Budget authority is seasonal. Most sellers behave as though every month is equally likely to produce a signature, which is why so many good deals die in the wrong quarter. Here is the evidence, the arithmetic, and one famous salesman who never learned any of it.

Part One: Is the Year-End Spike Real, or Is It a Sales Legend?

Q1. Everybody says government money dumps in September. Folklore, or measured?

Measured, and it ran in the American Economic Review, not a trade magazine. Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard and Neale Mahoney of Chicago Booth pulled the near-universe of federal procurement: 14.6 million contracts worth $2.6 trillion, FY2004 to FY2009.

1.  Spread evenly, each week would carry 1.9% of annual spending. The final week carries 8.7%, which is 4.9 times the rest-of-year weekly average.

2.  The final month carries 16.5% of the year’s contract dollars: one-twelfth of the calendar, one-sixth of the money. Across all six years studied, last-month share never fell below 14.8%. Structural, not situational.

Q2. That data is old. Has anything changed?

It has gotten sharper. An analysis of 68 million awards from USASpending, FY2021 to FY2025, found that on September 30 agencies obligate $227 billion. The next business day, $30 billion. By the first weekend of October, under $5 billion a day. Roughly a third of the government’s ~$700 billion annual contract budget is committed in the final sixteen days of September.

1.  The number of contracts signed on September 30 is unremarkable: 47,277, about the same as an ordinary Tuesday in October (57,520 on October 7). What changes is the size.

2.  Median contract on September 30: $1,199. On October 7: $496. Agencies are not panic-buying staplers, they are closing deals that took six months to negotiate before the authority evaporates.

Q3. Just the Pentagon, or everywhere?

Everywhere. No agency obligates less than 3.6% in the final week against the 1.9% flat-year benchmark, and several are wildly above it.

Table 1  |  Share of annual contract spending obligated at year-end, by agency

Agency	Total spend	Last month	Last week
State Department	$33.5B	34.9%	20.4%
Small Business Administration	$0.4B	31.9%	16.3%
Health and Human Services	$76.4B	25.5%	12.2%
NASA	$82.7B	16.9%	11.0%
Defense	$1,820B	16.0%	8.6%
Energy (lowest of the majors)	$142.0B	6.6%	4.0%
ALL FEDERAL CONTRACTING	$2,600B	16.5%	8.7%

Source: Liebman & Mahoney (2017), Table 2, Federal Procurement Data System. A flat year would put 1.9% in the final week.

Q4. Does the category of the thing being sold matter?

Enormously, and almost nobody works it out. The spike concentrates in discretionary, deferrable, ongoing-need categories. It vanishes where buying early would violate appropriations law.

Table 2  |  What spikes at year-end and what does not

Product or service category	Last month	Last week	vs 1.9% flat
Construction of structures and facilities	40.9%	28.6%	15.1x
Household furnishings and appliances	37.8%	20.7%	10.9x
Maintenance / repair of real property	34.8%	20.1%	10.6x
IT equipment	29.2%	14.9%	7.8x
IT and telecom services	21.0%	12.3%	6.5x
Professional and management services	19.1%	9.9%	5.2x
Fuels, lubricants, oils and waxes	13.2%	0.7%	0.4x

Source: Liebman & Mahoney (2017), Table 3. Consulting, IT, facilities and furnishings are the year-end categories. Fuel is not, because buying next year’s gasoline in September is a textbook improper obligation.

Part Two: The Money Is Real. It Is Also a Warning.

Q5. If year-end money is that easy, why be careful about it?

Because the same researchers measured what the rushed money buys, using the federal IT Dashboard: 686 major projects worth $130 billion, graded by agency CIOs on cost, schedule and performance. The verdict is brutal.

1.  Projects originating in the final week have 2.2 to 5.6 times higher odds of a lower quality score. Odds ratios ran 0.18 to 0.46 across every specification, all with p-values under 0.01.

2.  Only 3.04% of normal-year projects score in the bottom bracket. For final-week projects it is 25.79%. Dollar-weighted, 48.7% of final-week spending lands in the bottom two grades versus 8.6% the rest of the year.

3.  In plain OLS terms, a last-week contract scores a full point lower on the 0-to-10 scale. The mechanism shows up in the paperwork: competitively sourced contracts receiving only one bid rise 1.7 points on a base of 20%. Nobody had time to run the process properly.

Q6. Any proof the deadline causes this, rather than something else?

The most elegant thing in the paper. Since 1992 the Department of Justice has held authority to roll over up to 4% of appropriations for IT, making it the one agency without a use-it-or-lose-it gun to its head on that spending.

1.  At other agencies, 12.1% of IT spending happens in the final week. At DOJ it is 3.4%, close to the 1.9% a flat year would produce. DOJ’s own non-IT spending, which does expire, sits at 9.3%. Same agency, same people, same month.

2.  The difference-in-differences estimate is a 9.5 percentage point reduction, p below 0.001, and DOJ shows no year-end quality drop at all. The deadline is the cause. So take the year-end money, it is real, but scope it harder than usual: urgency replaced consideration.

3.  One detail captures the pressure: a 75% increase in Pacific Time Zone spending on sub-$100,000 contracts on the last day. A procurement officer told the authors that every September 30th at 9pm Pacific he got a call from the East Coast, where the year had already expired, asking if he could spend anything in his remaining three hours.

Part Three: Corporates, States, and the Invisible Way to Lose

Q7. Corporates have no appropriations law. Does the mechanism still apply?

The same mechanism with better manners. Paul Oyer proved the private-sector version in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1998: because sales and executive pay is nonlinear, manufacturing firms’ sales run higher at fiscal year end and lower at the beginning. Firms have a seasonality driven by their own calendar, not their customers. Gartner still tracks it by name, forecasting an enterprise software “budget flush” before year-end 2025, then cutting its 2026 growth forecast because demand had been pulled forward into it.

Q8. When is the corporate decision actually made?

Before you think. For a calendar-year business, planning opens around September and closes in November. APQC benchmarking across 3,900+ organizations found top performers finish a budget in 25 days or fewer and bottom performers need 56 or more, with most cycles running eight to twelve weeks.

1.  If your first serious conversation happens in December, you are not selling into this year’s budget. You are lobbying for next year’s, and no one is going to tell you. Even best-practice companies run three negotiation cycles on a budget and others run nine, and every one is a chance for your line item to be cut by someone you have never met.

Q9. How much of the market is not on a January-to-December year?

About a third, which is a large blind spot. An analysis of 717 public companies found close to 70% close on December 31. The other 30% is where deals die quietly. It is all public record, on the cover of the 10-K, and for a private company it is one question nobody finds intrusive. Four seconds of research decides which month your proposal can be signed.

Table 3  |  Fiscal year-end cheat sheet

Buyer type	Year ends	Write the proposal	Chase the signature
US federal government	September 30	May – June	Aug – Sep 30
46 states, most public universities	June 30	Feb – March	May – June 30
New York, UK, Canada, financial services	March 31	Nov – Dec	Feb – Mar 31
Retail and consumer goods	Late Jan / early Feb	Sept – Oct	Dec – Jan
Calendar-year corporates (~70%)	December 31	Aug – Sept	Oct – Dec 31

Sources: NASBO Fall 2025 Fiscal Survey; Numeric 2025 (717 public companies); NCSL. Canada’s civil service calls its March 31 rush March Madness.

Part Four: What You Actually Do About It

Q10. Same buyer, same need. Does the proposal really change?

Completely, and the wrong shape reads as though you have not been paying attention. You cannot sell hay in March. Farming has never had the slightest confusion about this. There is a window in which a thing can be sold and windows in which it cannot, and enthusiasm during the wrong month has never once changed that.

1.  Planning season, roughly 90 to 120 days out, wants a strategy engagement scoped for next year. Become a line item in a document being written right now.

2.  Year-end, 30 days out, wants something contracted, invoiced and started before the budget expires. Anything needing three months of alignment is dead on arrival.

3.  Fiscal Q1, right after a year-end, is the worst month of the twelve. Money allocated, buyer exhausted, your enthusiasm landing on a locked door.

Q11. How do you build this into a pipeline without a consulting project?

One spreadsheet column. Record every account’s fiscal year end and work backwards: ninety days for planning conversations, sixty for the written proposal with a price and start date, thirty for the signature chase. Time your publishing to the same clock. The piece about next year’s strategy should land while people are writing next year’s budget, not in February when the money is allocated and the reader is merely interested. Most forecasting is a guess about human enthusiasm. This part is arithmetic.

Part Five: Willy Loman Never Owned a Calendar

Q12. What does a 1949 play have to do with fiscal timing?

Miller wrote the definitive study of a salesman with no system. The tragedy is not that Willy Loman is lazy. He works constantly, out on the New England road at sixty-three. The tragedy is that everything he does is uncorrelated with whether anyone can actually buy.

1.  Willy’s hero is Dave Singleman, an eighty-four-year-old who had sold in thirty-one states and made his living from a hotel room in his green velvet slippers, working the phone. Willy takes the wrong lesson and concludes the magic was the man. It is at least as likely that after sixty years Singleman knew precisely which buyer had money in which month, and simply called them then.

2.  Howard Wagner, the boss, is not written as a villain. He is written as a procurement process: uninterested in loyalty or thirty-four years of service, interested in numbers and his new wire recorder. Every seller has met Howard. Howard now has a vendor management system and a fiscal calendar.

3.  Willy has been moved to straight commission before the play even begins. He is on the purest pay-for-signature contract there is, in a business where signatures are seasonal, and he has no idea when the seasons are.

4.  Charley’s graveside defense is that a salesman rides on “a smile and a shoeshine”, and when they stop smiling back it is an earthquake. A beautiful line and a terrible business plan. A smile is not budget authority. Biff’s verdict is the whole article in six words: he had the wrong dreams. Not no dreams. Wrong ones.

Willy believed being well-liked was the mechanism. The mechanism is whether the money exists, whether it expires, and when. The uncomfortable part is that he would recognize most modern pipelines: real effort, warm relationships, and a forecast built on how the last call felt. Miller’s salesman had a territory. He did not have a calendar.

The Bottom Line

Everything else in sales is about being more persuasive. This is about being present during the eight weeks when persuasion is legally capable of becoming a purchase order. The federal government hands you a 4.9x spike and publishes the date. Seventy percent of public companies hand you December 31 and the rest hand you something else, also published. Forty-six states hand you June 30. None of it is hidden.

Persuasion moves a buyer. The calendar decides whether the buyer can move at all. Learn the second one first.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Liebman, J. & Mahoney, N. (2017). “Do Expiring Budgets Lead to Wasteful Year-End Spending? Evidence from Federal Procurement.” American Economic Review 107(11): 3510–3549. Source for Charts 1 and 3 and Tables 1 and 2.  NBER full text (PDF)

2. American Economic Association highlight reproducing Figure 4, the 3.04% vs 25.79% quality split.  aeaweb.org

3. Valan Intelligence (April 2026). “The $227 Billion Day.” 68M awards from USASpending, FY2021–FY2025. Source for Chart 2.  valan.io

4. Oyer, P. (1998). “Fiscal Year Ends and Nonlinear Incentive Contracts.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(1): 149–185.  Oxford Academic

5. Numeric (2025). Fiscal year-end analysis of 717 public companies; source of the ~70% figure.  numeric.io

6. NASBO, Fall 2025 Fiscal Survey of States. The 46 states on July–June, plus the exceptions.  nasbo.org

7. APQC / CFO.com. Annual budget cycle benchmarks across 3,900+ organizations.  cfo.com

8. Gartner (October 2025). IT spending forecast citing the enterprise “budget flush” before year-end.  gartner.com

9. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949). Act Two for Singleman and the Wagner firing; the Requiem for Charley and Biff.