How we build and maintain our datasets.

Federal contract data

Source: USASpending.gov, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's official public source for federal spending, mandated by the DATA Act of 2014.

What we ingest: Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) prime contract awards, filtered to records flagged with one or more of the following set-aside / preference codes:

• 8(a). Sole-source and competitive 8(a) Business Development Program awards.
• WOSB. Women-Owned Small Business set-asides (including EDWOSB).
• SDVOSB. Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business set-asides.
• HUBZone. Historically Underutilized Business Zone set-asides.
• SDB. Small Disadvantaged Business preferences.
• Small business. Total small-business prime contract dollars (used as a denominator for diversity-share calculations, not as a "diverse" category itself).

What we publish:

• Total dollars awarded to each preference category, per agency, per fiscal year.
• Contract count per preference category, per agency, per fiscal year.
• Top recipient lists per agency.
• Cross-agency aggregates (e.g., "total 8(a) spending across all federal agencies in FY2024").

How we ingest it: Our sync_federal_awards management command queries the USASpending.gov public API by fiscal year and certification flag, paginates through results, normalizes agency naming variants (e.g., "Department of Health and Human Services" vs. "HHS"), and writes to two persistent tables: FederalAward (raw awards) and AgencyDiverseSpending (pre-aggregated for fast dashboard queries).

What we do not do:

• We don't include sub-award (subcontract) flow-down data. USASpending's sub-award data has known coverage gaps; we'd rather omit a number than publish an incomplete one.
• We don't include grants, only contract obligations.
• We don't reclassify awards based on our own criteria; the certification flags come from the federal contracting officer's reporting at the time of award.

Federal fiscal year convention: The U.S. federal fiscal year runs October 1 through September 30. "FY2024" means October 1, 2023 through September 30, 2024.

Inclusion Index

The Inclusion Index ranks publicly-known corporate supplier diversity programs on the dimensions a diverse supplier actually cares about: program transparency, supplier accessibility, certification breadth, public reporting, and outcomes.

Score components (each 0–100, equally weighted):

1. Program transparency. Does the corporation publish a supplier diversity policy? Are program criteria, certifications accepted, and tier requirements stated publicly?
2. Supplier accessibility. Is there a registration portal? Are point-of-contact details published? Is application status trackable?
3. Certification breadth. Number and diversity of certifications accepted (federal: 8(a), HUBZone, WOSB, SDVOSB, DBE; private: MBE, WBE, LGBTBE, DOBE, VBE).
4. Public reporting. Does the corporation publish annual diverse supplier spend numbers? With what granularity (Tier 1 only, or Tier 1 + Tier 2)?
5. Outcomes. Public outcome data, diverse-spend dollars over time, supplier counts, growth, contract wins. Self-reported by the corporation OR independently sourced from filings/press.

Final score: Mean of the five component scores, rounded to the nearest whole number. Programs with insufficient public data are flagged "Not enough data to score" rather than given a placeholder zero.

Refresh cadence: Component scores are reviewed at least annually (the Inclusion Index report ships once a year), with corrections applied immediately on receipt of verifiable updates.

What this is not: The Inclusion Index does not measure the corporation's overall commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as an internal HR matter. It measures the discoverability and accessibility of their supplier-diversity procurement program, which is the question diverse suppliers ask. Companies with strong DEI cultures but undeveloped supplier-diversity programs may rank lower.

Outcome survey

The public outcome survey is a crowdsourced data collection where diverse business owners self-report what certifications they pursued, how long the process took, what it cost, and what contracts (if any) they won as a result.

What we publish: Aggregate statistics by certification type, time-to-approval, time-to-first-contract, and cost-to-revenue ratios. Individual respondents are kept anonymous unless they explicitly opt in to attribution.

What we caveat: Survey data is self-reported, not audited. Sample sizes per certification vary; we publish the count alongside every aggregate so readers can judge confidence. We don't extrapolate to claim a number is "industry average" when the sample is small.

Methodological notes:

• We exclude respondents who skipped key required fields (certification type, application date).
• We winsorize cost outliers at the 99th percentile to prevent single-respondent extremes from skewing aggregates.
• We report medians, not means, for time-and-cost questions because the distributions are heavily right-skewed.
• Where the sample for a specific certification × state combination is fewer than 10 respondents, we report the national figure for that certification with a "(state-level data not yet available)" note.

Certification facts (eligibility, fees, processing times)

Eligibility rules, application fees, processing-time estimates, and renewal cadence published on certification guides come from each certifying body's own program documentation. Sources by certification:

• MBE (NMSDC): NMSDC's Standards & Procedures and the regional council application portals.
• WBE (WBENC): WBENC's Standards and Procedures Manual and the regional partner organizations (RPOs).
• LGBTBE (NGLCC): NGLCC's certification standards and application portal.
• DOBE (Disability:IN): Disability:IN's certification standards and resource center.
• VBE / SDVOBE (NaVOBA): NaVOBA's certification documentation.
• 8(a), HUBZone, WOSB, SDVOSB, SDB: SBA program rules at 13 CFR Part 124, the SBA's program pages, and the certify.SBA.gov portal documentation.
• DBE: 49 CFR Part 26 and the U.S. Department of Transportation's DBE program guidance.
• State MBE / WBE / SBE: Each state's procurement office or department-of-transportation DBE/UCP page, linked individually on the corresponding state-program detail page.

Fees and processing times are point-in-time facts that change. Where a fee is fee-table-driven (NMSDC's revenue-tiered fees, for example), we publish the table. Where a processing-time estimate is a range, we publish the range with the source ("60–90 days, per NMSDC's website as of [date]").

If a certifying body changes a fee or eligibility rule, we update the article and move the "last updated" date, see dating policy.

Corporate supplier diversity program directory

Each entry in the corporate program directory is built from public-facing program pages on the corporation's own website, supplemented by named contacts where available. We do not pay corporations to be listed, and corporations cannot pay to influence their listing.

Program data points we capture:

• Program description (paraphrased from the corporation's own copy).
• Certifications accepted (verbatim from the corporation's stated criteria).
• Industries / commodities sought.
• Application portal URL.
• Contact email or general-purpose form URL where published.
• Last verification date (when our editorial team last confirmed the data still matches the source).

NAICS codes & SBA size standards

NAICS taxonomy: U.S. Census Bureau's NAICS. We index the full hierarchy (sectors, subsectors, industry groups, NAICS industries, U.S. industries) and link parent/sibling/child relationships.

Size standards: SBA's Table of Size Standards. We publish the threshold (employees or annual receipts) and label the unit explicitly.

Both are refreshed when Census or the SBA publishes updates. The SBA size standards table updates infrequently but does change, we re-sync when an update is published.

Refresh cadence

Known limitations

• FPDS subcontract gaps. Subcontract data on USASpending is incomplete for many federal agencies, so our diverse-spend totals are prime-only. Total economic activity flowing to diverse suppliers via subcontracting is undercounted by an unknown margin (estimates from GAO and SBA reporting suggest 15–30% of federal small-business activity is sub-award).
• State data variability. State procurement transparency varies enormously. Some states (Texas, California, Maryland) publish quarterly diverse-spend reports; others publish nothing structured. We cover what's publicly available and flag gaps explicitly.
• Self-certified WOSB pre-2022. Prior to October 2020, WOSB was largely self-certified. Awards flagged WOSB before that date may include businesses that wouldn't qualify under current WOSB Federal Certification rules.
• Tier 2 corporate spend. Tier-2 (subcontractor flow-down) supplier diversity spend is often reported by corporations in aggregate without verifiable detail. Our Inclusion Index credits Tier-1 reporting more heavily because it's verifiable.

How to cite

Journalists, researchers, and analysts: please cite specific datasets, not just "SupplierDiversity.com". Suggested citation forms:

• Federal spending dashboard: "SupplierDiversity.com Federal Spending Database, derived from USASpending.gov, accessed [date]."
• Inclusion Index: "SupplierDiversity.com Inclusion Index of Corporate Supplier Diversity Programs, [year edition]."
• Outcome survey aggregates: "SupplierDiversity.com Outcome Survey, [year], n=[respondent count for the cited slice]."

If you're a journalist on deadline who needs raw data, additional context, or a methodology question we haven't covered here, email editorial@supplierdiversity.com. We turn around journalist inquiries quickly.

For bulk data exports, see /data/.

Methodology changelog

Material changes to methodology are logged here so analysts comparing year-over-year numbers can adjust.

• May 2026: Initial publication of methodology document. Federal data: USASpending sync established. Inclusion Index: 2026 edition methodology codified.