Search Contract Opportunities on SAM.gov

After this lesson you should be able to search SAM.gov Contract Opportunities without an account, explain what a Login.gov account adds, and know that some federal buys never appear as a GPE synopsis. You should also know that AsherGate does not search SAM.gov or import a notice URL.

Confirm every listing against the files you download.

SAM.gov Contract Opportunities are procurement notices from federal contracting offices. The official page says anyone interested in doing business with the government can search them. The notices can include pre-solicitation notices, solicitation notices, award notices, and sole-source notices. Grant searches are not this system; SAM.gov points those to Grants.gov.

Anyone may search without an account. A user account, created through Login.gov, lets you save searches, follow changes to opportunities, and join interested-vendor lists. Following a notice is not an offer. It does not register your company and does not submit a bid.

FAR 5.102 says the Governmentwide Point of Entry may be accessed at https://www.sam.gov, and that synopsized solicitations are made available through the GPE. AsherGate is not the GPE. Your workflow is: find the listing on SAM.gov, download the files, then create a company draft here.

FAR 5.101 generally requires a GPE synopsis for proposed contract actions expected to exceed $25,000. For actions expected to exceed $20,000 but not $25,000, the contracting officer instead displays an unclassified notice or the solicitation in a public place or by appropriate electronic means. That display must be posted no later than the date the solicitation is issued and remain posted for at least 10 days or until after quotations have been opened, whichever is later. Some of those smaller actions can still be reached through the GPE when the notice permits electronic responses, but you cannot assume every buy under $25,000 will appear in Contract Opportunities.

FAR 5.202 lists situations where the contracting officer need not submit the 5.201 notice. Examples include national-security wording that cannot be synopsized without disclosing classified needs; unusual and compelling urgency when the Government would be seriously injured by the 5.203 time periods; certain foreign-government or treaty-directed sources; statutory sources such as some 8(a) awards; and actions not expected to exceed the simplified acquisition threshold when the notice is accessible through the GPE and the public can respond electronically. Do not treat a blank search result as proof that an agency has no need.

As of FAR 2.101 under FAC 2026-01, the simplified acquisition threshold means $350,000 except for listed contingency, emergency, and overseas humanitarian situations. Confirm the current definition before you rely on the figure.

Using the Nettlebrook story below, the facts copied from SAM.gov are notice AG-FIND-26-0211, Lackawanna Packaging Desk, 8,000 weatherproof asset labels, and a response due 21 October 2026 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Those lines come from the listing and the attached RFQ PDF, not from AsherGate.

The official step is to search Contract Opportunities, open the notice, and download every listed file. The product step is to create a New Solicitation draft named with that notice number and upload those files. Do not paste the SAM.gov URL into AsherGate and wait for an import. There is no import.