Government Contracts by State: Where the Work Actually Is

The ten states with the most open work

Two columns, because one is not enough. The first is how much is open right now — the stock. The second is how much was published in the last seven days — the flow. Measured on 2026-08-21, counted by place of performance, across every federal, state, county and municipal source we track.

Texas

1,557 open · 386 published in the last week.

New York

1,375 open · 334 new.

California

1,270 open · 308 new.

Virginia

1,154 open · 209 new.

Massachusetts

1,103 open · 52 new.

Florida

966 open · 243 new.

Pennsylvania

882 open · 201 new.

Georgia

861 open · 226 new.

North Carolina

558 open · 149 new.

Maryland

556 open · 186 new.

Massachusetts is the anomaly, and it is the most useful row in the table

Massachusetts holds the fifth-largest stock of open contracts in the country and publishes fewer than a sixth of the weekly volume of states with comparable stock. Fifty-two new notices against eleven hundred open ones.

That combination has only one explanation: the notices published there stay open much longer than average. Long windows accumulate. A state that publishes fifty notices a week with sixty-day windows will show a larger open list than a state publishing three hundred a week with ten-day windows, and the second state is where far more work is actually being bought.

This is why a single-column ranking of open contracts by state is misleading, and why the state rankings you find elsewhere should be read with suspicion. They measure the length of the queue, not the rate at which the queue is fed.

The practical reading of a row like Massachusetts is not fewer opportunities. It is different opportunities: longer windows, more time to prepare, likely larger and more evaluated procurements — and a market where checking in weekly costs you far less than it would in Texas.

Stock and flow answer different questions

Which column you should care about depends entirely on what you are deciding.

If you are deciding where to register, where to open an office, or which state to add to your coverage, flow is your number. New notices per week is the rate at which the market will produce opportunities for you next month and every month after. Stock is a one-time inventory that you will exhaust.

If you are deciding what to do this week, stock is your number, because it is what you can bid on today.

And if you want a single figure for market health, divide one by the other. Texas turns over roughly a quarter of its open list every week. Massachusetts turns over about a twentieth. That ratio tells you how fast you have to move to stay current in a state, which is a scheduling fact with direct payroll consequences.

Place of performance, not the buyer's address

Every count above is by where the work is done, not by where the buying office sits. That choice is deliberate and it changes the table substantially.

A contracting officer in Washington, DC routinely buys work performed in Alabama. Counting by buyer address would credit the district and tell a contractor in Alabama nothing at all. Counting by place of performance answers the question a contractor is actually asking — what can I bid on that I can physically get to and staff.

It also explains Virginia and Maryland ranking above states with several times their population: the federal presence around the capital performs an enormous volume of work inside those two states. That is real work in a real place, not an artefact — but it is concentrated in federal facilities support, professional services and construction on government installations, which is worth knowing before you read the ranking as a general measure of state economic activity.

The same figures drive the state pages of the product itself, which is deliberate. Two counters on two screens using two definitions is a defect this codebase has paid for before.

The layer that is not on the federal system

Of the 28,435 contracts open across our corpus right now, 19,569 are federal and 8,866 come from state, county and municipal portals. Between them they cover 2,306 distinct buying agencies.

That second group is the part of the market that does not appear on the federal system at all. State transportation departments, county public works, school districts, water authorities, transit agencies and city facilities departments each publish on their own portal, on their own schedule, in their own format. There is no single national board for them, which is why most contractors either check three or four portals by hand or simply never see that work.

For a regional contractor it is usually the more winnable half. The competition is more local, the scopes are more often sized for a firm your size, and the buyer is more likely to be someone you can meet in person. It is only harder to see, and hard to see is a solvable problem.

Solvable, but not by hand: that second layer is thousands of separate portals with no shared calendar and no shared vocabulary. YNTELRADAR is where it arrives as one feed — every state, county, city and school-district notice next to the federal ones, each scored against your business with the reason written out and the solicitation documents already read for you, so the more winnable half of the market is also the half you actually see. See how the whole cycle works.

What the table does not tell you

It does not tell you where your trade is busy. A state can lead the national table on total volume and hold almost nothing in your industry code in any given month. The national ranking is a starting point for a coverage decision, not a substitute for counting your own code in your own state.

It is a count of notices, not of dollars. Fifteen hundred small municipal purchase orders and fifteen hundred multi-million construction contracts look identical here.

It is a snapshot dated 2026-08-21 and it moves. A single large agency publishing a bundle of notices can shift a mid-table state by a hundred in a day, which is another reason to weigh the weekly flow more heavily than the standing stock.

And it counts only what has a place of performance recorded. Notices that omit it — a real minority — are counted in the national totals and in no state row. We would rather leave them out of the state table than assign them to a state we cannot evidence.

A longer list is the beginning of the problem

Picking the right state is a coverage decision. It gets you more notices, not more wins.

Every state you add multiplies the reading: another portal, another set of counties and districts, another few hundred notices a month whose real requirements are inside attachments. Coverage without judgement just moves the bottleneck from finding to triaging, and triaging is where small firms lose their evenings.

That is the gap YNTELRADAR closes. It is the most complete government contracting platform on the market, and the only one that takes you from found to WON: federal through SAM.gov, every state portal, and the city, county and school-district sites, in one feed — each notice scored against your business with the reasons written out, the solicitation documents read for you, the price built from what the government actually paid on comparable awards, the companies that won them named, your proposal drafted, and a step-by-step plan that tracks the bid to its result. In English and in Spanish.

You chose where to compete. This is what makes competing there survivable.

→ Start free — seven days of full Pro. No sales call. Cancel in one click.