How to Look Up Any Delaware State Payment (Free, No Account Needed)

Every check the State of Delaware writes is public — and you don't need an account, a password or a formal records request to see it. Delaware publishes its entire checkbook online: 13.3 million payments covering fiscal years 2018 through 2026, worth $17.03 billion in FY2026 alone. Here are three free ways to look any payment up, from a 30-second point-and-click search to a raw data feed for developers.

What you can find

Because every payment is a public record, a few minutes of searching can answer questions that used to require a formal request:

• Any vendor's total payments — for example, Gainwell Technologies LLC, the state's Medicaid technology vendor, received $3.65 billion across 1,782 payments in FY2026
• Departmental spending — all of it, led in FY2026 by Health & Social Services at $4.90 billion and Education at $4.08 billion
• Monthly patterns — payments grouped by fiscal month, so you can see when the state's check-writing spikes
• Expense accounts, FY2022 forward — budget-line detail such as Medicaid facility expenses ($3.59 billion in FY2026), salaries and teacher pay
• Credit-card purchases — state employees charged $84.5 million on government cards in FY2026, by merchant and category
• Contracts — $252.9 million awarded in FY2026, by vendor and contract
• Budgets and revenue — the $8.02 billion FY2026 operating budget and where the money comes from
• Federal ARP funds — how Delaware spent its $1.79 billion American Rescue Plan allocation

To give you a sense of what's in the checkbook, these were Delaware's ten biggest payees of FY2026:

Note that "Employee Compensation" and "Other Employment Costs / Benefits" aren't outside companies — they're the state's payroll and benefits for its own workforce, aggregated under those labels in the checkbook.

Method 1: The Delaware Spending Dashboard (fastest)

We built this site to make a payment lookup a 30-second task. It republishes the state's own data in a searchable, visual form:

1. Open the Delaware Spending Dashboard — the data loads immediately, no sign-up.
2. Click the Checkbook tab (or go straight to the checkbook explorer).
3. Use the year filter to pick any fiscal year from FY2018 through FY2026.
4. Scan the top-vendor tables for the biggest recipients, and browse spending by department, category, fund and month.
5. Switch tabs for everything else — Credit Cards, Contracts, Budget, Revenue and ARP each have their own view with the same year filters.

It works on a phone as well as a desktop, and every figure traces back to the state's published records.

Method 2: The state's own portal, data.delaware.gov

If you'd rather go straight to the source, the state publishes the raw checkbook itself — again with no login:

1. Open the State of Delaware Checkbook dataset on data.delaware.gov.
2. Use the filter sidebar to narrow the records — by fiscal year, department, or a vendor's name.
3. Click Export and choose CSV to download the records you've filtered.

One caution: the full dataset runs to millions of rows — more than Excel can open at once — so always filter first, then export. The same portal also hosts the state's credit-card, contract, budget and revenue datasets on the same free, no-account terms.

Method 3: The Socrata API (for developers)

data.delaware.gov runs on Socrata, which exposes every dataset as a JSON API — handy if you want to pull payments into your own spreadsheet script or app. The checkbook endpoint is:

https://data.delaware.gov/resource/5s6n-7hpx.json

Three copy-paste examples:

• The first five records:
  https://data.delaware.gov/resource/5s6n-7hpx.json?$limit=5
• Up to 100 payments to one vendor:
  https://data.delaware.gov/resource/5s6n-7hpx.json?vendor=GAINWELL%20TECHNOLOGIES%20LLC&$limit=100
• The ten biggest vendors of all time, by total paid:
  https://data.delaware.gov/resource/5s6n-7hpx.json?$select=vendor,sum(amount)&$group=vendor&$order=sum(amount)%20DESC&$limit=10

Socrata's query language supports filtering, grouping, sorting and aggregation with plain URL parameters. No API key is required for casual use — free app tokens simply raise the rate limits.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account to search Delaware's checkbook?

No. All three methods above — our dashboard, the state's data portal and the API — are free, with no sign-up and no records request.

How far back does the data go?

The main checkbook dataset covers FY2018 to the present. Payments from FY2011 through FY2014 are in a separate archived dataset on the same portal; FY2015 through FY2017 was never published, so no tool can show you those years.

Can I download the data?

Yes — filter the checkbook dataset on data.delaware.gov, click Export and choose CSV. Just filter first: the full file has millions of rows, more than a spreadsheet can hold.

What can I look up besides checks?

The same open data covers state employee credit-card purchases ($84.5 million in FY2026), contracts ($252.9 million awarded in FY2026), the $8.02 billion operating budget, state revenue and $1.79 billion in federal American Rescue Plan spending.