- SAM.gov
- System for Award Management — the U.S. government's official website for federal contract opportunities. Every listing on this site is sourced from SAM.gov's own published data.
- Solicitation / notice
- A public request from a government office asking businesses to submit a bid or quote for a job. This is the thing you're looking at on every card on this site.
- NAICS code
- A 6-digit number the government uses to classify what kind of business or trade a contract is for (e.g. 238220 = HVAC & mechanical contractors). Each category on this site maps to one NAICS code.
- PSC (Product/Service Code)
- A separate government code describing the actual product or service being bought on a specific notice. We use it, alongside the notice text, to sort listings into the right trade category.
- Set-aside
- A contract reserved so only businesses with a specific certification are allowed to bid on it. If a listing has no set-aside, it's open to any responsible business.
- Total Small Business (Total SB)
- A contract reserved for small businesses in general — no special certification needed beyond being a small business under the government's size rules.
- SDVOSB
- Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business. A contract set aside for businesses majority-owned by a veteran with a service-connected disability.
- 8(a)
- A Small Business Administration certification for small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. A contract set aside as 8(a) requires that certification to bid.
- WOSB / EDWOSB
- Woman-Owned Small Business, and Economically Disadvantaged Woman-Owned Small Business — SBA certifications for businesses majority-owned by women, with EDWOSB adding an economic-disadvantage requirement.
- HUBZone
- Historically Underutilized Business Zone. A certification for small businesses headquartered in, and employing people from, specific economically distressed areas.
- Confirmed location
- The government's own listing directly names this state. Our highest location confidence level — see the methodology page for the full three-level system.
- Verify location
- The government's location field was incomplete, so we pulled the state out of the notice's own text. Usually right, but double-check the official notice before you plan around it.
- Estimated location
- No location was findable in the notice text, so we show the state of the contracting office instead — the actual job site may be somewhere else.
- Fit score
- A 0-100 score for how well a notice's own text matches a specific trade, generated by a language model reading the notice — never a guess about who will win or how much competition there is.
- Fiscal Year (FY)
- The U.S. federal government's budget year, running October 1 to September 30 — not the calendar year. An award dated "FY2026" was made sometime between October 2025 and September 2026.
- Award / awardee
- A record of a contract that has already been won and assigned to a company. Awards are historical reference data (e.g. "who won this kind of job before") — they are never something you can still bid on.
- Long-term contract (IDIQ, BPA)
- A contract an agency awards once and then orders against for years, without running a fresh competition for each job. There is no list to join: a company is on one because it won that contract when the agency competed it, and agencies re-open them to new companies from time to time. Both of those are ordinary postings, so they show up the way any other job does. On last year's awards this covers indefinite-delivery contracts (by far the most common), blanket purchase agreements, basic ordering agreements, and — a small share — the GSA Schedule.
- Sources Sought
- An early-stage government notice asking the market whether qualified businesses exist for a future job — not yet a real solicitation you can bid on, but a signal that one may be coming.
- Presolicitation
- A notice announcing that a formal solicitation is coming soon, usually with a rough timeline — a heads-up before bidding opens.
- Open (biddable)
- Our word for a listing that is a real, currently active solicitation with a deadline that hasn't passed and isn't already committed to one company. See the methodology page for the exact rule.
- Small-business reserved %
- Of all the open listings in a category, the share that are reserved for some kind of small-business certification rather than open to any size of business.
Want the full picture of how our data is sourced and computed? Read the methodology →