How to Read a USASpending.gov Award Record
April 23, 2026
When you download raw USDA data from USASpending.gov, each row in the CSV represents a single assistance transaction and contains roughly 70 fields. Most are irrelevant for farm subsidy research. Here are the ones that matter and what they tell you.
Key fields
- assistance_listing_number / cfda_number
- The CFDA program number (e.g., 10.069 = CRP). This is how you know which program a payment came from.
- federal_action_obligation
- The dollar amount of the payment. Positive values are payments to the recipient; negative values represent recoveries or adjustments.
- recipient_name
- The legal name of the recipient. Individual farmers are redacted; corporations, partnerships, and LLCs are named.
- action_date / action_date_fiscal_year
- When the transaction was recorded. The fiscal year field tells you which USDA fiscal year this falls into (October 1 – September 30).
- primary_place_of_performance_state_code
- The two-letter state where the payment applies. This is usually the state where the farm is located.
- primary_place_of_performance_county_name
- The county where the payment applies. SubsidyLookup uses this to power its county-level pages.
How SubsidyLookup processes these fields
We aggregate transactions by recipient, program, state, county, and fiscal year. Named recipients get profile pages with totals across all years and programs. This lets you see the full payment history for a recipient in one place, rather than hunting through individual transaction records. Browse recipients or search to see this in action.