The BEAD accountability time-series

Last verified: 27 September 2026. This page tracks the money in the US$42.45bn Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment programme over time — awards first, then construction, then actual service. It starts lean: awards rows only. Only three states have put provider-level award lists in public so far (Texas: 17 final subgrantee contracts; Louisiana: 12 announced Benefit-of-the-Bargain awards; North Dakota: 2 finalized subgrantee contracts), and no state publishes per-subaward construction or service data yet. The series grows as states publish; the gaps are listed honestly below rather than filled in.

This is the plan's month-6 kill-gate item: if milestone data is still gappy at the month-6 review, this series is cut rather than left to rot. A staleness policy sits at the bottom of the page.

Snapshots

One row per immutable dataset release. Totals are cumulative sums of that release's rows — the same rows behind our BEAD Money Tracker.

What changed between the first and latest snapshots: +21 rows, +US$628,370,868 and +155,528 promised locations — twelve are Louisiana’s announced Benefit-of-the-Bargain awards (added in the 23 September 2026 release), two are North Dakota’s finalized subgrantee contracts (added in the 26 September 2026 release, announced by NDIT on 6 May 2026), and seven are Washington’s first-wave signed contracts (added in the 27 September 2026 release, announced by the WSBO ~25 September 2026); Texas’s seventeen final contracts were re-verified unchanged.

Milestones we can verify today

The events that move the numbers above — every one dated and sourced from our BEAD timeline: 2021–2026. Nothing here is inferred; the issuer's own labels stand.

• 12 February 2026 — Conexon Connect receives the first-ever BEAD funding disbursement: an initial portion of its $9m Louisiana award to begin construction across six northern Louisiana parishes. (Conexon, via PR Newswire)
• 1 May 2026 — Nextlink Internet switches on the first BEAD-funded tower in the US, in southern Bienville Parish, Louisiana, delivering gigabit service to 104 BEAD locations in Bossier Parish. (Nextlink Internet, via Light Reading)
• 6 May 2026 (reported) — North Dakota's IT department announces finalized BEAD subgrantee contracts with BEK Communications Cooperative ($5,942,467 / 257 locations) and Midco ($191,501 / 22 locations) — 279 locations, among the first states to complete this step; both rows enter the dataset with release 2026.09.26.1. (NDIT, via Broadband Communities)
• ~3 June 2026 (reported 4 June) — the Texas Broadband Development Office announces final subgrantee contracts with 17 providers (US$1,067,572,760 / 208,873 locations); the state has not published an official final award list, so every row carries a "press report" verification label. (Telecompetitor)
• August 2026 — the Texas Comptroller pauses all BEAD disbursements pending an audit over reported Starlink favouritism; "final" Texas contracts therefore carry real-world uncertainty. (via Fierce Network)
• 17 September 2026 — California's Public Utilities Commission votes 5–0 to ratify the state's BEAD final proposal amid the "Condition 50" dispute; no award list published yet. (Communications Daily)
• 21–22 September 2026 (reported) — Colorado rescinds a $103m provisional BEAD award to Maverix Broadband and refers the matter to investigators — the first BEAD fraud referral; the locations will be rebid. (Wireless Estimator)
• 23 September 2026 — Louisiana's 12 announced Benefit-of-the-Bargain awards (US$498,296,587 / 126,798 locations) enter the dataset with release 2026.09.23.1, documented in the state's BEAD Final Proposal v7.0 (18 November 2025), mirrored in our public-documents archive.
• ~25 September 2026 (reported) — Washington's broadband office announces signed BEAD subgrant agreements with the first seven of the state's 26 winners (US$123,940,313 / 28,451 locations: Broadlinc, Declaration Networks Group, Concept Communications, Kitsap PUD, the Spokane Tribe, the Lummi Indian Business Council and Hood Canal Communications), entering the dataset with release 2026.09.27.1; the state has not published an official machine-readable award list, so every row carries a "press report" verification label. (Telecompetitor)

Milestones not yet published

An accountability series is only as good as its milestones, and these do not exist in public yet — for any state, per subaward:

• Construction starts and completions per subgrantee
• Homes actually passed or connected per subgrantee
• Per-subgrantee disbursement amounts and dates (the programme's own "obligation date" field exists in our schema and sits null on every row — we will not invent it)
• Final, official award lists from California, Florida, and every state beyond Texas and Louisiana

This is why the series starts lean at awards rows only. As states publish milestones, they get their own snapshot lines here — with per-milestone sources, the same as the award rows. If milestone data is still gappy at the plan's month-6 review, this series is cut.

Methodology

Snapshots are generated by tools/timeseries.py, which reads each immutable dataset release under src/data/awards/data/<version>/, sums the rows itself, and fails loudly if any amount or location figure is missing, non-numeric, or negative — if the data can't be verified, no snapshot ships. The chart is generated by tools/charts/series_chart.py, our reusable static-SVG step-chart pipeline, with the same refusal discipline. Stale released snapshots are never silently rewritten: a restatement or correction gets a new dataset release, and this page's table gains a row, not an edit. Corrections route through the corrections log; the data discipline is set out in our methodology and how we cover BEAD.

Staleness policy: every dataset release is re-verified on a 90-day cycle. If a release's figures have not been re-verified within 90 days, its snapshot row is flagged stale here until the next release lands. Kill rather than let rot.

Download

The whole series as JSON: timeseries.json; flat snapshot table: timeseries.csv; the chart: SVG. The underlying per-award rows: awards.csv · awards.json · release notes.

More BEAD data: the BEAD Money Tracker, the county awards database, the first quarterly data story, the key-dates calendar, and the BEAD timeline: 2021–2026.