The blank column
Washington agencies filed 91,421 contracts in fiscal year 2025. On 47,780 of them, the space for what the contract cost is empty.
What the record shows
Washington publishes every state agency contract in an annual dataset. Each row carries the agency, the contractor, the purpose, the dates, and four money fields: state, federal, other, and total cost.
Across the twelve years from FY2014 to FY2025 — 642,567 contract records — 41.4% report no dollar figure at all. The money fields are blank, or zero, or a dash.
The rate is not stable. It sat between 25% and 34% for seven years, then stepped up sharply in FY2021 and has stayed there. FY2025, at 52.3%, is the worst year in the series.
Which contracts
The dataset records how each contract was procured. From FY2018 — the first year the field is populated — the ranking runs opposite to what you would guess.
Sole-source awards are among the best disclosed in the state. These are the contracts nobody else was allowed to bid on, the category that normally draws the most scrutiny, and only 20.9% of them omit the cost. Direct-buy non-competitive purchases are better still, at 15.8%.
What goes unrecorded is the routine work. Client-service-exempt contracts — the channel through which Washington pays for child care, home care, behavioral health, shelter and reentry services — disclose no cost 65.2% of the time, against 36.2% for competitively procured ones. Interlocal agreements, 79,489 of them carrying $45 billion in disclosed money, sit at 62.6%.
For anyone trying to follow a dollar from the Legislature to the organization that spends it, that ranking is the practical map. The non-competitive awards can be traced. The service contracts, in the main, cannot.
The obvious objection
Some contracts genuinely cost nothing. Interagency agreements, data-sharing arrangements and memoranda of understanding move no money, and the dataset has a field for exactly this: a non-financial contract flag.
If most of the blanks were non-financial contracts, there would be no story. So we checked.
The flag exists from FY2021 onward. Across all five of those years it accounts for a small minority of the blanks — at most 15.5%, and in FY2022 almost none. Strip the non-financial contracts out entirely and between 36.9% and 48.7% of everything Washington files each year remains a financial contract with no amount disclosed.
| Fiscal year | Contracts filed | No cost stated | Flagged non-financial | Financial, unexplained | Share of all filings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2021 | 66,577 | 29,116 | 4,524 | 24,592 | 36.9% |
| FY2022 | 67,931 | 30,841 | 133 | 30,708 | 45.2% |
| FY2023 | 74,495 | 36,844 | 1,686 | 35,158 | 47.2% |
| FY2024 | 79,329 | 36,176 | 1,220 | 34,956 | 44.1% |
| FY2025 | 91,421 | 47,780 | 3,298 | 44,482 | 48.7% |
What this is not
A missing figure is not evidence of wrongdoing. Nothing here shows money misspent.
It is also not a sector being singled out. Contracting entities linked to Washington’s 2,833 licensed child care sites state no cost on 40.9% of their rows — level with the 41.4% statewide rate.
Opacity belongs to the procurement channel, not to the people paid through it. A provider appears in the unpriced half because of the contract type it is paid under, not because of what it does or who it serves.
What the record does show is that for roughly half the contracts Washington signs, it does not say what they cost — so the question cannot be asked from the published data at all.
Why it matters
A contracts database exists so that a resident, a reporter or a legislator can see what the state bought and what it paid. When the amount is absent, every downstream use fails: you cannot total an agency’s spending, compare vendors, track a program across years, or notice that a provider’s public funding tripled.
The gap is closable without new legislation. The field already exists on the form. In FY2016, three-quarters of contracts were filed with it completed.
Method, sources and limitations
Source. Washington Office of Financial Management, Agency Contracts, one dataset per fiscal year, FY2014–FY2025, published on data.wa.gov. All twelve datasets were downloaded in full: 642,567 records.
Definition. A record counts as “no cost stated” when the total cost field is empty, zero, or a placeholder dash. Amounts are parsed from the published strings, which arrive in several formats ($15,000.00, $ - 0, 0). A parsed value of “nothing here” is kept distinct from a real zero.
Limitations.
- The procurement-type field is unpopulated in the FY2014–FY2017 datasets, so Exhibit 2 begins at FY2018 and covers the 473,993 records that carry a label. Spellings drift between years, so labels are grouped into families: “Sole Source”, “SoleSource” and “Sole Source Exempt” are one category, as are the four spellings of direct buy. A residue of 77,285 records whose labels form no coherent family is excluded from the exhibit but included in every all-contract figure.
- Correction, 8 August 2026. An earlier version of this report gave the competitive figure as 40.1%. That grouped “Competitive” together with “Competitive Solicitation – Exceptions”, which is a different and markedly less disclosed category. Competitive procurement alone is 36.2%, so the gap against client-service-exempt is 29 points rather than the 25 first published. The same version framed the child care comparison as a hypothesis this project had held and disproved; it never was one, and that framing has been removed.
- The non-financial flag is optional and self-reported by agencies, and only present from FY2021, so Exhibit 3 begins there. Because it is optional it is probably under-used, which would make the unexplained share smaller than stated — the check is run in the direction that weakens our own finding, and the finding survives it in all five years.
- Contract counts are records, not distinct contracts: amendments appear as separate rows, and a multi-year contract recurs across fiscal years. Rates are therefore shares of filings, not of unique agreements.
- This measures disclosure, not spending. A contract with no stated cost may still be fully documented in the agency’s own records and in OFM’s accounting systems.
Reproducing it. Every figure comes from the published datasets with no manual entry. The child care comparison joins the contract records to the DCYF licensed provider registry (data.wa.gov/d/was8-3ni8) by normalized name, and counts each contracting entity once rather than once per site.