PlainSpending

Agency Budget Percentile

According to USASpending.gov, the official federal award-transaction dataset, enter any federal agency budget figure (in dollars). The tool returns the percentile rank against the FY2025 distribution of obligated amounts across 96 federal agencies with reported obligations, so you can quickly see whether a budget falls in the bottom quartile, median, or Department-of-Defense-tier top one percent.

Tip: try $480 million (median), $38.9 billion (90th), or $410 billion (99th, DOD/HHS tier).

The FY2025 distribution, before you type anything

These are the actual cut-points computed live from all 96 federal agencies with reported obligations -- useful for a quick sanity check even without running the calculator.

10th percentile

$6M

25th percentile

$15M

50th percentile

$154M

75th percentile

$6.3B

90th percentile

$69.7B

95th percentile

$310.7B

99th percentile

$2.01T

How the percentile is calculated

We pre-computed the cumulative distribution of obligated amounts for the 96 federal agencies with reported obligations in USASpending.gov for fiscal year 2025 (of 111 agencies tracked overall; some report zero or unreported obligations and are excluded from the distribution). The tool linearly interpolates between the published percentile cut-points to estimate where any user-supplied figure falls. Because federal budgets follow a heavy-tailed distribution, the bulk of agencies cluster under one billion dollars while a handful (Defense, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Social Security) account for the long upper tail.

See the methodology page for full source notes, and the top-agencies ranking for the live agency leaderboard. Use the tool to sanity-check news-cycle budget numbers, contextualize a request in agency terms, or estimate the impact of a single DOGE-style termination against an agency's overall envelope.

Every figure on PlainSpending is computed directly from USASpending.gov award-transaction data, no number is typed in by an editor. This tool computes percentile cuts from every agency's live spending total, then runs the lookup in your browser. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.