By Outrider Editorial Team · Updated August 20, 2026
What is SAM.gov?
SAM.gov is the U.S. government's official system for federal contracting, operated by GSA. Registration is free, takes up to 10 business days to become active, and must be renewed every 365 days. It issues your Unique Entity ID, and its Contract Opportunities search is where agencies post every requirement above $25,000.
- Portal
- SAM.gov
- Run by
- U.S. federal government
- Registration fee
- Free (registration, UEI, and renewal)
- Time to register
- Up to 10 business days to become active
The federal government committed about $793 billion on contracts in fiscal 2025, a $17.8 billion increase over FY2024 after adjusting for inflation. That figure reproduces exactly against USAspending prime award obligations for the same period. DoD accounts for $491.7 billion of it, VA $78.3 billion, DOE $48.5 billion.
Access to all of it starts in one place: SAM.gov, the System for Award Management, operated by GSA. FAR 4.1102(a) states the rule plainly: offerors and quoters are required to be registered in SAM at the time an offer or quotation is submitted. No active registration, no award.
Nobody should ever charge you for this
Start here, because this is where new federal vendors lose money before they earn any.
GSA's entity registration checklist states it directly: "SAM.gov is FREE to use. There is no charge to get a Unique Entity ID, register your entity, and maintain your entity registration at SAM.gov." GSA's scam bulletin, "Don't Take the Bait", goes further: "The government will never ask you to pay to register, update your registration, or renew," and "you never need to pay to register, renew your registration, or 'fix registration errors.'"
The paid ecosystem is real and its prices are real. One company documented in comments filed with the FTC charged $495 for one year, $890 for two years, and $1,995 for five years to do a free thing. Using a paid filer is legal if it discloses clearly what it is. Paying because you believed registration costs money is a markup on a government form.
GSA has also structurally locked third parties out of your account. Since March 3, 2023, a registration service provider can hold only a Data Entry role, never Entity Administrator, must be appointed by you, and cannot grant that access to anyone else. Keep the Entity Administrator role in your own company.
Know the tells GSA publishes: SAM.gov will never ask for personal information outside the SAM.gov system, never ask for money or threaten legal action, never ask you to call or text someone, and never send a link that does not end in .gov. The FTC's Impersonation Rule, effective April 2024, makes government impersonation directly actionable; in its first year the FTC brought five cases and shut down 13 impersonating websites. Report problems to fsd.gov, reportfraud.ftc.gov, or the FBI's IC3.
UEI replaced DUNS in 2022
If you are reading a guide that mentions a DUNS Number, that guide is at least four years stale. On April 4, 2022, GSA systems switched to the Unique Entity ID (SAM) as the authoritative government entity identifier. It is 12 characters, assigned by the government inside SAM.gov, with no third-party website involved.
You can get a UEI alone using just your legal business name and physical address. Useful for subcontractors and grant sub-recipients, but know the limit GSA states: "If you choose to only get a Unique Entity ID, you cannot apply directly for federal awards."
Registering your entity, step by step
- Create a Login.gov account with multi-factor authentication. SAM.gov usernames and passwords are managed by Login.gov.
- Pick your purpose. All Awards (contracts plus financial assistance), Financial Assistance Awards Only, or UEI only. If you want contracts, pick All Awards.
- Download the Entity Registration Checklist first. It is free, it is GSA's own, and it is the difference between one sitting and three.
- Complete entity validation. Legal business name, physical street address, date and state of incorporation. A post office box may not be used. FSD is explicit: if you use a virtual office, use the address where you keep your records, which may be your home address.
- If no automatic match, upload documents. They must prove legal business name, physical address, start year, and state of incorporation, verified by an authority outside your entity, usually a government, evidenced by a stamp or seal. Copies of federal awards do not count, and machine-translated documents are rejected outright.
- Receive your 12-character UEI.
- Declare your relationship to the entity. If you are not an employee, officer, or board member you must supply contract start and end dates plus an entity point-of-contact email, and you can only receive a Data Entry role.
- Core Data. Organization start date, fiscal year end, MPIN, addresses, TIN, IRS Consent Form, CAGE (U.S. entities select No and one is assigned after submission), entity and socio-economic details, EFT routing and account numbers, remittance address.
- Assertions. NAICS codes, optional Product Service Codes, worldwide size metrics per 13 CFR 121, optional Disaster Response Registry entry. Your small business status is derived automatically from the receipts, employee count and NAICS codes you enter here.
- Representations and Certifications. FAR Responses 1 through 4, plus an Architect-Engineer response if you entered a 5413xx design NAICS code, plus the DFARS response if you will bid DoD work. These cover Section 889 telecommunications, executive compensation, and greenhouse gas disclosure at $7.5M. FAR 52.204-8 lets contracting officers rely on them instead of re-collecting per solicitation, provided they were updated within the last 12 months.
- Points of Contact. Accounts Receivable, Electronic Business, and Government Business are mandatory.
- The SBA supplemental page, offered if you selected at least one small business NAICS code. It builds your small business profile and is the entry point for HUBZone and 8(a) applications.
- Submit. Status becomes Submitted Registration while IRS TIN validation and DLA CAGE validation run. GSA's published estimate is that registration can take up to 10 business days to become active.
- Renew every 365 days.
Two timing facts: a Work in Progress registration is deleted after 90 days untouched, and a deactivated registration is unrecoverable, with a 24-hour wait before you can start again.
Renewal is the failure mode
GSA's term for a lapsed registration is Inactive Registration, not "expired." An inactive registration stays searchable, so it looks fine from the outside while making you ineligible for award, and nobody calls to tell you. Set your own reminder well ahead of the 365-day mark, because the day you discover the lapse is usually the day a proposal is due.
There is also no status called Failed or Rejected. Rejection happens at the document layer, with its own incident workflow, which is why a stalled registration usually means a validation document, not a decision about you.
Contract Opportunities: how to actually find work
Anyone can search Contract Opportunities without an account. What an account buys you is saved searches, notifications, and the ability to join an Interested Vendors List on notices where the contracting officer enabled one.
Contract Opportunities is the governmentwide point of entry, and FAR 5.003 requires contracting officers to transmit every FAR-required notice to it. FAR 5.101(a)(1) requires synopsis of proposed contract actions expected to exceed $25,000. Presolicitation notices must be published at least 15 days before a solicitation issues, with at least 30 days response time above the simplified acquisition threshold and 45 days for R&D. Those lead times are your planning calendar.
Filter on the dimensions that matter. The search supports notice type, posted date range, response deadline, agency, place of performance, NAICS code, PSC, and set-aside type. Set-aside filtering is where a small business stops drinking from the firehose: SBA (Total Small Business, FAR 19.5), 8A, HZC (HUBZone), SDVOSBC, WOSB, EDWOSB, LAS (Local Area Set-Aside), and VSA for VA veteran-owned work, each with a sole-source variant.
Learn the nine notice types. FSD lists exactly nine: Special Notice, Sources Sought, Presolicitation, Intent to Bundle Requirements, Solicitation, Combined Synopsis/Solicitation, Award Notice, Justification, and Sale of Surplus Property. There is no notice type called "Sole Source," whatever other guides tell you; sole-source intent appears through the sole-source set-aside codes and through Justification (J&A) notices.
The two most valuable types are the ones most vendors ignore. Sources Sought is, verbatim, "a synopsis posted by a government agency seeking possible sources for a project. It is not a solicitation for work or a request for proposal." Presolicitation "helps the government determine if the requirement can be set-aside for a small business if capable small businesses respond." Responding is how a requirement gets shaped, and shaped as a set-aside, months before the solicitation drops.
Save the search, then turn on notification. Log in, run a filtered search, use Actions then Save, name it, then use Actions then Notify to get email when new results appear. Saved searches live under Workspace, Profile, Saved Searches. Build one per NAICS code you serve rather than one broad search you stop reading.
Set-asides: what you can claim and what you must earn
$179 billion went to small businesses as prime contractors in FY2025, nearly 28 percent of all prime federal contract dollars, against a 23 percent statutory goal. Prime plus subcontracts came to nearly $273 billion.
But there is a hard line between the two kinds of status. GSA states it plainly: "The socio-economic statuses on the Socio-Economic Types page of a SAM.gov entity registration are self-selected. There is no formal certification process." Ticking "Women-Owned Business" or "Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Business" in SAM.gov is market-research signal, not eligibility.
- WOSB and EDWOSB self-certification ended October 15, 2020.
- Veteran certification moved from VA to SBA on January 1, 2023, and SDVOSB self-certification for subcontracting and goaling purposes ended December 22, 2024.
- Formal certification for 8(a), HUBZone, WOSB/EDWOSB and VOSB/SDVOSB is free at certifications.sba.gov. Once certified, update or renew your SAM registration and the certification is retrieved from SBA automatically.
- The exception is the Total Small Business set-aside (code SBA, FAR 19.5), which needs no SBA certification, only that you are small under the solicitation's NAICS code with an active SAM registration.
One live caveat, dated August 2026: GSA has an active alert warning that the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul "will result in changes to provisions, clauses, and representations and certifications across FAR parts" and that those changes will impact SAM.gov. Expect the reps and certs question set to move, so read them at renewal rather than clicking through from memory.
The five mistakes that cost federal vendors awards
- Paying for a free registration. $495 to $1,995 for a form GSA hands you a checklist for.
- Letting the registration go Inactive. It stays searchable, so nothing looks broken until you are ineligible on a due date.
- Using a PO box or virtual office address in validation. The single most common documented rejection cause.
- Claiming a self-selected socio-economic type as a certification. Self-selection in SAM.gov does not qualify you for WOSB, SDVOSB, HUBZone, or 8(a) set-asides.
- Only watching Solicitation notices. By the time a solicitation posts, the requirement, the NAICS code, and often the set-aside decision are already fixed. Sources Sought is where you influence them.
Sequence to start this week
- Search Contract Opportunities with no account, filtered to your NAICS code and a Total Small Business set-aside. Ten minutes tells you whether the federal market buys what you sell.
- Download GSA's Entity Registration Checklist and gather everything before you open a registration.
- Create Login.gov, register the entity yourself, and keep the Entity Administrator role in-house.
- Set a renewal reminder for day 300, not day 365.
- Apply free at certifications.sba.gov for any SBA program you actually qualify for, then start responding to Sources Sought notices in your codes.
Frequently Asked
SAM.gov questions, answered.
Do I have to pay anyone to register in SAM.gov?
No. GSA's own entity registration checklist says SAM.gov is free to use, with no charge to get a Unique Entity ID, register, or maintain your registration. GSA's scam bulletin adds that the government will never ask you to pay to register, update, renew, or fix registration errors. Paid help exists and is legal if it discloses clearly, but one service documented in FTC rulemaking comments charged $495 for one year and $1,995 for five.
How long does SAM.gov registration actually take?
GSA publishes one number: registration can take up to 10 business days to become active after you submit. The step that adds real time is entity validation on the front end. Most entities match automatically, but if you have to submit documents, FSD says review may resolve in as few as five days or take several weeks, with an average manual review of two business days.
What replaced the DUNS Number?
The Unique Entity ID (SAM). GSA systems switched to it on April 4, 2022, and it is now the authoritative government entity identifier. It is 12 characters, assigned by the government inside SAM.gov, and no third-party website is involved. Entities with an active registration before that date were assigned one automatically.
Do I need to apply separately for a CAGE code?
Not if you are a U.S. entity. GSA's checklist tells you to answer No when asked whether you have a CAGE code, and one will be assigned after you submit your registration. CAGE validation by the Defense Logistics Agency is one of the two checks that run while your registration sits in Submitted status. Non-U.S. entities are the exception and must obtain an NCAGE code before starting.
Why did my entity validation fail?
Almost always a document problem. FSD rejects PO boxes and non-physical addresses, documents that are not authorized or certified by an external authority such as a government stamp or seal, copies of federal awards, out-of-date documents submitted without a companion current-name document, and machine-translated foreign-language documents. Allowable file types are PDF, PNG, JPG/JPEG and BMP.
I self-certified as woman-owned or veteran-owned in SAM.gov. Can I bid those set-asides?
No. GSA is explicit that the socio-economic statuses on the SAM.gov Socio-Economic Types page are self-selected with no formal certification process. WOSB and EDWOSB self-certification ended October 15, 2020, and SDVOSB self-certification for subcontracting and goaling ended December 22, 2024. Apply free at certifications.sba.gov, then update your SAM registration and the certification flows in from SBA automatically.
Do I still need a notarized letter to register?
Not for a normal registration or renewal. The notarized Entity Administrator Appointment Letter is now required only when the administrator has left the organization, a registration exists with no administrator, or access to the administrator account has been lost. If your entity already has an administrator, they can simply assign you the role, which GSA notes is much faster and simpler.