Defense awards the day they are made, not ninety days later
Every business day at about five in the afternoon, Eastern, the Department of War announces each contract it has awarded worth $7.5 million or more. The award record carries the same contracts about ninety days later. Defense contract announcements keeps every day of those announcements, read into rows you can search, so you know who just won a defense contract while it still matters.
One day at a time, every award in it
The Defense contract announcements screen is under Intelligence in the menu, in More of the market. Each day is a card, newest first, and each award in it is a row: the company, its city and state, the part of the department that awarded it, the amount, the contract number and whether the company is a small business.
Search by words or by a contract number, and narrow by the agency, a smallest amount, small business only, and the days you want. A company links to its page when exactly one company on record has that name, and to a search of the record when it does not.
- A modification is marked as one, so a new award and a change to an old one are told apart
- The contracting activity is kept with every award, so you can see which office bought it
- Each day links to the announcement itself on war.gov
- A paragraph that could not be read into its parts is kept whole, never dropped
money not obligated by 30 September goes back, and nobody gets credit for handing it back
The first sign that a contract you track has gone
A recompete you have been working for a year can be awarded on a Tuesday, and the award record will not say so for three months. In that time you are still positioning for something that is over, and the company that won it is already hiring.
The announcement is the first official word. It names the winner, the amount and the contract number on the day, and the contracting activity tells you which office to watch for the follow-on. A large award to a prime is also the first sign of subcontracting work under it.
- Who just won in your market, by agency
- Which primes are about to need subcontractors
- The contract number to find the award again when the record has it
the end date was published the day the contract was signed, and the window opens a year before it
How each announcement is read
The department publishes each day as a list grouped by its parts: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Space Force, the Defense Logistics Agency and the rest. Each paragraph names a company and its place, says what it was awarded and for how much, and ends with the contracting activity and the contract number. Those are read into the columns on the screen, the agency heading over each paragraph is kept with it, and an asterisk after the name, which the department uses to mark a small business, is kept as that.
The amount is the first dollar figure in the paragraph. Where a paragraph announces a ceiling, a cumulative value or several companies at once, that figure is what the department wrote, and the paragraph is always shown with the row so you can read the rest in its own words.
Where it stops
Defense contract announcements comes with every paid plan. The department announces contracts of $7.5 million and more, so smaller awards are not in it, and no other department publishes a daily list like it. An announcement is not the award record: the amount is the one announced, which may be a ceiling rather than what was obligated. When the department publishes a day as a title and a link only, that day shows its title and the link to the announcement, and nothing more.
Related
- Award historyThe same awards once the record has them, with every action.
- Recompete radarThe contracts ending that you are positioning for.
- Incumbent profilesThe company that just won, and everything else it holds.
- The platform NewWhere this sits among the eight parts of the product.
See who was last awarded in your NAICS
Every code, every buying office, every vendor and every recompete, organized from the federal record and read nightly. Open it with a plan.