Payments

Spending by Year

Category Breakdowns by Jurisdiction

Public spending is classified using harmonized category schemes — including CPV and NAICS — to enable cross-jurisdiction comparisons.

Explore Further

Use the Payers and Payees directories to browse spending by organization. For custom analysis, query the full dataset — 87.6 million triples tracking over €1.46 trillion in payments — via the SPARQL endpoint. Learn about the methodology on the How It Works page.

All payment data is published as bulk datasets on datahub.io and interlinked using the Public Spending (PSNET) ontology.

The payments section of Publicspending.net makes government expenditure transparent by organizing millions of individual payment records into searchable, browsable tables. Each entry pairs a payer with a payee, showing the amount transferred and the date it occurred. This granular view allows citizens, researchers, and journalists to trace exactly where public money flows, whether across federal agencies, state governments, or municipal departments. By compiling data from multiple countries and jurisdictions into one unified interface, the platform removes the friction typically associated with open-data research, letting users compare spending patterns across regions and time periods without needing to visit dozens of separate government portals.

The dataset covers several distinct jurisdictions, including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Greece, Alaska, Massachusetts, and Chicago, with records spanning multiple calendar years. This international scope means users can examine spending patterns not only within a single government but also across different levels of administration and different national contexts. The team behind the site focuses on engineering meaningful interconnections between otherwise fragmented records, developing algorithms that unify company names, entity classifications, and payment codes such as CPV and NAICS. These normalization efforts ensure that similar organizations appear consistently throughout the data, making cross-referencing and enrichment of expenditure records significantly more reliable.

For those interested in the largest transactions, the top payments tables highlight the biggest transfers by payer, payee, amount, and date for each covered year. These high-value entries often reveal significant procurement contracts, intergovernmental transfers, and major capital investments that shape public infrastructure and services. Beyond the headline figures, the full payment dataset is accessible through the datahub.io platform and a SPARQL endpoint, enabling advanced querying for those who want to drill deeper into the underlying records. This dual approach, offering both curated summaries and raw queryable data, accommodates casual visitors as well as technical users seeking to run their own analyses.

Publicspending.net positions itself as a global resource for anyone who wants to follow the trillions of dollars that move through government systems each year. The site's broader mission extends beyond simply listing transactions; it aims to help users understand the interconnections between payers, payees, and spending categories across jurisdictions and over time. By providing downloadable, reusable datasets and encouraging third-party engagement, the platform supports a growing community of civic technologists, auditors, and policy analysts. Whether the goal is accountability journalism, academic research, or informed civic participation, the tools offered here make public financial data more approachable and actionable for a worldwide audience.