Finding 01
VOSB Contracting Is Growing — Steadily
Veteran-owned firms captured more federal contract dollars every year from FY2022 to FY2024, with consistent year-over-year growth.
Source: USASpending.gov Award Search API. Records sorted by award amount descending; 5,000 largest VOSB awards captured per fiscal year.
Across the three-year study period, veteran-owned small businesses secured $96.54 billion in federal contract awards. The trajectory is positive: $30.3B in FY2022, $32.5B in FY2023, and $33.8B in FY2024 — an 11.5% increase over the period.
The largest single-year jump came between FY2022 and FY2023 (+$2.17B, +7.2%), followed by continued but more modest growth into FY2024 (+$1.27B, +3.9%). This suggests the post-pandemic federal contracting environment has been favorable for veteran-owned firms, though the pace of growth is moderating.
These figures represent the top 5,000 VOSB awards by dollar value per fiscal year — a sample of the largest contracts, not the complete universe. Total VOSB contracting across all agencies is considerably higher. The trend direction and agency/state concentration findings remain valid within this sample.
Finding 02
One Agency Dominates: The VA at $65.5 Billion
The Department of Veterans Affairs accounts for nearly 68 cents of every VOSB contract dollar in this dataset — reflecting both its legal mandate and its unique mission alignment with veteran-owned firms.
The VA's dominance is not surprising — its Veterans First Contracting Program gives VOSB and SDVOSB firms priority in the procurement process before any other small business programs. But the concentration is striking: the VA and DoD together account for 87.3% of all VOSB contract dollars in this dataset.
This means the remaining 13 agencies in the dataset share just $12.3B. For veteran-owned firms looking to diversify beyond the VA and DoD, Homeland Security ($2.9B) and Health & Human Services ($1.8B) represent the next largest opportunities.
Agency rankings were produced using a two-step CTE pipeline: the first CTE aggregated total and VOSB dollars per agency, the second applied RANK() OVER (ORDER BY vosb_dollars DESC) and PERCENT_RANK() window functions to score each agency's relative position.
Finding 03
Virginia Leads All States at $20.7 Billion
VOSB contract dollars are heavily concentrated in states with large federal footprints. The top 5 states account for nearly half of all VOSB contract activity.
| Rank | State | VOSB Contract Dollars | Awards | Relative Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Virginia (VA) | $20.7B | 1,817 | |
| 2 | Washington D.C. | $7.5B | 1,082 | |
| 3 | California (CA) | $6.1B | 1,079 | |
| 4 | Maryland (MD) | $6.0B | 639 | |
| 5 | Texas (TX) | $5.2B | 1,065 | |
| 6 | Florida (FL) | $4.5B | 863 | |
| 7 | Colorado (CO) | $4.2B | 328 | |
| 8 | Alabama (AL) | $3.2B | 231 | |
| 9 | North Carolina (NC) | $2.6B | 406 | |
| 10 | New York (NY) | $2.5B | 580 |
Virginia's dominance reflects its geography — the Pentagon, multiple major VA medical centers, and the highest concentration of defense contractors in the country are all located within the state. The Northern Virginia / D.C. / Maryland corridor alone (VA + DC + MD) accounts for 35.4% of all VOSB contract dollars.
Texas and Florida, despite large military bases and significant veteran populations, rank 5th and 6th respectively — suggesting that proximity to federal procurement headquarters may matter as much as veteran population size.
The state distribution query used SUM(award_amount) OVER (ORDER BY award_amount DESC) to calculate cumulative running totals and NTILE(4) to bucket states into concentration quartiles — identifying which states are in the top quartile for VOSB contract density.
Finding 04
Ten Firms Captured $17.5 Billion
A small number of large veteran-owned firms dominate the top of the VOSB contracting landscape, primarily in IT services and professional services for federal agencies.
The top 10 firms are overwhelmingly concentrated in information technology and professional services — the sectors where federal agencies spend the most and where VOSB set-aside programs are most actively applied. The presence of large firms like SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton in the VOSB list reflects their veteran-owned subsidiary or qualifying status under the set-aside certification rules.
The gap between the largest firms ($3.5B for Four Points Technology) and smaller VOSB awardees is significant. A relatively small number of established firms are capturing a disproportionate share of the largest contracts, which is common in federal contracting but worth noting for policy discussions about VOSB program reach.
Methodology
How This Was Built
The analysis uses a reproducible Python + SQL pipeline. All code is public on GitHub.
load_data.py) queries the USASpending Award Search API v2, filtering to VOSB and SDVOSB set-aside contract codes across FY2022–2024. The script paginates through results (100 records/page) with polite rate-limiting and loads all records into a local SQLite database.schema.sql with indexes on fiscal year, agency, state, and veteran flags for query performance. The NAICS sector reference table enables 6-digit to 2-digit sector rollups in the industry analysis queries.This analysis captures VOSB set-aside contracts only — awards where veteran-owned status was the basis for the contract vehicle. It does not capture open-competition contracts won by veteran-owned firms. NAICS industry codes are sparsely populated for large IDIQ umbrella contracts in the USASpending API. The 5,000-record-per-year cap means total dollar figures represent the largest contracts, not the complete universe of VOSB activity.
All Code Is Public
The Python data loader, SQLite schema, and all five annotated SQL queries are available on GitHub. Clone the repo, run python load_data.py, and reproduce every finding in this analysis.