Method

Every filter this site applies, named. A figure whose filters are not published is a claim, not a measurement.

The window

Everything on the dashboard covers 4 July 2024 to 9 August 2026 — the current Parliament, starting the day of the general election. The period is fixed rather than rolling so that contracts, donations and divisions are all describing the same span of time. A rolling "last twelve months" would straddle two Parliaments and change meaning every morning.

Contracts: counts and medians, never totals

Contract awards are counted, and their median is reported. The column is never summed, and the reason is not fussiness. The largest rows in Contracts Finder are framework ceilings — a limit that many public bodies may spend against over several years, frequently shared between hundreds of suppliers, and sometimes with no supplier named at all. Adding them together produces a number in the hundreds of billions that corresponds to nothing that was ever paid to anyone. The median award, around ninety thousand pounds, is the honest shape of the thing.

Rows are included when the award date falls inside the window. Notices carrying obviously broken dates — the register contains awards dated to the third century and to 2034 — fall outside it and are therefore excluded, which is a filter doing real work and is why it is written down here.

Donations: sums are used

Electoral Commission figures are amounts that were accepted, not ceilings that might be spent, so they add up and are added up. Donations are included by acceptance date within the window. The register reflects what was reportable: donations under the statutory thresholds are not on it, so the total is a floor, not a complete account of money given.

Parliament

Divisions, attendance and interests come from Parliament's own APIs. Attendance is the share of divisions an MP was eligible to vote in and did. A rebellion is a vote against the member's own party's lobby, counted only where that lobby had a clear line to rebel against. Both measures are descriptive: attending votes is not the whole of the job, and declaring an interest is the rules working rather than evidence of anything wrong.

Freshness

Figures are recomputed from the live database every fifteen minutes; the footer says when. The underlying records are collected by the Watchdog, which is also where you can read any individual contract, donation or MP record behind these totals.