Five Years Stopped Being the Ceiling in February
Of the 375 Defense services contracts of $50 million or more coming off period of performance between March 2027 and September 2028, 54 run within two days of exactly five years, and the five-year bin is twice as tall as any other on the board. FAR 17.204(e) is what pressed that shape into the market, and DoD stopped using it on February 1.
Measure every large Defense services contract on our expiring board from its start date to its current end date, and the lengths do not spread out. They stack on whole years, and one year runs away with it.
Five.
Fifty-four of the 375 services contracts of $50 million or more coming off period of performance between March 2027 and September 2028 run between 1,824 and 1,828 days. The three-month bin holding the five-year mark stands more than twice as tall as the next one, 67 against 33 (chart below).
That shape has a cause, and the cause is one sentence of regulation your customer stopped using on February 1.
The Sentence
FAR 17.204(e), still sitting in 48 CFR chapter 1 today:
"Unless otherwise approved in accordance with agency procedures, the total of the basic and option periods shall not exceed 5 years in the case of services."
Information technology was carved out. Everything else in the services column got planned around five, and a generation of base-plus-four-options structures is what came of it.
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