Top 25 contractors took more than half of Pentagon contract dollars in fiscal 2026, data show

By Garrett Sloane

An Inquisitor Data report. This is a Premium story; it is free to read while the Inquisitor’s paid tier is in development.

WASHINGTON — Twenty-five companies and their subsidiaries received more than half of the Defense Department’s contract obligations in fiscal 2026, federal spending data show. Their share was larger than the year before.

The department obligated $404.4 billion in contracts in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to USAspending.gov. Data reported so far show $216.6 billion of it, or 53.6%, went to the 25 largest contractors after affiliated companies are grouped under their corporate parents. In fiscal 2025 the top 25 took $248.4 billion of $492.2 billion, or 50.5%.

The five largest contractors, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, accounted for 36.4% of fiscal 2026 obligations, up from 34.1%.

Fiscal 2026 figures are preliminary. The Pentagon reports contract data to the public with a delay of up to 90 days, so totals for the year will grow, and shares may shift, as the remaining actions post. The Inquisitor will update the analysis in January.

How concentrated

The rise in concentration came as total reported obligations fell. Much of the gap between the two years probably reflects the reporting lag rather than an actual drop in spending, since fiscal 2026 data are less than four weeks old. The share figures should be read with that caveat.

The top 25

Lockheed Martin remained far ahead of every other contractor in both years. Its $52.9 billion in reported fiscal 2026 obligations was close to the $57.5 billion that the next two companies, RTX and Boeing, received combined. Lockheed’s reported total is down from $73.5 billion in fiscal 2025, a gap that may narrow as late fiscal 2026 data post.

Several patterns stand out:

• Health care and supply companies rank high. Three of the top 10 are not weapons makers. Cencora, formerly AmerisourceBergen, is a pharmaceutical distributor. Humana and TriWest administer TRICARE, the military health program. Atlantic Diving Supply of Virginia Beach is a supplier of tactical and commercial equipment. A separate Inquisitor story today examines the TRICARE contracts.
• RTX and Boeing moved up. RTX rose from third to second and Boeing from fourth to third, while General Dynamics fell from second to fourth. Much of General Dynamics’ total comes from submarine contracts held by its Electric Boat unit, where a single construction or long-lead obligation can run to billions of dollars.
• A newcomer at No. 18. TOTE Services, a Jacksonville, Fla., ship-management company, did not rank in the top 500 in fiscal 2025, when the cutoff was about $114 million. It rose to 18th in fiscal 2026 largely on one Navy contract, N0002426C2421. That $2.21 billion firm-fixed-price contract was signed July 13, 2026, by Naval Sea Systems Command and runs to Sept. 30, 2031. Federal data list it as awarded under full and open competition with one offer and classify it under combat ships and landing vessels. Its public description reads only “see the statement of work.”
• Fluor rose from 24th to 15th. Most of its total comes from Fluor Marine Propulsion’s management of the Navy’s nuclear reactor laboratories. That contract received a $2.41 billion modification announced Oct. 23.
• SpaceX moved from 30th to 19th, with $2.22 billion in reported fiscal 2026 obligations.

The 10 biggest contracts

The Inquisitor also ranked individual contracts with activity in fiscal 2026 by lifetime obligations. The 10 largest total $302.4 billion. Seven of them, worth $195.6 billion or about 65% of that sum, are recorded in federal data as not competed.

Sole-source awards are routine for major weapons already in production. The government generally buys F-35 fighters from Lockheed Martin, which designed the jet, and Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines from General Dynamics’ Electric Boat, which leads design and construction with HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding. Federal acquisition rules allow contracts without full and open competition when only one responsible source can meet the need, among other exceptions.

The three competed contracts on the list are the KC-46 tanker program, which Boeing won in 2011 over a rival bid, and two TRICARE health contracts from 2016.

Lifetime obligations are different from the “announced value” in daily Pentagon contract releases. Announced values are often ceilings, the maximum the government could spend. Obligations are money legally committed. A contract can carry a ceiling many times larger than what is ever obligated.

What the numbers do and don’t show

Concentration in defense contracting is not new, and the data alone do not say whether it is good or bad for taxpayers. The Pentagon itself has studied the trend. A February 2022 Defense Department report on competition in the defense industrial base said the industry had consolidated from 51 aerospace and defense prime contractors in the 1990s to five: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Those five remain the top five in both years of the Inquisitor’s data. The report raised concern that fewer competitors can mean higher prices and less innovation, and it recommended steps to strengthen competition and merger review.

The data also have limits. Obligations in a given year reflect when money is committed, not when work is done or paid for. One large production lot can swing a company’s total by billions of dollars. Federal data assign each award to the entity that holds it, so joint ventures, such as the Lockheed–Northrop Longbow venture that makes Apache helicopter radars, appear separately from their parents unless grouped by hand.

This analysis does not address lobbying or political spending by contractors. The Inquisitor examined lobbying by the largest contractors in a separate report.

Methodology

The Inquisitor downloaded the 500 largest recipients of Defense Department contract obligations (award types A through D: definitive contracts, purchase orders, delivery orders and BPA calls) for fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026 from the USAspending.gov API in October 2026. Recipient entities were grouped under parent companies by name. For example, Electric Boat, Bath Iron Works and National Steel and Shipbuilding were grouped under General Dynamics; Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace under RTX; and Sikorsky under Lockheed Martin. Joint ventures were not split between their owners. Department-wide totals come from USAspending’s agency summary for the same award types. Amounts are net obligations, including deobligations, in each fiscal year. Because only the top 500 recipients were grouped, a parent with many small subsidiaries below that cutoff may be slightly undercounted.

The single-contract ranking uses USAspending’s award search for Defense Department contracts with transactions in fiscal 2026, sorted by total obligations over each contract’s life. Competition status and offers received are taken from each award’s latest Federal Procurement Data System record. The Inquisitor will publish corrections if company or agency responses identify errors.

Request for comment

The Washington Inquisitor is seeking comment on these findings from Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Fluor, Humana, TriWest Healthcare Alliance, the Government Accountability Office, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the American Enterprise Institute and Taxpayers for Common Sense. General Dynamics, TOTE Services and Naval Sea Systems Command do not publish press email addresses; the Inquisitor will seek their comment through other channels. This story will be updated with any responses.

Featured image: F-35A Lightning II aircraft from the 388th Fighter Wing fly in formation above the Utah Test and Training Range, March 30, 2017. U.S. Air Force photo by R. Nial Bradshaw, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.