Federal Contract Solicitations Posted: Department of Energy (Monthly)

## What this measures

The number of contract solicitations posted on SAM.gov in each month by the Department of Energy.

## Why it matters

A department's solicitations are the front of its spending pipeline, months before obligations appear in USAspending.

## How to read it

Seasonal, with a summer peak before the fiscal year ends on September 30; compare with the same month a year earlier. The series starts in January 2020 at 111. The latest month, September 2026, is 232. The high is 318 (August 2026) and the low 55 (February 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.

## 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. Department = the notice's department field.

## 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.