Open Federal Contract Solicitations (Month End)

## What this measures

The number of solicitations that were open on the last day of each month: posted on or before that day, with a response deadline after it.

## Why it matters

The stock of open bids is what contractors can respond to right now, the federal market's open order book.

## How to read it

Higher means more open bids. Most solicitations close within weeks, so the stock follows the posting season with a short lag. The series starts in January 2020 at 5,597. The latest month, September 2026, is 8,194. The high is 11,695 (August 2026) and the low 3,851 (December 2020).

## What it does not say

Not every federal purchase is posted: purchases under $25,000, orders under existing contracts and some classified or urgent buys are not. Solicitations rarely carry a dollar value, so these series count notices, not dollars. One requirement can be posted as several notices. A solicitation with no deadline in the extract is left out; deadline extensions show as the latest deadline.

## How it's built

Each notice is counted once, by its posted date and its base type, the type it was first posted as (a solicitation later turned into an award notice still counts as a solicitation). Solicitations = solicitations and combined synopsis/solicitations. History from January 2020: SAM.gov replaced FBO.gov as the system of record in November 2019, and about half the notices carried over from FBO have no department. From the last 25 months Palanor keeps one slim row per notice and recomputes the closed months on every run; a month is published three days after it ends.

## Source

SAM.gov Contract Opportunities, U.S. General Services Administration: the public data extracts on sam.gov/data-services (ContractOpportunitiesFullCSV.csv, every active notice, daily; the Archived Data files FY2018 on). Public domain. Refreshed daily by /api/cron/sam-opportunities-sync.