Top Government Contractors: U.S. Top 10 by Federal Obligations

Lockheed Martin leads the U.S. federal government’s FY2024 contractor ranking, with $52.48 billion obligated, followed by RTX and Boeing. For a comparable public table, use one fiscal year, one spending measure and the source’s reported parent-company grouping.

As of October 14, 2026, FY2024 is the newest Top 100 Contractors workbook listed on SAM.gov’s static reports page. The ranking below uses its government-wide Federal worksheet—not a defense-only or technology-services list.

The top 10 government contractors

These are the first ten vendors in the official FY2024 workbook, ordered by dollars obligated. Company names are shortened for readability; amounts are rounded to two decimal places in billions of U.S. dollars.

Rank	Contractor	FY2024 obligations (USD billions)
1	Lockheed Martin	52.48
2	RTX	25.43
3	Boeing	24.76
4	Northrop Grumman	19.67
5	General Dynamics	19.54
6	UnitedHealth Group	18.78
7	Leidos	11.79
8	L3Harris Technologies	9.47
9	McKesson	9.05
10	Huntington Ingalls Industries	8.92

Scope: U.S. federal procurement across agencies, grouped under the workbook’s “Ultimate Parent Legal Business Name.” This is not a ranking of global company revenue, state and local contracts, or subcontractor earnings.

An obligation is the government’s commitment to spend funds. It is not necessarily money already paid: USAspending calls actual payments outlays. Negative obligations, or de-obligations, reduce previous commitments. These distinctions are defined in the USAspending Federal Spending Guide.

Why another “top contractors” list may look different

Check both the period and the population before comparing ranks. Washington Technology’s 2026 Top 100 puts Leidos first, but that publication analyzes federal spending on IT, systems integration, telecommunications, professional services and other high-tech needs. Its scope is narrower than the SAM.gov government-wide table; the two lists are not a like-for-like measure of rank changes.

Grouping matters, too. If you are republishing the official ranking, preserve its reported vendor rows rather than merging names based on assumptions about corporate ownership. A separately consolidated ranking needs its own documented mapping and recalculated ranks.

Prepare a spreadsheet readers can explore

The useful output is one row per reported vendor, with numeric amounts and enough provenance to explain the ranking.

1. Extract one scope

Download the FY2024 workbook from SAM.gov and copy the Federal worksheet into a clean working file. Keep the original workbook unchanged.

Do not append the agency worksheets to the Federal worksheet and sum them: the Federal sheet already provides government-wide figures. For an agency-specific page, use that agency’s worksheet and label the narrower scope.

2. Keep source fields separate from display fields

A practical publication schema is:

Field	What to store
rank	Descending order by the unrounded dollar amount
contractor_display_name	Readable name, such as Lockheed Martin
ultimate_parent_legal_business_name	Exact name from the workbook
obligations_usd	Full-precision numeric dollars, without $ or thousands separators
fiscal_year	2024
scope	U.S. federal government — Federal worksheet
source_url	Official workbook download link
accessed_date	Your actual download date

For example, Lockheed Martin’s source amount is 52479365101.92 dollars, not the rounded display value 52.48. Keep full precision in the file; round only the presentation. Preserve the workbook’s “Number of Actions” separately if you include it—do not relabel that field “number of contracts.”

3. Validate before publishing

Sort the amount column descending and confirm that the first ten rows match the table above. Check that amounts import as numbers, not text, and that each reported vendor has one row within your chosen scope.

State whether you publish ten rows or the full hundred. A top-ten extract can answer who leads, but cannot support analysis of the entire contractor market. Add a caption naming the fiscal year, measure, units and grouping. The public ranking table disclosures checklist covers these decisions in more detail.

4. Publish only the cleaned public extract

TablePage accepts CSV, TSV, XLSX and XLS files and turns an upload into a public dataset page with a shareable link and filterable table. Upload the cleaned ranking—not a working file containing private notes, sensitive information or unrelated worksheets.

Check the resulting page’s names and numeric values against the source, then place the scope and source link beside the table wherever you share it.

If you later build a newer ranking from live USAspending transactions, label it as a separate dated analysis. USAspending’s October 6, 2026 data disclosures state that Department of Defense and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers procurement data are published on a 90-day delay in the Federal Procurement Data System, affecting their availability on USAspending. A recently ended fiscal year therefore should not be presented as fully reported merely because the calendar has moved on.