Federal Procurement Data System, explained for people who bid

Every federal contract action above a reporting threshold is recorded in a public database. Used properly it tells you who buys what you sell, who they buy it from, how much they pay and when the current arrangement ends. Used improperly it is a very large spreadsheet.

Match my company

What the system records

The Federal Procurement Data System is the government's record of contract actions. Each entry describes one action, which may be a new award, a modification, or an order placed under an existing vehicle.

Who awarded it: agency, sub-agency and contracting office
Who received it: the vendor, with its entity identifier
What it was for: NAICS code, product or service code, and a description
How much: obligated amount for the action, and the potential total value including options
How it was bought: competition status, set-aside type, contract vehicle and pricing type
When: signed date, start date, current end date and potential end date

Award data also appears in the public spending portal, which presents much the same underlying record in a friendlier interface.

The fields that actually matter for research

Most of the record is administrative. Five fields do the work.

NAICS code. Start here. It is how you find actions in your own market rather than in everybody's.
Contracting office. Agencies are not monoliths. The office is the real buyer, and offices have habits.
Competition and set-aside fields. They tell you whether the work was competed at all, and which pool it was competed within. A long history of sole source awards is a very different market from a history of full and open competition.
Potential end date. This is the field people miss. It tells you when a recompete is likely to appear, which gives you months of lead time instead of days.
Obligated against potential value. The difference tells you whether an award is being used as expected or has become something else.

Turning the record into a decision

Find your market

Filter by your NAICS codes and look at which agencies and offices buy this work at all. Some markets are concentrated in two offices, which changes where you spend your relationship effort.

Identify the incumbents

For each buying office, look at who has been receiving the awards and for how long. Repeat awards to the same vendor across years, especially uncompeted ones, describe an entrenched position.

Read the pricing pattern

Look at typical obligated amounts in your codes at that office. If the work is routinely awarded at a scale your company cannot carry, that is a no-bid decision you can make a year early.

Build a recompete calendar

Potential end dates in your codes are a pipeline. Work backwards: a requirement ending next autumn usually appears as a sources sought notice months before that, which is where you want to be present.

What the data will not tell you

It records actions, not intentions, so it is history rather than forecast
Descriptions are frequently terse and occasionally unhelpful
Reporting lags and corrections mean recent entries are not final
An action below the reporting threshold may not appear at all
Nothing in it explains why an award was made, which is what a debriefing is for

Treat it as evidence, not as an oracle. Combined with the notice record it is the strongest free research material in the market.

The same research, next to the opportunity

Doing this research by hand for one requirement takes an afternoon. Doing it for every opportunity you consider is not realistic, which is why most no-bid decisions get made without it.

FederalContracts puts competitor award history beside each matched opportunity: prior awards for the same NAICS code and agency, the awardees, the values and the dates. The research happens before you decide, not after you have already written the proposal.