Four in Ten Expiring Contracts Are Out of Ceiling

Every contract on the expiration board has an end date. About four in ten of them also have a second clock that is already at zero.

We pulled the funded ceiling on all 1,201 DoD prime contracts whose period of performance ends between February 2027 and August 2028, the desk's running window, one live call to the USAspending award record apiece.

Of the 1,200 that carry a ceiling on file, 497 have obligated every dollar of base and all options. No room left (chart below).

That number decides something concrete for the incumbent, and it is not the same question as the end date.

What the ceiling actually gates

An end date tells you when the work stops. The ceiling tells you whether the government can keep buying without opening a new action first.

A contract sitting at 100% of base and all options has spent its runway. Extending it means a new modification against fresh ceiling, a bridge, or a follow-on, and each of those is a visible event: a J&A on SAM, a mod on the daily board, a synopsis. A contract with headroom can just keep issuing against what is already there, quietly, until it can't.

So the 497 are the ones where the incumbent's next year of work has to surface somewhere you can watch.

The $118 billion of unobligated ceiling still on the board is not spread evenly across it. It sits in the other buckets.

Where the room is

Run the same 1,200 by how much of the ceiling is gone and the board splits five ways:

497 at or over ceiling. Net negative headroom, because three legacy records show obligations above a ceiling that was never restated.
231 between 90% and 100%, with $3.9B of room left between them. Close enough that one more option year eats it.
147 between 75% and 90%: $11.4B.
185 between 50% and 75%: $42.7B.
140 under 50%, holding $63.1B of unspent ceiling by themselves.

The median contract on the board has burned 98% of its ceiling. The money that looks like slack is concentrated in roughly one contract in four, and most of it is large-platform production where the ceiling was always going to be drawn down in tranches.

Boeing's KC-46 line alone is $16.8B of that headroom, sitting at 65.5% consumed with a July 2027 end date.

Strip the production giants out and the services half of the board looks like the count, not the dollars: 204 of the at-ceiling contracts are services work, and they carry a combined $32.4B already obligated with nothing left to add.

The delivery-order wrinkle

Here's the catch. 341 of the 497 out-of-ceiling contracts are delivery orders, not standalone contracts.

An order at its own funded ceiling is a smaller problem than a definitive contract at its ceiling, because the fix can be a new order on the same parent vehicle, if the parent is still open and still has capacity. The desk counted the other side of that two weeks ago: 201 of the expiring orders ride a parent IDV that has already stopped taking new orders, and 104 more ride one that shuts before the order itself ends. Where those two lists overlap, the order is out of ceiling and the vehicle behind it is closed. That is the follow-on you can see coming from here.

Two of the cleanest are the DCSA background-investigation fieldwork orders, HS002123F0019 to Peraton and HS002123F0020 to CACI, each fully obligated at roughly $730 million and both ending March 31, 2027. Same requirement, two primes, both at ceiling, both eighteen months out. The vetting mission does not pause, so the ceiling math says a new action is coming whether or not a notice has posted yet.

Final Thoughts

Consumption is not a forecast. A contract at ceiling might get a bridge, a ceiling increase, a full recompete, or a quiet lapse, and the record does not say which. What it does say is which incumbents have run out of the easy option.

The board sorts into two piles for anyone building a pursuit list against it. One pile still has room to absorb another year on the existing paper, and you will not see it move.

The other pile, 497 deep, has to buy its next year in the open, on a vehicle you can name and a clock you can already start. That is the half worth watching.

Thanks for reading.