Peace Corps

Reading $400.1 million as an award total, not a volunteer census

The Peace Corps trains and places volunteers in partner countries. USAspending does not count those volunteers. It counts awards the agency makes to vendors and other recipients: training facilities, medical support, IT, logistics, and similar instruments. $400,062,464.96 is the obligation stock for those awards through the FY2026 cutoff. A year with more volunteers does not automatically produce a larger USAspending total, and a year with fewer volunteers does not automatically shrink it.

Because so much of the Peace Corps model is people rather than procurement, this $400.1 million understates the agency’s full cost of operations if a reader expected every dollar to appear as an award. Federal employee pay and many volunteer-related disbursements never show up as the 589 USAspending rows. The table is complete for awards; it is incomplete as a budget encyclopedia.

589 awards and a mid-six-figure average

Five hundred eighty-nine awards against $400,062,464.96 implies about $679,223 per award. That mean sits between high-volume grant shops and thin-contract micro-agencies. Training and medical-support contracts can be large; small purchase orders still populate the tail. The packet gives no breakdown by country of performance, even though Peace Corps work is overseas. USAspending place-of-performance fields on individual awards are the only path to that geography.

The state table on SpendingVault still matters. Many Peace Corps vendors, recruiters, and domestic offices are U.S.-sited, so obligations attributed to states can be real even when volunteer service is abroad. Read a state share as a USAspending location field, not as “volunteers assigned to that state.”

Questions

How much has the Peace Corps obligated on USAspending?

USAspending.gov shows $400,062,464.96 in Peace Corps obligations through FY2026 across 589 awards. The awarding-agency CGAC is 1125. The total is an award ledger, not a count of volunteers or of countries served. USAspending.gov records this as awarding-agency obligations through FY2026, not cash outlays. The live table for CGAC 1125 is the source for the current 589-award book.

Does the $400 million include volunteer stipends?

Only if those payments were issued as USAspending awards. Many personnel and volunteer costs never appear in the 589-award extract. The packet does not itemize stipend versus contract dollars, so this page does not split the $400,062,464.96 that way. That figure uses only the packet totals. The extract has no median and no contract-versus-assistance split. FY2026 is the warehouse cutoff, not a single-year appropriation.

What is agency code 1125?

1125 is the USAspending awarding-agency CGAC identifier for the Peace Corps. SpendingVault filters /agencies/1125/ to that code. It is an accounting key, not a State Department bureau number. SpendingVault URLs under the agency path filter to that CGAC identifier. It is an accounting tag, not a quality score. Totals on this page are obligations through FY2026.

Why look at spending by state for an overseas agency?

USAspending still tags many Peace Corps awards with U.S. recipient or place-of-performance locations. The state table for CGAC 1125 shows those domestic attributions for the 589 awards. It does not map volunteer posts by host country. Outlays are unpublished in this packet, so this page does not estimate cash already paid. Refresh the agency page after USAspending updates rather than treating the current stock as frozen.