How Long Is a Draft RFP Good For?

If you pulled a draft RFP off SAM this week, you now have a scope, an evaluation approach, and a solicitation number. What you do not have is a date.

Two of them landed inside the last day and a half. USSOCOM posted the draft for Program Manager Counterproliferation service support at 1:57 Saturday morning, and the Air Force put out the draft for the Global Unified Airbase Readiness and Defense IDIQ on Friday night, solicitation number FA2381999.

So we pulled the rest.

Every Defense draft-RFP notice on SAM since Oct. 1, 2024, keyed to its own solicitation number: 161 of them.

What the draft actually predicts

Thirty-seven have a real, non-draft solicitation posted under that same number. The median wait was 90 days, and the distribution has no bunching near zero at all (chart below).

18 of the 37 took more than 90 days. The slowest quarter waited 183 days or more. The longest was NAVAIR's C-40 contractor logistics support: draft solicitation Dec. 13, 2024, actual solicitation Jan. 12, 2026, a gap of 395 days. The Marine Corps PKI support services draft ran 390. DLA Aviation's KC-46 landing gear PBL ran 241.

The fast end exists.

Army Training Models went draft on Jan. 23 this year, solicitation on March 4, award notice on July 27. That is the whole cycle inside six months, and about as clean as this gets.

So a draft tells you the requirement is real and the shop is staffed enough to write a PWS. It does not tell you the quarter.

The other 124

Here's the part that should change what you do with the number.

100 of the 161 drafts are the only notice that has ever posted under their solicitation number. No presolicitation, no RFP, no amendment, no award. Not one of the 124 non-converting drafts carries an award notice on its number either.

Two that a capture plan would have tracked:

Army Watercraft Sustainment Maintenance. ACC-DTA posted three zone drafts on Dec. 16, 2024, W912CH-25-R-L001 through L003, splitting CONUS, OCONUS and pier-side. 649 days later, each of those three numbers still holds exactly one notice.
NAWCAD WOLF air platform engineering and integration, N00421-25-R-0002. Draft RFP Oct. 16, 2024. 710 days, nothing since.

To be fair, silence on a number is not proof that nothing happened. A requirement can come back under a fresh solicitation number in a new fiscal year, and a fair-opportunity competition under an existing IDIQ never touches SAM in the first place.

That is exactly why the number matters: the saved search you built off the draft is watching a string the government may never use again.

The filter problem underneath it

One more finding out of the same pull, and it is a tooling bug in your own monitoring.

Of the 161 drafts, 74 posted as presolicitations and 57 as special notices. The other 22 posted as Solicitations.

SAM's notice type is a field the agency picks, and a seventh of the time the agency picked the one that means the RFP is on the street.

If your alerts key on notice type, those 22 arrived looking like live competitions. And the reverse case is worse: drafts that post as special notices are invisible to anyone filtering for presolicitations and solicitations, which is most people.

Final Thoughts

None of this makes the draft RFP less valuable. It is still the cheapest look you get at the evaluation scheme, the PWS structure, and the CLIN architecture before the clock starts, and reading one is still the highest-return hour in a capture cycle.

What it will not carry is the schedule. Roughly a quarter of drafts older than six months have a matching RFP on file, and the ones that do took a median of 120 days to get there.

Plan the proposal staffing off the agency's own history with that number. The draft is a statement of intent, and intent at DoD has a long tail.

Thanks for reading.