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The contractor belt

Federal contracting is not spread across the country. It is concentrated in a ring around Washington and a handful of defence and laboratory states, and those states were already the richest ones.

Updated September 4, 2026

$46,754

District Of Columbia, per person

FY2025 contracts

$366

Delaware, per person

The other end of the list

128x

Gap, top to bottom

Same country, same year

2.7x

Richer half vs poorer half

Average contract dollars per person

Twelve states, most of the money

Contract dollars per resident. The District of Columbia is a city doing a federal government's worth of work, Virginia and Maryland are the contractor suburbs around it, Connecticut builds submarines, and New Mexico runs two nuclear laboratories.

Federal contract obligations per resident, FY2025, by place of performance. Bottom of the list for comparison: Minnesota $436, Arkansas $416, Delaware $366.

It flows uphill

Federal money is usually discussed as redistribution from richer places to poorer ones. Procurement runs the other way. States in the richer half of the income distribution receive 2.7 times as much contract money per person as states in the poorer half, because contracts follow expertise, security clearances and existing industrial capacity.

$1,000$10,000$51,620$63,404$75,187$86,971$98,755$110,538Median household incomeDistrict Of ColumbiaVirginiaConnecticutMarylandNew MexicoAlaskaHawaiiMassachusettsNew HampshireCaliforniaNew Jersey

Contract dollars per person, log scale

Each point is a state. Hover for the figures. The vertical axis is logarithmic because the spread runs across two orders of magnitude.

How this was built

Contract dollars come from USAspending, scoped to place of performance rather than recipient location. Recipient location attributes money to a company's headquarters, which is why a naive version of this table puts Minnesota and Indiana on top: large health insurers are based there and administer federal payments. Award types are restricted to contracts, so grants, loans and direct payments are excluded; leaving them in produces figures like North Dakota at $126,000 a head, which reflects how pass-through programmes are recorded rather than where money is spent. Population and median household income are the 2023 five-year American Community Survey. Coverage is the fifty states and the District of Columbia; territories are excluded because residents pay no federal income tax on local income and procurement there follows different rules.

Sources