253 of 658 federal contracts expiring in the next 18 months drew exactly one offer last time

What was counted

Every federal contract in 28 NAICS codes with a recorded value between $250,000 and $20,000,000 whose period of performance ends between 2026-08-12 and 2028-02-11. That is 658 awards. For each one we read number_of_offers_received from the latest procurement transaction on the award, which is FPDS data exposed through USAspending's public API. 658 of the 867 awards we pulled carried a usable offer count; the rest reported none and are excluded rather than guessed at.

Nothing here is modelled, scraped from a paid service, or estimated. Any line can be checked by searching its award ID on usaspending.gov.

The full underlying dataset — every contract, its offer count, its set-aside and a direct USAspending link — is published as a CSV, together with the collector that builds it, at github.com/beeindustriesmail-tech/federal-recompete-offer-counts. It is released under CC0; you do not need our permission or our agreement to reuse it.

The same dataset is deposited on Zenodo with a permanent DOI, so it can be cited in writing that outlives this page: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21924171. That record carries the CSV, the collector script and a data dictionary setting out the method and its limits.

By NAICS code

The spread is the interesting part, and it is wide. In janitorial services, precision machining and landscaping, most expiring contracts had a single bidder last cycle. In highway and bridge construction not one of the thirty-two contracts we read did — every single one drew two offers or more, and so did six in seven industrial building contracts and six in seven guard contracts. A contractor deciding where to spend proposal time is choosing between those two worlds, and today has no way to tell which one a given solicitation belongs to until after the award is published.

The largest of them

The twelve single-offer contracts with the highest recorded value, each ending within 18 months, each recorded as competed, each having received one offer at its last award.

Why this is not an accusation

A single offer is not evidence that anything improper happened. Incumbents are often the only firm holding the clearances, the facility or the transition risk, and agencies compete work they know only one company will bid. The point is narrower and entirely practical: the offer count from the last cycle is the best public signal of whether the next cycle is worth a small firm's proposal budget, and it is not in any of the alert products those firms pay for.