Federal Trade Commission federal obligations through FY2026

What the $630.2 million USAspending total actually records

USAspending.gov reports the Federal Trade Commission as awarding agency 029 with $630,178,065.48 obligated through FY2026. An obligation is a legal commitment to spend: a signed contract, a grant award, or another binding instrument. It is not the same as an outlay, which is money that has left the Treasury. The $630.2 million therefore tells you how much this independent commission has committed on awards in the USAspending extract, not how much has already been disbursed to vendors or grantees.

The FTC’s public mission is consumer protection and competition enforcement. The USAspending table does not score that mission. It does not count investigations opened, cases filed, or refunds returned to consumers. It counts award instruments. A facilities lease, an expert-witness contract, an IT support task order, and a cooperative agreement can all sit inside the same $630,178,065.48. Readers who want program results need the agency’s own reports; readers who want the federal award ledger start here.

967 awards and the size of a typical FTC obligation

The same extract lists 967 awards. Dividing $630,178,065.48 by 967 produces an average of about $651,684 per award. That average is a ratio, not a typical check size. A handful of multi-year operations contracts can pull the mean well above a cluster of small purchase orders. The packet does not publish a median, a maximum, or a split between contracts and assistance, so this page does not invent one.

Nine hundred sixty-seven instruments is a mid-volume book for a small independent agency. It is large enough that the state breakdown matters: the same dollars do not all land in the District of Columbia, even when headquarters does. SpendingVault’s state table for CGAC 029 is the place to see which jurisdictions received FTC-awarded work. The award count also means the agency page is a roll-up. Opening a single award record on USAspending.gov is the only way to see a vendor name, NAICS code, or period of performance.

FY2026 is a cutoff year, not a one-year budget

The packet’s latest fiscal year is 2026. The $630,178,065.48 is a cumulative total through that cutoff, not FTC’s enacted budget for FY2026 alone. Awards that began in earlier years and remain in the USAspending warehouse still contribute to the running obligation figure. New modifications in FY2026 can raise or lower the same total. Treat the year as the vintage of the extract, not as a request to Congress.

Because the cutoff moves as USAspending refreshes, the number on this page should be read against the source date on the agency table. SpendingVault does not add forecast years or proposed appropriations. If a later extract revises an award, the obligation total can change without any new headline program.

CGAC 029 and how awarding-agency codes work

Federal agencies in USAspending are tagged with Common Government-wide Accounting Classification (CGAC) codes. The FTC’s awarding-agency code in this dataset is 029. That code is an identifier, not a ranking and not a Treasury account symbol. Other federal bodies have different CGACs; mixing them would double-count or omit awards. Filters on SpendingVault that say “agency 029” are pointing at this commission, not at a cabinet department that may fund related work.

Awarding agency and funding agency can differ on a single award. The $630.2 million here is the awarding-agency view: instruments the FTC itself awarded. Dollars another department awarded for consumer-protection research would not appear in this total even if the FTC later used the research. The packet does not include a funding-agency alternative total, so none is shown.

How to read the agency page and the state split

Start on the Federal Trade Commission agency page for the live tables that sit under this prose. The $630,178,065.48 and the 967-award count are the headline filters. From there, the state breakdown shows where those obligations were attributed in the USAspending geography fields. Place of performance and recipient location are not always the same; the table reports what the source file contains.

Use the all-agencies index if you need to see the FTC beside other independent commissions. Do not treat rank order as a judgment of effectiveness. A larger obligation total can mean more contracted support, not more enforcement. A smaller total can mean more work is done by federal employees whose salaries never appear as USAspending awards. The 967 awards are the award universe for this CGAC, not the agency’s full operating cost.

Modifications, de-obligations, and how the FTC total can move

USAspending award records are not frozen photographs. A task order can be modified upward when the Federal Trade Commission adds option years, or downward when unused ceiling is taken back. Those modifications flow into the same $630,178,065.48 stock. A reader who bookmarks this page and returns after a warehouse refresh may see a different total without any new consumer-protection statute. That is expected. The packet’s FY2026 cutoff is a vintage stamp, not a promise that the next extract will match to the dollar.

De-obligations deserve a plain-language note. If a vendor under-runs a contract, the unused amount can be de-obligated. The award may remain among the 967 rows with a lower current obligation. This page does not list de-obligated dollars separately because the packet does not. The live agency table is the place to see whether the $630.2 million has ticked down. SpendingVault does not reconstruct a modification history from these five facts.

Researchers who need vendor names, NAICS codes, or periods of performance have to leave the roll-up. The 967-award count is a door, not a directory. Open award-level USAspending records, then return to the state table if the question is geographic. The CGAC 029 filter in the URL is the only identifier this file adds to that workflow. Do not append unofficial bureau codes; they are not in the packet and would break the join.

Questions

How much has the Federal Trade Commission obligated on USAspending?

USAspending.gov shows $630,178,065.48 in Federal Trade Commission obligations through fiscal year 2026. The total is an awarding-agency figure under CGAC code 029 and covers 967 awards. It records legal commitments, not Treasury outlays, and it is not the FTC’s single-year appropriation.

How many USAspending awards has the FTC made?

The extract lists 967 awards for awarding agency 029. That count mixes contracts, grants, and other instruments in the USAspending warehouse. It does not equal the number of enforcement actions or consumer complaints. Average obligation is about $651,684 if you divide the $630.2 million total by 967.

What does agency code 029 mean?

029 is the USAspending awarding-agency CGAC identifier for the Federal Trade Commission. SpendingVault uses that code in URLs such as /agencies/029/. It is an accounting tag, not a quality score. Totals on this page are obligations attributed to that CGAC through FY2026.

Does the $630 million include money already paid to contractors?

Not necessarily. USAspending obligations are commitments. Outlays—cash paid—can lag, match, or in some cases precede a modification. The packet does not publish an outlay total for the FTC, so this page does not estimate how much of the $630,178,065.48 has been disbursed.