Standardized Federal Spending Data Elements

The lists on this page contain two types of standardized federal spending data elements:

1. Data elements that were collected under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) and featured on USAspending.gov prior to the revisions to FFATA in the DATA Act of 2014.
2. Data elements that were added based on the requirements of the DATA Act of 2014 and that have been featured on USAspending since it relaunched in 2017 pursuant to DATA Act requirements.

The elements listed represent the original consensus the federal community reached during the original DATA Act implementation. Additional data elements will continue to be added to improve transparency reporting. For the current data model element list visit Data Transparency.

The data elements are grouped by category; each short list represents a different category. There is a white paper associated with each element linked to in the Data Element Name column, along with a separate link to the relevant GitHub issue in the Provide Feedback column. The latter contains input on the white papers posted during the initial public comment period. Thank you to all who posted responses to these papers and provided input on these data elements.

The finalized original 57 data element concepts and definitions are located here. As of late 2021, OMB has stated that they no longer plan to update the list, though this could change in the future.

Awardee and Recipient Entity Information

This list includes information about recipients and awardees of federal funds. Please note that these elements will be standardized across the different types of awards (grants, contracts, etc.).

Award Amount Information

This list includes elements used to describe the amount of a certain award.

Award Characteristic Information

These elements describe the different characteristics each award possesses – for example, its transaction code, its Award Identification (ID) Number, and so on.

Funding Entity Information

These data elements describe characteristics of the entity that provided funding for an award.

Awarding Entity Information

Elements on this list describe awarding entities – those that presented the awardee with the funding.

Account Level Information

This list features elements that describe the accounts from which the awards are funded.

* An asterisk (*) next to a data element name indicates that the name for that data element has changed since it was first posted here in December 2014. All final data element names and definitions are posted here.