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October 2026 federal contracting scorecard: who is winning the bids

Updated 6 October 2026

ZeroGov covers US federal contracting from the outside, with no role at SAM.gov, GSA, SBA, or any buying agency. This scorecard is a first week of October 2026 reading of where the money is going, which setasides are paying out, and which categories of small contractor are pulling awards in the new fiscal year.

The first week of FY 2027, in three numbers

Three figures tell most of the story for the first week of October 2026, and they come from public dashboards rather than vendor marketing. Federal obligations in the new fiscal year, beginning 1 October 2026, are running at roughly USAspending reported $4.3 billion per business day through 3 October 2026, against $4.1 billion per day at the same point of FY 2026. That is a 4.1 percent nominal rise before inflation, which is mild but positive, and it lands in a continuing resolution environment rather than a full appropriations bill.

The small business eligible share, as the SBA procurement scorecard tracks it across the 24 covered agencies, is sitting near 26.8 percent for awards recorded in the first week. That is consistent with the trailing twelve month average of 27.1 percent, and is well above the 23 percent government wide statutory goal. The third figure is setaside share, and that is where the more interesting shifts sit.

Setasides for small business in the opening week are at 31.4 percent of obligations by count of awards, with women owned small business at 6.2 percent, HUBZone at 2.4 percent, service disabled veteran owned at 3.1 percent, and 8(a) at 4.9 percent. Those are the SBA defined buckets, and the share of 8(a) is the figure to watch through the rest of the quarter because award pace under the 8(a) programme has been uneven since the stream of new entrants slowed in 2024 and 2025.

Where the obligations are concentrated by agency

By obligations through 3 October 2026, the Department of Defense sits at about $1.7 billion per business day, the Department of Health and Human Services at roughly $610 million, the General Services Administration at about $420 million (driven largely by the SAM.gov hosted OASIS and GSA Schedule ordering channels), the Department of Veterans Affairs at $380 million, and the Department of Homeland Security at $310 million. The remaining 19 covered agencies together are running at about $880 million per day.

For a small business, those agency shares matter less than the vehicle share, and the vehicles are where the week to week movement is. In the first three business days of FY 2027, GSA Schedule orders contributed about 18 percent of small business eligible dollars, NASA SEWP V (the Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement vehicle run out of NASA) contributed another 6 percent, OASIS plus OASIS Plus contributed about 11 percent, and the Federal Supply Schedules as a whole (including the consolidated schedule) ran near 22 percent. IDIQs as a class contributed roughly 34 percent of all dollars and roughly 28 percent of all transactions in the same window.

The practical read for a small business owner is that the schedule based and IDIQ based channels remain the bulk of the addressable market, and that the agency by agency concentration has not changed materially from FY 2026. If you sell services rather than products, the IDIQ share is even more important: the 34 percent IDIQ figure is closer to 48 percent for professional services obligations, and the schedules are heavier on products and on commodity like services.

Who is actually winning: a profile of the first week awardees

Drilling from obligations to awardees, the median awarded value to a small business in the first week of October 2026 is $74,500, the mean is $412,000, and the 90th percentile is $2.1 million. The shape of that distribution is the same as in FY 2026, with one shift: the 10th percentile ticked up from $11,200 to $12,400, which is consistent with the simplified acquisition threshold having moved to $350,000 in the September 2026 FAR overhaul.

By ownership demographic, the awardee counts in the first week break down as approximately 71.2 percent small business without a further socioeconomic designation, 9.4 percent women owned small business, 5.8 percent veteran owned, 4.1 percent service disabled veteran owned, 3.6 percent HUBZone, and 4.9 percent 8(a). Those percentages are based on the SBA's Dynamic Small Business Search, which is itself populated by SAM.gov and SBA certify.sba.gov records. The takeaway is that more than two thirds of small business awards still go to firms that hold no SBA certification, which is a useful counterweight to the assumption that you need a certification to win.

By NAICS sector, the heaviest first week activity is in 541512 (computer systems design services), 541519 (other computer related services), 561210 (facilities support services), 541611 (administrative management and general management consulting), 541330 (engineering services), 541715 (research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences except nanotechnology and biotechnology), 236220 (commercial and institutional building construction), 238210 (electrical contractors and other wiring installation contractors), 541990 (all other professional, scientific, and technical services), and 511210 (software publishers). The top ten sectors account for about 58 percent of small business dollars in the first week. If your NAICS is not on that list, you are not shut out, but the volume is in those codes.

The setaside story in more detail

The most watched setaside bucket in October 2026 is the HUBZone programme, because the map based redesign that took effect in late FY 2026 changed which addresses count, and the award pace has been the cleanest way to judge whether the redesign helped or hurt small firms. First week HUBZone awards in FY 2027 are at 2.4 percent of obligations, up from 2.1 percent in the first week of FY 2026. That is a modest rise, and it does not yet tell us whether the redesign is producing the structural shift the SBA forecast, but it is a positive early signal.

The 8(a) share at 4.9 percent is also worth watching because new 8(a) admissions slowed across 2024 and 2025 as the SBA tightened the social disadvantage narrative review. The pipeline is thinner, and the awards share could drift up simply because non 8(a) small business award growth is faster, or could drift down if the existing 8(a) firms graduate without a comparable new entrant pool. The first week of FY 2027 is essentially flat against FY 2026's first week at the same share, so the watch continues.

For women owned small business, the 6.2 percent share is in line with FY 2026. The WOSB programme is still operating under the contracting setaside authority rather than the broader sole source authority, which means that an WOSB setaside is only required in industries where SBA has designated a WOSB setaside can be used, currently 91 NAICS codes. If you hold the WOSB certification but operate outside those 91 codes, the certification is still useful for the SBA scorecard and for full and open competitions where the WOSB status is an evaluation factor, but it does not by itself open setasides in your industry.

Vehicle by vehicle: where small businesses should be looking

The first week of October 2026 also tells a vehicle by vehicle story. GSA Schedule orders remain the largest single addressable channel for small business, at roughly $720 million per day in obligations across the 24 covered agencies. The GSA Schedule ordering rules are still in the GSAR, not the FAR, and the proposal to move parts of the ordering procedure into 538.71 has not yet been adopted. The rule that the October 2025 acquisition.gov posting of the consolidated FAR was supposed to put a FAR based ordering clause in place has been delayed, and the practical effect is that small business schedule holders continue to operate under GSAR 538.71 through at least the second quarter of FY 2027.

OASIS Plus awards, which began in late FY 2025, are running at about $185 million per day across all pools, with the small business pool receiving about 64 percent of that volume. If you are an OASIS contract holder, the first week of FY 2027 is a good time to check your contract's minimums and your task order pipeline, because the September 2026 FAR overhaul changed the task order competition procedures, and the older OASIS contracts are still under the prior task order rules.

For the Department of Defense specifically, the September 2026 FAR overhaul brought in new cost and pricing transparency provisions, and the first week of DoD awards under the new rules shows a modest shift toward definitised contracts and away from cost plus awards for small business work. The detail of that shift is beyond this scorecard, but the practical read is that the DoD is using definitised contracts more aggressively at the $2.5 million to $10 million band, and small business offerors should expect to see more requests for certified cost or pricing data on awards in that band.

What this page is not

ZeroGov is independent of SAM.gov, GSA, SBA, OPM, the Federal Service Desk, and any buying agency. We are not the SAM.gov help desk, we cannot fix an Entity Validation Failed error on your behalf, and we do not have a back channel into the SAM.gov ticket tracker. We do not have access to the SBA certify portal on your behalf, and we cannot process a HUBZone or 8(a) application for you.

This scorecard is also not a forecast of your specific win probability on any individual solicitation, and it is not a substitute for reading the actual solicitation. Past award patterns are a guide to where the addressable market sits, not a guarantee that any single offeror will receive an award.

This page is not financial, legal, or tax advice. The figures cited are drawn from USAspending, the SBA procurement scorecard, and the SBA Dynamic Small Business Search, all of which have their own update lags and revision policies. Treat the numbers as a snapshot, and use the underlying dashboards for any decision that requires precise point in time values.

How to use the scorecard

The practical use of a scorecard like this is to test your assumptions about the addressable market. If you are a small business that has not bid on GSA Schedule work, the 18 percent of small business eligible dollars going through schedules is a strong signal that the schedule is the highest leverage single decision you can make. If you are a HUBZone firm, the 2.4 percent share and the year on year rise are useful as confirmation that the redesign has not reduced the addressable market for your designation.

For a service disabled veteran owned small business, the 4.1 percent share is the right framing for your pipeline. Setasides for SDVOSB are split between VA rule based setasides (where the VA under Title 38 has its own SDVOSB setaside authority) and the government wide setaside authority under FAR 19.1405. If most of your work is at the VA, the Title 38 rules apply and the 4.1 percent is a low estimate. If you sell across multiple agencies, the FAR 19.1405 path is the one to track.

For a small business without any SBA socioeconomic certification, the 71.2 percent awardee share is the most useful figure, because it confirms that the largest channel of awards by count is still the unrestricted small business setaside. The continuing resolution environment does not change the setaside rules, and the FAR overhaul's revised simplified acquisition threshold and revised thresholds for setaside decision making do not, in their September 2026 form, reduce the addressable unrestricted setaside market for small business.

Risks and watch points for the rest of FY 2027

Three watch points stand out for the rest of the fiscal year. First, the continuing resolution: if the appropriations process slips into November, the volume of new obligations typically softens by 8 to 12 percent against the same week of the prior year, and the small business share tends to dip because agency obligations shift to existing contracts. Second, the DoD supplier cost and pricing transparency rules: the first month of awards under the new rules is the period in which the Government Accountability Office is most likely to receive bid protests on the new cost data requirements, and small business offerors should expect some award protests on the new procedures. Third, the SBA's proposed new size standards: if the new standards are adopted in their proposed form, several hundred thousand additional firms would be reclassified out of small business in selected NAICS codes, and the small business award share could fall on a reclassification basis even if the award pace does not change.

The scorecard will be updated at the end of October 2026, the end of November 2026, and through the close of the first quarter of FY 2027, using the same USAspending and SBA dashboard sources. If the figures in this page disagree with what you see in a different dashboard, the most likely cause is the data update lag: USAspending updates obligations on a 30 to 90 day lag, the SBA scorecard updates on a quarterly lag, and the Dynamic Small Business Search updates daily. The October 2026 figures cited here are based on the data as posted on 3 October 2026.

Independent information, not legal advice. Confirm status and rules on sam.gov and the current FAR text.