This article investigates generalized Ricci almost solitons, also known as GRA solitons, on contact metric manifolds, including the gradient case. At first, we establish that a complete K-contact or Sasakian manifold endowed with a closed GRA soliton satisfying \(4c_1c_2 \ne 1\) is compact Einstein with scalar curvature \(2n(2n+1)\) . As for the gradient case, it exhibits an isometry to the unit sphere \({\mathbb {S}}^{2n+1}\) . Subsequently, we identify a few adequate conditions under which a non-trivial complete K-contact manifold with a GRA soliton is trivial ( \(\eta \) -Einstein). Following that, we establish certain results on H-contact and complete contact manifolds. We also demonstrate that a non-Sasakian \((k,\mu )\) -contact manifold with a closed GRA soliton is flat for dimension 3, and for higher dimensions, it is locally isometric to the trivial bundle \({\mathbb {R}}^{n+1} \times {\mathbb {S}}^n(4)\) , provided \(4c_1c_2 (1-2n)\ne 1\) and \(c_2\ne 0\) . Finally, we discuss a few applications of GRA solitons in general relativity. These include characterizing PF spacetimes with a concircular velocity vector field and determining a sufficient condition for a GRW spacetime to be a PF spacetime.