SAMWatcher

The Contract Opportunities extract is a public dataset published by SAM.gov containing every active and archived contract opportunity notice the U.S. federal government has posted. Each row is one notice, with roughly 47 columns covering the notice id, title, solicitation number, posting agency and office, NAICS code, product or service code, set-aside type, place of performance, posted date, response deadline, and a description.

It is the same information you see on a SAM.gov listing page, published in bulk so it can be searched, filtered, and analysed offline. The extract is public domain data and requires no account to obtain.

SAMWatcher ingests this extract and indexes it so it can be filtered in seconds instead of paged through one notice at a time.

SAM.gov republishes the Contract Opportunities extract once per day. A notice posted or amended during the business day appears in the following day's file, so the extract lags the live SAM.gov listing page by up to about 24 hours.

The practical consequence: for a solicitation with a short response window, always confirm the deadline on the SAM.gov listing itself before you commit to a bid. The extract tells you an opportunity exists; SAM.gov is what governs its terms.

A notice ID is the unique identifier SAM.gov assigns to a single posting. It is stable for that posting and is what the listing URL is built from.

A solicitation number is assigned by the contracting office, not by SAM.gov. It identifies the procurement itself, so several notices — a sources sought, then a presolicitation, then the solicitation, then an award — can share one solicitation number while each carries its own notice ID.

When you are tracking a procurement over time, the solicitation number is what ties the postings together. When you are linking to one specific posting, use the notice ID.

The notice type tells you where a procurement is in its lifecycle, which is the single most useful signal for deciding whether to spend time on it.

• Sources Sought. Market research. The agency is asking who can do the work; there is nothing to bid on yet. Responding is how you influence the eventual requirement and how the agency decides whether to set the award aside for small business.
• Presolicitation. Advance notice that a solicitation is coming. Use it to start teaming and to get your questions ready.
• Solicitation. The actual request for offers. This is what you respond to.
• Combined Synopsis/Solicitation. Presolicitation and solicitation in one document, permitted for commercial items under FAR Part 12. Response windows are often short — sometimes under two weeks.
• Special Notice. Anything that does not fit the other categories: industry days, pre-proposal conferences, program announcements.
• Sale of Surplus Property. The government selling assets rather than buying.
• Award Notice. Who won, for how much. Useful competitive intelligence and the fastest way to find your likely subcontracting partners.
• Justification and Approval (J&A). The written justification for awarding without full and open competition.
• Intent to Bundle. Notice that several requirements are being consolidated into one larger contract.

A Combined Synopsis/Solicitation merges the presolicitation announcement and the solicitation into a single posting. It is authorised under FAR Part 12 for commercial products and services, and the streamlining is the point: the agency skips the separate advance notice.

Because there is no presolicitation, there is no advance warning. The first time the requirement is public is the day quotes are being requested, and response windows are frequently 10 to 15 days and sometimes shorter.

This is the notice type where a daily alert matters most. A combined synopsis you find a week late is often one you can no longer realistically bid.

• RFI — Request for Information. Market research. No award results from an RFI. The agency is gathering capability information, and your response shapes the requirement that eventually gets competed. Usually posted as a Sources Sought notice.
• RFQ — Request for Quotation. The agency asks for a price quote, typically for commercial items under simplified acquisition procedures. A quote is not an offer in the contractual sense: the government's purchase order is the offer, and your acceptance forms the contract. RFQs are usually fast and price-driven.
• RFP — Request for Proposal. Used for negotiated procurements, usually larger and more complex. You submit a proposal covering technical approach, past performance, and price; the agency evaluates against stated criteria and may hold discussions before award. Your proposal is an offer the government can accept to form a contract.

In rough terms: an RFI has no award, an RFQ is mostly about price, and an RFP is about the trade-off between price and everything else.

NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, a six-digit code identifying an industry. The contracting officer assigns one NAICS code to each solicitation, choosing the one that best describes the principal purpose of what is being bought.

It matters for three reasons:

• It sets the size standard. Each NAICS code carries a small-business size standard, expressed either as average annual receipts or as number of employees. Whether you count as a small business for a given solicitation depends on the NAICS code that solicitation carries — not on your company overall.
• It determines eligibility for set-asides. If the work is set aside for small business and you exceed the size standard for that NAICS code, you cannot bid as a prime.
• It is the most efficient filter. Filtering the extract by the three or four NAICS codes you actually work in removes the overwhelming majority of notices that will never be relevant to you.

The assigned code can be challenged. If you believe the contracting officer picked a NAICS code that does not fit the work, a NAICS code appeal can be filed with the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals, generally within 10 calendar days of the solicitation being issued.

A size standard is the maximum size at which a business still counts as small for a given NAICS code. It is expressed either in average annual receipts (for example, $25.5 million) or in number of employees (for example, 500 or 1,250), depending on the industry.

Two details catch people out:

• Receipts are averaged over five fiscal years, and employees over the trailing 24 months. One unusually strong year does not immediately disqualify you.
• Affiliates count. The SBA adds the receipts and employees of all affiliated concerns — companies under common ownership or control, including some joint ventures and some investor relationships. Size is measured across the whole affiliated group, not the bidding entity alone.

Size is determined as of the date you certify it in your offer, against the size standard for the NAICS code on that specific solicitation. The SBA's Table of Size Standards is the authoritative reference, and it is revised periodically.

A set-aside restricts competition to a defined category of business. If a solicitation is set aside and you do not hold the relevant status, you cannot compete for it as a prime contractor.

The main types:

• Total Small Business Set-Aside. Open to any business that is small under the solicitation's NAICS code.
• 8(a) Business Development. Reserved for firms in the SBA's 8(a) programme for socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses. Nine-year term, one time only.
• HUBZone. Reserved for firms certified as operating in and employing residents of a Historically Underutilized Business Zone.
• Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) and Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB). Certification is now handled through the SBA's Veteran Small Business Certification programme.
• Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) and Economically Disadvantaged WOSB (EDWOSB). Available only in NAICS codes the SBA has designated as underrepresented.
• Partial set-aside. Part of the requirement is set aside and the remainder competed openly.

The Rule of Two governs most of this: if the contracting officer reasonably expects offers from at least two responsible small businesses at fair market prices, the acquisition must be set aside for small business.

The Rule of Two requires a contracting officer to set an acquisition aside for small business when there is a reasonable expectation that offers will be received from at least two responsible small business concerns, and that award can be made at fair market prices.

It applies to acquisitions above the micro-purchase threshold. Below the simplified acquisition threshold, acquisitions are generally reserved for small business automatically.

This is the practical reason responding to Sources Sought notices matters even though nothing is being awarded. The responses are how the contracting officer forms the expectation the rule turns on. If two capable small businesses answer, the requirement is likely to be set aside; if none do, it is likely to go full and open.

Start by narrowing on attributes rather than reading listings:

1. Identify your NAICS codes. Usually three to six codes cover what you actually deliver. This is the highest-value filter available. 2. Decide which notice types you care about. If you want to influence requirements early, watch Sources Sought and Presolicitation. If you only want things you can bid today, watch Solicitation and Combined Synopsis/Solicitation. 3. Filter by set-aside status you hold. No point reading 8(a) set-asides if you are not 8(a). 4. Constrain the posting window. Anything posted more than 60 days ago in an active status is usually either closing imminently or stalled. 5. Check the response deadline before you read the description. A notice closing in three days needs a different decision than one closing next month.

The common failure is reading listings one at a time in posted order. Filtering first turns thousands of notices into a few dozen worth actually opening.

Yes. To be eligible for award you must have an active and complete registration in the System for Award Management at sam.gov. The contracting officer verifies registration before award, and an inactive registration will cost you the award regardless of how good your offer was.

You will need a Unique Entity ID (UEI), which SAM.gov assigns during registration and which replaced the DUNS number in April 2022. You also need to complete the annual representations and certifications.

Registration is free. Initial registration commonly takes two to six weeks because of entity validation, so start well before you intend to bid. It must be renewed annually or it lapses.

Searching and reading opportunities requires no registration at all — only bidding does.

An active notice is one still open for the action it describes. A notice becomes inactive or archived when its response deadline has passed, when the agency archives it explicitly, or when the procurement has been cancelled or awarded.

Archived notices remain useful. They tell you what an agency bought before, roughly when they buy it, which NAICS codes they use for it, and — through the associated award notices — who won and at what price. That is how you build a picture of an agency's buying pattern and identify the incumbent before a recompete appears.

A notice that is archived without an award notice usually means the procurement was cancelled or is being restructured. Those often come back.

Attachments are the documents that carry the actual requirement. The notice description is a summary; the attachments are what you bid against.

Read in this order:

1. The SF1449 or SF33 cover form. It carries the response deadline, the contract type, the set-aside, and where to send your offer. Everything procedural is here. 2. The Statement of Work, Performance Work Statement, or Statement of Objectives. This is the requirement itself. 3. Section L (Instructions to Offerors) and Section M (Evaluation Factors) on an RFP. Section M tells you how you will be scored, which is what should drive how you write the proposal. 4. Amendments. Check for these last and check for them again before you submit. Amendments change deadlines, remove requirements, and add pricing sheets. Missing one is a routine cause of a non-responsive bid. 5. Q&A documents. Agencies post consolidated answers to questions. They frequently reveal the incumbent, the real scope, or a constraint not stated elsewhere.

The solicitation sets its own question deadline, and it is almost always well before the response deadline — commonly one to two weeks after issuance, and often less than half way through the response window.

Questions are submitted in writing to the contracting officer or contract specialist named on the notice, usually by email. The agency then posts consolidated answers as an amendment or a separate Q&A document, visible to every offeror. Your question and its answer become public, though the agency will not identify who asked.

Two practical points: read the whole solicitation on the day it posts rather than the week it closes, because the question deadline is what you will miss otherwise. And check back for posted answers even if you asked nothing — other bidders' questions routinely surface scope details that change the bid decision.

A non-responsive offer is rejected without evaluation, no matter how good it is. The common causes are procedural rather than technical:

• Late submission. Federal deadlines are effectively absolute. The Government-wide late-proposal rule has narrow exceptions, and "the portal was slow" is generally not one of them.
• Missing a required form, certification, or pricing sheet. Including one that a later amendment removed, or omitting one an amendment added.
• Failure to acknowledge amendments. Each amendment must be acknowledged as the solicitation directs.
• Not being registered and active in SAM.gov at the time of award.
• Taking exception to a material term. Conditioning your offer on changed terms can make it non-responsive.
• Exceeding stated page limits or ignoring format requirements in Section L.

Almost all of these are avoidable by building a submission checklist from Section L on the day the solicitation posts, and re-checking amendments immediately before you submit.

It varies by notice type and dollar value, and the range is wide.

For acquisitions over the simplified acquisition threshold, FAR 5.203 generally requires at least a 30-day response period after issuance of the solicitation, and at least 15 days between the synopsis and issuance. Commercial-item acquisitions under FAR Part 12 may use a shorter period the contracting officer considers reasonable.

In practice:

• Combined Synopsis/Solicitation for commercial items: often 10 to 15 days, sometimes less.
• Standard RFQ under simplified acquisition procedures: often 10 to 30 days.
• Full RFP for a complex service: 30 to 45 days, occasionally longer.
• Sources Sought: 5 to 15 days, though nothing is lost by responding late except influence.

Subtract the question deadline, which usually falls in the first third of that window, and the effective time to make a bid/no-bid decision is much shorter than the headline number suggests.

A bid protest is a formal challenge to a solicitation's terms or to an award decision. Protests can be filed with the agency, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), or in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

The GAO timeliness rules are strict and are where most protests fail:

• Challenges to solicitation terms apparent on the face of the solicitation must be filed before the deadline for receipt of proposals. You cannot bid, lose, and then complain about terms you could see all along.
• All other protests must be filed within 10 calendar days of when you knew or should have known the basis of the protest.
• Where a debriefing is required and requested, the protest must be filed within 10 days of the debriefing. Filing within 5 days of a required debriefing triggers an automatic stay of performance under CICA.

These are days, not business days, and the clock starts at knowledge rather than at award notice. Legal advice is worth getting early; the deadlines expire faster than most companies decide to act.

A debriefing is the agency's explanation of how your offer was evaluated and why it did not win. For negotiated procurements you must request it in writing within 3 days of receiving notice of award, and the agency will normally provide it within 5 days.

Request it. Two reasons:

• It is the cheapest competitive intelligence available. You learn the evaluated strengths and weaknesses of your own proposal, the overall ranking, and the awardee's price. Applied to the next bid, that is worth considerably more than the hour it costs.
• It preserves your protest options. A required debriefing extends the protest clock, and the automatic-stay window runs from the debriefing rather than from the award.

A debriefing is not a negotiation and will not reverse the award. Treat it as information gathering.

These are contract vehicles — structures that let an agency buy repeatedly without running a full competition each time.

• IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity). A contract with no fixed quantity or delivery schedule. Holders compete for individual task or delivery orders issued under it. Winning the IDIQ gets you the right to compete, not revenue.
• GWAC (Government-Wide Acquisition Contract). A pre-competed IDIQ for IT that any federal agency can order from. Examples include GSA's Alliant and NASA SEWP.
• BPA (Blanket Purchase Agreement). A simplified arrangement for filling recurring needs, often established against a GSA Schedule contract.
• GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS). A long-term government-wide contract with commercial firms, giving agencies access to commercial products and services at pre-negotiated terms.

The strategic point: much federal spending flows through vehicles, and the individual task orders are frequently competed only among vehicle holders and never appear as open opportunities. If you see an agency buying your service repeatedly but never openly, the work is almost certainly on a vehicle you are not on.

The simplified acquisition threshold (SAT) is the dollar level below which agencies may use streamlined purchasing procedures under FAR Part 13 rather than full competition procedures. It is currently $250,000 for most acquisitions, with higher thresholds in some circumstances such as contingency operations.

The micro-purchase threshold, currently $10,000 for most supplies and services, is lower still: purchases below it can generally be made without competitive quotes at all, often on a government purchase card.

Why it matters:

• Acquisitions between the micro-purchase threshold and the SAT are reserved exclusively for small business.
• Below the SAT, procedures are lighter, response windows are shorter, and administrative burden is much lower — which makes this the realistic entry point for a company that has never held a federal contract.
• Above the SAT, the full FAR competition machinery engages, along with the 30-day minimum response period.

These thresholds are adjusted for inflation periodically, so confirm the current figures in FAR Part 2 before relying on them.

SAMWatcher ingests the public Contract Opportunities data extract published by SAM.gov. We reproduce and index that file; we do not create, verify, correct, or supplement its contents.

Our copy is refreshed daily and can lag SAM.gov by a day or more. SAM.gov is the authoritative source, and where our copy and SAM.gov disagree, SAM.gov governs. Always confirm a notice, its attachments, and above all its response deadline at the source before acting on it.

SAMWatcher is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by SAM.gov, the General Services Administration, or any United States government agency.

Expanding a result shows a short automated summary of what the buying agency is actually asking for, generated by a language model from the notice text and its attachments. It exists so you can triage a long result list without opening every listing.

It is produced without human review. It may be wrong or misleading, and it is provided for convenience only. Never rely on a summary in place of the official notice — read the solicitation and its attachments before you make a bid decision or commit resources.

Basic is free and requires no card. It includes keyword, NAICS, notice type and date filtering, AI intent analysis and attachment links on every notice, and saved searches. It is ad-supported.

Premium is $10 per month, billed through Stripe. It adds emailed result lists on demand, automated daily alerts on your saved searches, and removes advertising from the results list entirely.

There are no per-seat charges and no annual commitment. Cancellation is self-service from account settings, and access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.

Because federal response windows are short and they start without warning.

A Combined Synopsis/Solicitation may close 10 days after it posts, and the question deadline can fall within the first four. If you search weekly, roughly half of the notices you find in any given week are already past the point where a serious bid is realistic — and you will never know about the ones that opened and closed between searches.

A daily digest against a saved search inverts that: new matches arrive the morning after they post, with everything still open listed underneath. The cost of missing a day drops to nothing.