What it is, and who runs it
SAM.gov's own description of Contract Opportunities is “procurement notices from federal contracting offices”, and it lists the notice types it holds: pre-solicitation notices, solicitation notices, award notices, and sole source notices. That mix matters — not every record on it is a contract you can bid for.
The same site is also where a supplier registers an entity and gets the identifier federal buyers use to find and pay it. Registration and opportunity search are different jobs on the same system, and both take time.
Open SAM.gov Contract Opportunities — the portal’s own site.
What it does well
- One place for every federal civilian and defence opportunity, rather than one site per agency.
- Free to search and free to register, with an “active only” filter on the search so closed notices can be excluded.
- Notices name the buying office, the response deadline, and — where the buyer sets one — the small-business set-aside, which is the closest thing to a permission to bid that a notice carries.
- Machine-readable access exists, which is what lets a service like this one read the same notices you do.
Where it falls short for a small bidder
- It is federal only. City, county and state work is not on it at all — that is a separate set of portals, which is why we read three of them as well.
- An open federal solicitation usually publishes no contract value. If you need to know what comparable work has gone for, the notice will not tell you; the award records will.
- The feed is noisy for a small supplier: pre-solicitation and sole-source notices sit alongside live solicitations, and nothing on the site knows what your firm can actually deliver.
- Registration is its own project. Getting an entity registered and active is a prerequisite for being paid, not a step you can skip while you decide.
- The notice is a signpost, not the procurement. The documents and the submission usually live on the buying agency's own system, so a registration you do not have can end the bid before it starts.
How many open notices from it we hold
107 open notices from SAM.gov are in the snapshot behind this site, checked against the clock as this page was built.
Every notice below was still open when we last checked the official feeds, 2 days ago (11 November 2026 at 17:43 UTC).
We check every closing date each time this page is loaded, so a notice whose deadline has passed is never shown here — the dates you can see are still open. Check the official notice itself before you plan any bid work.
A notice being open is not the same as it being worth your time — and the portal has no view on that. What we add is the shortlist: the ones that plausibly suit a small supplier, each with a reason, plus what comparable contracts were actually awarded for.
The shortlist, not another feed
One email a week, every Tuesday: the live notices worth your time, each with the buyer, the closing date, the published value where the buyer published one, one line on why it fits a small supplier, and a link to the official notice. It is a subscription, billed monthly through Stripe, and you can cancel any time. We add no markup to anything.
The other portals we read
- Contracts Finder
Contracts Finder is the UK government's notice service for below-threshold work. What it does well, where it costs a small bidder time, and our live count.
- Find a Tender
Find a Tender is the UK's national public-sector notice service. What it does well, where a small bidder gets stuck, and the notices we hold from it today.
- the local US feeds
Where New York City, Los Angeles and Illinois publish their own bids, what each does well, and why a small supplier ends up with three logins and no shortlist.
- The free sample brief and the price
The offer page: what the weekly brief contains, the founding rate, the FAQ, and the sample.