Guide

How to win a federal recompete

There are 41,333 federal contracts worth $599 billion reaching the end of their period of performance in the next six months. Every one of them is a dated opportunity. This is what you actually do with that.

What a recompete actually is

Almost no federal contract is permanent. Work is bought for a base period with option years, typically totalling three to five, and when that runs out the agency must either re-compete the requirement, extend it, or stop buying it. The need rarely goes away — someone still has to guard the building, maintain the aircraft, run the help desk. So the same work comes back to market on a predictable cycle.

That is the opening. A recompete is the one moment when work that has belonged to a single company for years is required to be available to everyone else. Incumbents win most recompetes, and they win them mostly on preparation rather than merit — they have been talking to the customer for four years and you have not.

The clock

Count backwards from the incumbent’s end date. Each window opens a door and closes the one before it. This is the sequence, and it is the reason a date is worth knowing a year ahead rather than a month.

1. 01

   Position

   18mo+

   Too early to chase this specific contract, which makes it the right time to become someone the office can legally award to.

   Do: Finish your SAM.gov registration, settle which NAICS codes you bid under, and start any socioeconomic certification now — 8(a) and HUBZone take months.

   Closes: Nothing closes yet. This is the only phase where being unregistered is recoverable.

2. 02

   Research

   18mo → 12mo

   The agency is beginning to plan the follow-on. You want to know more about this requirement than the notice will ever tell you.

   Do: Pull the incumbent's award history, find the contracting officer for the buying office, check the agency's procurement forecast, and file a FOIA request for the current contract — the price and the statement of work are usually releasable.

   Closes: FOIA responses routinely take three to six months. Requested later than this, the answer arrives after it is useful.

3. 03

   Shape

   12mo → 9mo

   The requirement is being written now. This is when a specification quietly comes to describe one company's way of working.

   Do: Get a capability statement in front of the contracting officer and ask for a market-research meeting. This is routine and expected — contracting officers are required to conduct market research (FAR 10.001) and generally want to hear from capable firms.

   Closes: Once the requirement is drafted, changing it means changing someone's document. Influence gets much more expensive from here.

4. 04

   Sources sought

   9mo → 6mo

   The highest-leverage window on the whole clock, and the one most small businesses sleep through.

   Do: Watch SAM.gov for a sources-sought notice or RFI on this requirement and respond to it properly, with specifics rather than a brochure.

   Closes: The set-aside decision. Under the Rule of Two (FAR 19.502-2), if the contracting officer reasonably expects offers from two or more capable small businesses at fair market prices, the acquisition must be set aside — which removes every large prime from the competition. That determination is made from sources-sought responses. Not answering is a vote against your own eligibility.

5. 05

   Team

   6mo → 3mo

   The competition is now effectively fixed. What is left to decide is who you are standing with when it opens.

   Do: Lock teaming agreements or a joint venture in writing, line up the past-performance references you will cite, and settle a price-to-win before the RFP frames your thinking.

   Closes: Teaming after the solicitation drops means negotiating a partnership and writing a proposal in the same thirty days. It shows.

6. 06

   Solicitation

   3mo → 1mo

   The RFP typically posts in this window, and everything about it is fast.

   Do: Submit written questions before the cut-off, usually about a week after release — the answers are published to all bidders and a well-aimed question can correct a requirement that locked you out.

   Closes: Proposals are commonly due about thirty days after release. A bidder starting here is writing against people who started a year ago.

7. 07

   Award or bridge

   1mo → end

   Either an award is imminent or the agency has run out of runway.

   Do: If no solicitation ever appeared, expect a bridge — a short sole-source extension of the incumbent, often six to twelve months. That is not a loss, it is a second dated shot at the same requirement, and now you know the office is behind.

   Closes: If you bid and lost: request a debrief within three days of notification (FAR 15.505/15.506). It is the only way to learn why, and it starts the clock on any protest.

The single move worth more than everything else

If you take one thing from this page: respond to sources-sought notices, even when you are not sure you would bid.

A sources-sought notice or RFI is the contracting officer asking the market who can do this work. What they do with the answers is decide how to compete it. Under the Rule of Two — FAR 19.502-2 — if the contracting officer reasonably expects offers from two or more responsible small businesses at fair market prices, the acquisition must be set aside for small business. Not may. Must.

Which means two small firms writing credible responses can remove every large prime from a competition before it starts. And the reverse is just as true: when nobody answers, the contracting officer has no basis for a set-aside and competes it full-and-open, where you are bidding against companies with a hundred times your proposal budget. The determination is made from who spoke up.

3,130 of the contracts in the six-month window are already tagged to a set-aside programme, worth $41 billion. Those are the ones where that decision has already gone the right way. Browse them by programme.

Write the response properly. Name the specific work you have done, give contract numbers and dollar values, address each capability the notice lists, and state plainly which socioeconomic categories you qualify under. A brochure gets read as “not really capable”.

Before any of this: be able to receive an award

None of the above matters if the government cannot legally pay you. Three things, all free, all slower than you expect:

• A Unique Entity ID. Issued by SAM.gov, and it replaced the DUNS number in April 2022. Anything telling you to buy a DUNS number is out of date.
• An active SAM.gov registration. Free, renewed annually, and routinely takes several weeks because entity validation is a manual review. Nobody can award to you while it is pending. Registration agents who charge for this are selling you a free service.
• The right NAICS codes. Every solicitation is issued against one, and the SBA size standard that decides whether you count as small is set per code — the same company can be small for one and large for another. Look yours up.

Then, if you qualify, pursue the socioeconomic certification that fits: 8(a), HUBZone, WOSB or SDVOSB. These take months, and they change which competitions exist for you rather than merely how you score in them. Check which you might qualify for.

What to learn about a contract before you chase it

Once you have a target and a date, the research is mostly public and almost nobody does it:

• The incumbent’s position. How much of their revenue is this one contract? A company with one customer defends differently than one with forty. Look them up.
• The buying office. Not the department — the sub-agency that actually holds the contract. That is who you build a relationship with, and they buy the same things repeatedly.
• The contract itself. File a FOIA request with the agency for the current contract and statement of work. Prices and the statement of work are generally releasable; genuine trade secrets are redacted. Responses take months, so ask early.
• The agency forecast. Agencies publish procurement forecasts of what they intend to buy. They are public, underread, and will often name the recompete before any notice does.

Prime or sub — decide early

Bidding as a prime against an entrenched incumbent, with no past performance on that requirement, is the most common way small firms waste a proposal budget. Subcontracting to the incumbent, or teaming with another bidder, puts you on the contract and builds the past performance that makes the next recompete winnable. Large contracts carry subcontracting plans with small-business targets the prime has to meet, which is leverage you can ask about directly.

The SBA mentor-protégé programme lets a small business form a joint venture with a large mentor and still bid as small. It is the closest thing to a shortcut in this business, and it takes months to set up — which is another reason the clock starts a year out.

After the award, win or lose

If you lose, request a debrief within three days of notification (FAR 15.505 and 15.506). It is the only structured account you will get of how your proposal was evaluated, and it feeds directly into the next bid with that office.

A debrief also starts the protest clock. GAO protests are generally due within ten days of when you knew or should have known the grounds, and filing within that window can trigger an automatic stay of performance. Protesting is a serious step with real costs to the relationship, and it is not a substitute for a better proposal — but the deadline is short enough that not knowing it removes the option.

If you win, the clock starts again. Your own end date is now in this index, and someone else is reading it.

Where to start today

This is a practitioner’s summary of public acquisition rules, not legal advice, and agencies vary in how closely they follow the typical timing. The FAR is public and searchable at acquisition.gov — every rule cited here can be read in full there.