Guide

How to find a federal recompete before the solicitation drops

If the first you hear of a rebid is the notice on SAM.gov, you have already lost most of the race. Here is where to look instead.

The problem with waiting for the solicitation

By the time a solicitation is published, the requirement has usually been written. Often it has been shaped — legitimately — by months of market research, capability statements and industry-day conversations. The incumbent has been having those conversations for a year. A bidder who arrives at the notice is responding to a document someone else helped shape, on a timeline measured in weeks.

The firms that win recompetes they did not previously hold almost always started twelve to eighteen months out. Not writing a proposal — there is nothing to write yet — but learning the programme, meeting the contracting office, and becoming a known quantity before anyone drafts a statement of work.

Which means the useful question is not “what is open?” It is “what is ending?”

The data already exists, and it is free

Every federal prime contract award is published, including its period of performance. USAspending carries all of it, with no API key and no cost: the incumbent, the buying office, the value, the NAICS code, and the date the work is currently scheduled to stop.

The catch is that you cannot ask it the question you care about. USAspending’s date filters cover when an award was signed, modified, or first made. None of them covers when it ends. You can read an end date once you already have an award, but you cannot search for awards by end date. So “what is expiring in my industry in the next six months” is not answerable from the API directly, which is why the answer is not already sitting on a page somewhere.

The workaround is unglamorous: pull awards by action date, keep the ones still running, and build your own index on the end date. That is what this site is. Right now that index holds 10,318 contracts worth $343.5 billion ending within 180 days, 6,623 of them within 90.

Filter to what you can actually win

Raw expiry is a firehose, and most of it is irrelevant to a small business. A half-billion-dollar systems integration contract held by a large prime is not an opportunity for a twelve-person firm, whenever it happens to end.

Set-asides are the filter that matters. Federal work reserved for small business, service-disabled veteran-owned, 8(a), HUBZone or women-owned firms is closed to large primes by law. Of the contracts ending in the next 180 days, 3,149 are set-aside work worth $41.7 billion:

• Total Small Business506 · $19.5 billion
• SDVOSB Set-Aside548 · $7.9 billion
• 8(a) Competed555 · $6.7 billion
• 8(a) Sole Source445 · $4.8 billion
• Women-Owned Small Business396 · $1.3 billion
• HUBZone Set-Aside218 · $757 million
• Partial Small Business191 · $520 million
• SDVOSB Sole Source290 · $283 million

What to do with a name and a date

Once you have an incumbent, a buying office and a date, the rest is ordinary business development — and none of it requires a solicitation to exist yet:

• Look up the contracting officer for that office and introduce yourself. Ask what the programme's pain points are. This is normal and expected — contracting officers conduct market research constantly.
• File a capability statement with the office. It is how they build the list of who to consider when they start planning the follow-on.
• Check whether the requirement has appeared in the agency's procurement forecast. Agencies publish these, and they are far less read than they should be.
• Decide early whether you are a prime or a sub on this one. Approaching the incumbent about teaming is a legitimate play, and often a better one than bidding against them cold.
• Watch for a sources-sought notice. That is the government asking who is capable, and it is the last moment where you can meaningfully influence how the requirement gets written.

What an end date does not tell you

Be honest with yourself about the limits. An end date is the period of performance recorded at time of award. Contracts get option years exercised, get extended by bridge contracts, get restructured, and get terminated early. A date here is a signal to go look, not a promise that a solicitation arrives that week.

Nor does it tell you whether the work will be recompeted at all. Some requirements are absorbed into a larger vehicle, moved onto a GWAC, or simply stop. The date tells you when to start asking. The asking is still your job.

The short version

Stop watching what is open. Watch what is ending, filter it to the set-asides you actually qualify for, and start twelve months out. The data is free and public. The only reason it was not already on a page is that nobody had indexed it by the one field that matters.