10 guides
Federal contract opportunities, documents included
Federal contract opportunities from SAM.gov with the solicitation documents themselves: 62 fields, no API key, and attachment rates measured per agency and notice type.
Scrape SAM.gov
A walkthrough of extracting U.S. federal contract notices: which filters actually narrow the index, how to get the solicitation documents, and why there are three deadline fields.
The API key question
Several SAM.gov scrapers require you to register for an api.sam.gov key. That moves the quota problem, the approval wait and the renewal onto you — for data that is public either way.
Solicitation documents
Measured on a stratified sample covering 96.7% of the active index: Veterans Affairs posts documents on nearly every solicitation, the Department of Defense on about a quarter — and DoD is 63% of the index.
Deadline precision
SAM.gov stamps midnight UTC on deadlines that are date-only. Passing that through as an instant would present a precision that does not exist, so it is null instead.
SAM.gov data fields
62 fields, snake_case, null where a value is genuinely absent and never a missing key — with coverage measured across five days spread over ten months.
Set-aside codes
SBA, 8(a), WOSB, SDVOSB, HUBZone — the codes that reserve a contract for a category of small business, present on 46.1% of notices.
NAICS vs PSC
Two classification systems on the same notice, describing different things. One is better filled, and the difference decides which one your pipeline should key on.
Exclusions and debarment
63% of the federal exclusion list is individuals and only about a fifth of those carry a UEI. A name-matching lookup would manufacture false positives about real people.
Opportunity monitoring
A working monitoring pipeline: what to filter, how often to run, which deadline field to schedule against, and where the attachment rate changes your plan.
Is it legal?
Federal notices are published because the law requires agencies to publicise them, and U.S. Government works carry no copyright. That settles more than usual — and not everything.