatedly across DHS, VA, Treasury, IRS, and DOD non-weapons programs.

Healthcare contractors like Humana, Centene, and UnitedHealth appear in the top 25 primarily through Medicare Advantage and TRICARE administrative-services contracts. These are not primarily medical-care providers from the federal-record perspective — they are administrators, processing claims and managing networks for federal beneficiaries. Their growth tracks federal program enrollment more than per-award changes.

How Concentration Has Changed

The defense-prime concentration has been roughly stable for the past decade. The civilian-side picture has tilted toward greater concentration as a small set of professional-services firms have captured an increasing share of agency IT work. The DOGE program is now an offsetting factor: terminations and pauses through 2025 and 2026 have removed obligations from civilian agencies in particular, especially USAID, the Department of Education, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Track ongoing actions on the DOGE tracker.

Where to Look for Detail

For spending by agency, see our federal spending breakdown. For defense-specific analysis, see the defense spending breakdown 2026. To explore by category, see spending by industry. The complete live ranking is on the full contractor rankings page; each contractor page lists every individual award, primary agencies, and PSC categories.

How These Numbers Are Calculated

Every figure cited here is computed from the USAspending.gov award dataset. Recipient identity is reconciled to SAM.gov Unique Entity ID registrations. Industry context follows the Product and Service Code (PSC) hierarchy from the Federal Procurement Data System. "Total obligations" is the sum of binding federal commitments in the fiscal year — not outlays (cash that has actually left the Treasury) and not contract ceilings (the maximum value if every option year is exercised). Read the full methodology.

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