Reference
Government contract number lookup: how to read a federal PIID
A federal contract number is a Procurement Instrument Identifier, or PIID — 13 to 17 characters recording which office bought, in which fiscal year, and under what kind of instrument. The format is fixed by FAR subpart 4.16, so the same positions carry the same meaning on every award issued since 2017.
The four parts of a contract number
Positions are counted from the left and never shift. Only the serial number varies in length — agencies pick four to eight characters and use the same width throughout.
A standalone contract
Held by THE MITRE CORPORATION, worth $15.21B.This contract’s pageDepartment of DefenseNAICS 541990Expiring in this industry
| Positions | Value | What it records |
|---|---|---|
| 1–6 | FA8702 | The activity address code of the office that issued the award — a six-position code identifying a specific agency office or unit. Within DoD it is the office’s DoDAAC. 498 distinct issuing offices appear across the contract numbers tracked here. |
| 7–8 | 25 | The last two digits of the fiscal year the instrument was issued — fiscal 2025 here. Not the year the work ends, and not the calendar year. |
| 9 | C | The instrument type. C marks contracts of all types except indefinite-delivery contracts — a standalone award, not an order placed against a vehicle. See the table below. |
| 10–13 | B001 | The serial number, assigned by the issuing office. It carries no meaning of its own — two offices can both issue a 0001. |
Position nine says what kind of award it is
One letter separates a contract from an order placed against one. These are the letters that occur in the 3,067 contract numbers FedTally has parsed, with the FAR definition of each and how often it turns up.
| Letter | Instrument | Seen |
|---|---|---|
| F | Task orders, delivery orders or calls under an indefinite-delivery contract, blanket purchase agreement or basic ordering agreement | 1,217 |
| D | Indefinite-delivery contracts, including Federal Supply Schedules, GWACs and multi-agency contracts | 783 |
| P | Purchase orders | 409 |
| C | Contracts of all types except indefinite-delivery contracts | 314 |
| A | Blanket purchase agreements | 240 |
| G | Basic ordering agreements | 54 |
| N | Reserved for departmental or agency use | 48 |
| V | Purchase orders | 2 |
Letters K, M, N, S and T are reserved by the FAR for departmental or agency use, so their meaning is set by the issuing agency rather than government-wide. E, J, W, X and Z are reserved for future use; I and O are not used at all.
A task order carries its own number and its parent’s
An indefinite-delivery vehicle (IDV) is a contract that fixes terms without a firm quantity; agencies buy against it by placing task or delivery orders, and each order gets its own contract number. That is why one award can show two: 1,271 of the 2,000 contracts here — 64% — are orders under a parent vehicle.
The order
The vehicle it was placed against
Held by LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION, worth $1.9B.This contract’s pageDepartment of DefenseNAICS 336414Expiring in this industry
Both numbers open with W31P4Q, so the same office issued the vehicle and the order. The fiscal year moves from 2023 to 2023. Position nine moves from D, an indefinite-delivery contract, to F, an order placed against one. Searching the vehicle number returns every order under it; searching the order number returns one.
Numbers issued before October 2017 look different
FAR 4.1601(b) gave agencies until 1 October 2017 to adopt this format, and it applies to new awards only — a contract signed before then keeps the number it was given. Those numbers are agency-specific, usually shorter, and often start with letters standing for the agency rather than an activity address code. 204 of the 3,271 identifiers in the current snapshots predate the deadline and do not decode by position.
Where to look one up
- FedTally’s expiring contracts — the contract number, incumbent, value and end date for every award running out inside 180 days, by industry.
- USAspending.gov — indexes awards by contract number and returns obligations, agency and recipient.
- SAM.gov — the system of record. FedTally’s contract data is drawn from its Contract Awards feed.
Format and definitions from FAR subpart 4.16 (Unique Procurement Instrument Identifiers). Counts measured across the 2,000 contracts in FedTally’s current SAM.gov Contract Awards snapshots — public domain US Government data — and change as those snapshots resync.