VA net obligations by fiscal year

Net obligations by U.S. fiscal year, by type

Sum of federal_action_obligation per transaction · FY of action date (Oct–Sep) · nominal dollars

• Contracts
• Assistance — aggregated benefits to individuals
• Assistance — awards to organisations

1. ¹ USAspending coverage of VA benefit payments is incomplete in FY2008–FY2013: aggregated payments to individuals in those years total less than 50% of the median of FY2022–FY2025 ($198.5B; cutoff $99.3B). Those low totals reflect what was reported to USAspending, not a matching fall in benefits paid, so the rise across these years should not be read as spending growth. The rule is recomputed from the data on every build; no years are hard-coded.
2. ² VHA medical-care records are missing or sparse in FY2008–FY2013, FY2023–FY2026: VHA's county-level cost-of-care listings (64.011–64.050, 64.012 prescriptions, 64.029 purchased care) appear in USAspending from October 2013 (only 64.012 and 64.029 before that) and stop after January–February 2023 (last action dates 2023-01-31 and 2023-02-28). In flagged years the VHA share of aggregated benefits is below 50% of its typical level ($75.2B a year). So the aggregated-benefits line is not like-for-like across FY2023: the drop reflects what VHA reports to USAspending, not a fall in care provided. VBA compensation (64.109) keeps rising, which is why the total holds.
3. ³ FY2026 is in progress: latest action date loaded is 2026-09-04 (contracts to 2026-09-04; assistance to 2026-08-25). The hollow point and dashed segment are a partial year and are not comparable to complete years.
4. Series start at FY2008, the first fiscal year of the loaded USAspending archive. 6 stray transactions dated FY2005–FY2007 ($5.3M net) are outside that archive and not charted.
5. Contracts: FPDS contract actions (usa.contract_txn).
6. Assistance — aggregated benefits to individuals: Benefits to individual veterans and survivors reported to USAspending as summary records by program, county (or state) and period, with the placeholder recipient “MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS” / “REDACTED DUE TO PII” — VBA compensation, pension, education and insurance payments and, while VHA reported them (FY2014 to early FY2023), the cost of VHA medical care, community care and prescriptions by patient county.
7. Assistance — awards to organisations: Grants and other assistance to identified organisations (states, universities, non-profits, providers).

Per-year values and source coverage

Transaction counts show how much the source holds for each year · last column attributes each award to its first action's FY (for comparison)

Why the transaction counts move

Counts track reporting rules as much as buying. In every year the rows loaded equal the rows in USAspending's files; these are changes in what was reported, not missing data.

• FY2008 contracts (≈1.30M rows). About 1.1M are actions under the then $3,000 micro-purchase threshold, reported one line each — mostly from station “small purchase” offices — and together only about $0.7B. This itemised reporting stops at the start of FY2009. FAR 4.606 lets agencies report micro-purchases but does not require it; why VA stopped is not documented in the sources checked (cause unverified). Compare FY2008 dollars with later years, not counts.
• FY2016 ($3,000–$3,500 band). Actions in that band drop from about 10.6K to 2.3K, matching the 1 Oct 2015 inflation adjustment of the micro-purchase threshold to $3,500 (FAC 2005-83, 80 FR 38293).
• FY2018–FY2019 contracts (≈221K → ≈130K rows while dollars rise). The drop is entirely in actions of $3,500–$10,000, which fall from about 5,000 a month to under 1,100 between spring and autumn 2018. This matches the micro-purchase threshold rising to $10,000 (FY2018 NDAA §806, Pub. L. 115-91, 41 U.S.C. 1902; applied by class deviation in 2018 and in the FAR by FAC 2020-07). FAR 4.606(c)(1) excludes purchase-card and other micro-purchases from FPDS unless agency procedures require them.
• FY2010–FY2013 assistance. VBA benefit listings begin reporting to USAspending between September 2010 and August 2011 (compensation, 64.109, first appears 29 March 2011), and VHA reported only two care listings until October 2013. Low totals in these years are coverage, not lower benefits.
• FY2023–FY2026 assistance (≈1.01M → ≈0.42M rows while dollars hold). VHA stopped reporting its monthly county-level cost-of-care records (64.011–64.050, 64.012, 64.029) after January–February 2023. VBA benefit rows are stable at about 380–420K a year, so the drop is VHA's records, not a change in how benefits are aggregated. Source: counts by Assistance Listing in the USAspending VA award files.

How to read this

• Measure. Net obligations: the sum of federal_action_obligation over every non-deleted transaction, including negative de-obligations. Obligations are commitments, not outlays (cash paid).
• Attribution. Each transaction counts in the U.S. fiscal year (1 Oct – 30 Sep) of its action date. The last table column shows the alternative used elsewhere on this site — every dollar of an award in the fiscal year of its first action — which front-loads multi-year awards and should not be read as a year-by-year trend.
• No forecast. Year-to-year movement mixes real spending change with changes in what agencies reported to USAspending, so this page does not fit or extend a trend line.
• Award-level detail and methodology: methodology · data quality.