Lockheed Martin 51 Billion in Federal Contracts: Top 10 US Contractors
USAspending.gov data shows Lockheed Martin Corp ($51.24B obligations) Boeing ($21.55B) and Rockwell Collins Australia ($20.64B) leading US federal contract recipients — concentrated in aerospace defense and healthcare administration.
Research period:
Research Question
Across 5000 US federal contractors in the USAspending.gov dataset which receive the largest contract obligations — and how does contractor concentration correlate with NAICS industry and agency mix?
Methodology
We queried PlainFedContract contractors table for name slug and total_amount across all 5000 indexed recipients. We ranked contractors by total_amount high-to-low and reported top-10 alongside their recipient_level and UEI identifier where available. We cross-referenced top contractors against the top 10 NAICS industries by total_amount to identify the industry anchors driving the largest contract flows.
Top entities — primary metric (from USAspending.gov)
Across 5000 US federal contractors in the USAspending.gov dataset which receive the largest contract obligations — and how does contractor c
Findings
Lockheed Martin Corp tops the list at $51.24 billion in contract obligations
PlainFedContract records LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP at the peak position among 5000 top contractors drawn from USAspending.gov contract data. The dataset registers 111 federal agencies submitting obligations that total 746.42 billion dollars in fiscal year 2023. Column contractor_name and column total_obligations enable direct ranking across the 5000 entries. State and territory breakdowns span 56 jurisdictions, allowing per-state aggregation for the leading contractor. USAspending.gov — Contract Obligations Data, 2024 release Lockheed Martin profile links to full obligation history.
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION follows immediately with 24.52 billion dollars recorded in the same obligations table. The 111 agencies include defense components that drive the bulk of entries for these contractors. NAICS codes attached to each row permit filtering by industry classification across the 499 available codes. Fiscal year 2024 registered 740.76 billion dollars overall, confirming the scale captured in the ingest process.
Boeing Rockwell Collins UnitedHealth anchor the top 5
THE BOEING COMPANY occupies third place at 21.55 billion dollars within the obligations table. ROCKWELL COLLINS AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED follows at fourth position with 20.64 billion dollars logged from the identical USAspending.gov source. UNITEDHEALTH GROUP INCORPORATED stands fifth at 19.73 billion dollars, marking the highest non-defense entry among the 5000 contractors. US Treasury Department — Federal Spending Transparency, 2024
OPTUM PUBLIC SECTOR SOLUTIONS and TRIWEST HEALTHCARE ALLIANCE CORP occupy sixth and seventh slots at 16.07 billion dollars and 15.51 billion dollars respectively. ELECTRIC BOAT CORPORATION registers eighth at 13.85 billion dollars tied to submarine construction. These positions derive from column total_obligations joined to agency identifiers and NAICS fields. The 56 state and territory breakdowns support geographic slicing of the top tier.
Engineering Services and Aircraft Manufacturing drive $105 billion across NAICS codes
Engineering Services under NAICS 541330 leads all 499 industry codes with 53.93 billion dollars aggregated in the obligations table. Aircraft Manufacturing under NAICS 336411 follows at 51.37 billion dollars. Engineering Services industry profile and Aircraft Manufacturing industry profile provide row-level detail from the 5000 contractors. Direct Health and Medical Insurance Carriers (NAICS 524114) records 44.27 billion dollars while Research and Development Physical Engineering Life Sciences (NAICS 541715) logs 44.27 billion dollars in fourth position. SAM.gov — System for Award Management, 2024
The 111 agencies feed these industry totals through standardized submission pipelines. Column naics_code enables the aggregation that produces the ranked list. State-level columns further segment obligations for each code across the 56 jurisdictions. Fiscal year comparisons between 746.42 billion dollars and 740.76 billion dollars illustrate annual movement captured in the dataset.
Coverage and limitations
USAspending.gov serves as the upstream agency responsible for the contract obligations data. Its release cadence follows quarterly updates with annual fiscal year snapshots that feed the PlainFedContract ingestion pipeline. Revisions appear as flagged records in subsequent vintages, allowing the system to track changes to obligation amounts without overwriting prior submissions. The snapshot vintage used here differs from live API endpoints that may incorporate post-publication corrections submitted by reporting agencies.
Coverage edges exclude contractors outside the 5000 largest by total obligations, along with non-prime awardees and entities below reporting thresholds defined in federal acquisition regulations. The 111 agencies represent mandatory reporters, yet smaller sub-agencies or grant-only programs fall outside the contract-specific extract. Geographic coverage spans the 56 state and territory breakdowns yet omits sub-state Census tract granularity available in other Treasury datasets. NAICS 499 codes capture industry classification at the six-digit level while omitting certain emerging sectors until code revisions occur.
The methodology page details normalization steps applied during ingest, including deduplication of contractor identifiers and alignment of agency codes. Cross-references to SAM.gov enable validation of entity registration status for each of the 5000 contractors. Revision history tracking supports audit queries that compare original submissions against later vintages. Public-records terminology such as prime contract action, modification number, and award identifier appears throughout the stored columns. Coverage gaps therefore center on scale thresholds rather than complete omission of any single agency or jurisdiction. Internal links to contractor profiles and industry pages surface related metrics derived from the same obligations table.
Overall the dataset combines 5000 top contractors, 111 agencies, 499 NAICS codes, and 56 jurisdictions to surface concentration patterns that link defense manufacturing with health administration sectors. Lockheed Martin leads while engineering and aircraft codes dominate totals, with fiscal year 2023 and 2024 figures confirming stability in aggregate obligations. Methodological transparency around vintages and exclusions supports reproducible analysis across the stored tables.
Adjacent data points from the same source
Additional entities surfaced by USAspending.gov
What this analysis cannot tell us
Total contract obligation figures reflect cumulative dollar amounts across multiple fiscal years in the indexed dataset and do not represent a single fiscal year spend. Some parent companies appear under multiple recipient names and levels (parent vs child) — the dataset contains both LOCKHEED MARTIN CORP and LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION as separate rows with separate UEIs. Contract obligations represent the government commitment to spend not actual cash outlays — programs can be de-obligated or modified before payment. Subcontractor flows are not captured in the prime recipient dataset — a portion of every prime contract value passes downstream to subcontractors in separate flows. Classified contract awards are partially redacted in the USAspending feed. Our indexed totals cover the top 5000 contractors by dollar volume — a long tail of smaller recipients falls below our indexing threshold.
Sources
- USAspending.gov — https://www.usaspending.gov/
- US Treasury Fiscal Service — https://fiscal.treasury.gov/
- SAM.gov — https://sam.gov/