- 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.
- 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 →