Two-thirds of expiring 8(a) contracts were never competed
Across the 20 industries FedTally tracks, 134 of the 204 expiring 8(a) set-aside contracts were awarded sole-source — never opened to competition.
· Updated
The 8(a) programme is the flagship federal set-aside: firms admitted to it can win contracts that are closed to everyone else. But closed to everyone else and competed are not the same thing. When we counted the 8(a) contracts nearing the end of their period of performance across the 20 industries FedTally tracks, most had never been competed at all.
As of 29 August 2026, 204 8(a) contracts in those industries sit inside their final 180 days. 134 of them — 66% — carry the code 8AN, which SAM.gov spells out as 8(A) SOLE SOURCE. The other 66 carry 8A, 8A COMPETED. Two-thirds of the expiring 8(a) pipeline, in other words, went to a single named firm without a competition.
The codes are on the page
This is not an inference. Every row on FedTally’s 8(a) set-aside page prints the set-aside code SAM assigned it. 8AN is a sole-source award — one a contracting officer directed to a specific 8(a) firm. 8A is competed among 8(a) firms. Open the page, count the labels, and the split is there to check.
Where the work sits
The 204 contracts run across 17 agencies and 160 distinct incumbents, but four buyers hold most of them.
| Agency | Expiring 8(a) |
|---|---|
| Defense (DoD) | 66 |
| Health & Human Services | 35 |
| State | 19 |
| Homeland Security | 13 |
| 13 other agencies | 71 |
| All 17 agencies | 204 |
The timing is tight. 139 of the 204 — more than two-thirds — reach the end of their period of performance within 90 days. For an incumbent that means a recompete decision now; for anyone else it means a short runway to position against a contract that may not be competed at all.
Why it matters to a small firm
A firm planning against the 8(a) pipeline usually treats an expiring contract as a chance to bid. At 66% sole-source, that assumption is wrong most of the time. The realistic play is earlier and more relational: get known to the contracting shop, get onto the vehicle, and be the firm an officer can direct work to — because for two of every three of these awards, that decision was made without a solicitation. The competed third is where an open bid actually has a path, and it is worth knowing which third a given contract is in before spending a capture budget on it.
How much can go sole-source
The sole-source route is not unlimited. Under the 8(a) rules, a requirement expected to draw two or more capable 8(a) bidders at a fair price must be competed once it clears the “rule of two” threshold — $7 million for manufacturing, $4.5 million for everything else (13 CFR 124.506(a)). Below that, an agency may award sole source. Above roughly $25–30 million (a higher $100 million figure applies to a Department of Defense agency under 13 CFR 124.506), a sole-source 8(a) award needs a written justification — see FAR 19.808-1 and 13 CFR 124.506. And an individually-owned firm has a lifetime cap of $168.5 million in combined 8(a) awards before it can no longer take them sole source (13 CFR 124.519); tribally- and ANC-owned firms are exempt.
One clarification, because it is widely misread: the 8(a) program actions in early 2026 removed firms from the program, not contracts from the books. SBA suspended 1,091 participants in January and moved to terminate several hundred more in March for missing annual review documents (SBA releases 26-26 and 26-34) — those are eligibility actions affecting future awards. Contracts already in force run under their own terms. If a contract you are watching is on this page, its end date is the date to plan around.
How this was counted, and what it isn’t
The figures come from SAM.gov’s Contract Awards API, read on 29 August 2026. FedTally tracks 20 NAICS industry codes and holds up to 100 award records per code — about 2,085 live contracts in all. Within that sample we kept the rows SAM tags 8A or 8AN whose period of performance had not yet ended, and split them by code.
This is a sample, not a census. It covers 20 industries out of hundreds, and the counts move a little every night as SAM files new modifications and expired contracts drop out — so the percentage is the durable figure, not the raw total. We also don’t quote a combined dollar value: contract amounts in this feed are inflated by ceiling figures on vehicles that will never be fully spent, and a single row can swing the sum by billions. Counts and shares are solid; aggregate dollars are not. The one number that carries the finding — roughly two in three expiring 8(a) contracts were sole-source — is countable by hand on the page it came from.