Our breakdown of the 2026 Top 100 and everything it illustrates

Edition number 33 of our annual top 100 ranking has been online since World Cup opening day, but we'll back ourselves as worthy of that hype, pomp, and circumstance.

Nick's all done putting the final product together, and now he's here to take us through the underlying takeaways and other key talking points that we gleaned from the ranking.

This is a research project and ranking based off data, not an award.

Classified and subcontract numbers are not included.

What are a couple other common questions you get, Nick?

Well, probably the most common one, and I have to laugh, you know, th- th- I love your World Cup analogy.

I, I wish we could, uh, you know, we were at, at the bar watching the USA game last week, and it was-- I would love to have that excitement when the top 100 comes out.

But it's in here, right? Um, but probably the most common question is, uh, why is my number so low? You know, what, what, what do you count? How, why, you know? And, uh, those are the most common ones.

I mean, we use, it was, it's over 300 product and service codes, the PSC codes, to analyze the, the spending data, and then we rank people accordingly.

There could be things that companies do that fall outside of those codes.

So we do take a pretty broad definition of, you know, IT and systems integration and professional services and, and those things.

So it probably does come down a lot to not counting the subcontracting work and intel.

And I think that, that issue around intel might become a bigger issue for some companies thinking their numbers should be higher because that spending, as defense spending grows and is expected to continue to grow, the intel and classified spending grows along with it.

So yeah.

Why is my number low?

Unfortunately, federal law says we can't look at intel spending, so it's like tough luck, industry.

Yeah.

It, it's interesting.

When we first started doing this and, and asking that question, it's like, well, 'cause the PSC codes get pretty granular, and you can't really publicly disclose those kinds of granular spending when you're talking about classified intelligence work.

'Cause then other people could look at it and think, oh, they're spending money here, so it means this.

And, and, uh, so yeah, it's with a good reason that it's not, not a public data.