RecompetedHow Two Digits Date Your Whole Pipeline
Positions seven and eight of a solicitation number are supposed to name the fiscal year the instrument gets signed. We decoded all 5,312 readable numbers on DoD services notices published in fiscal 2026. Nine in ten are honest, and the ones that aren't are wrong in a direction that changes month by month.
On September 29, the last business day of fiscal 2026, the Office of Naval Research posted a solicitation for its Long Range Broad Agency Announcement. The number on it was N0001425SB001.
The title said FY25.
Responses run to the end of December.
That is not a typo, and it is not rare.
What the digits are supposed to say
FAR 4.1603(a)(2) is unambiguous about this. Positions seven and eight of a PIID are "the last two digits of the fiscal year in which the procurement instrument is issued or awarded," and the rule goes out of its way to add that this means "the date the action is signed, not the effective date if the effective date is different."
So those two characters in the middle of every solicitation number you track are a claim about a fiscal year. We went and checked how often the claim holds.
Nine in ten numbers are honest
We pulled every Department of War opportunity notice in NAICS 541, 561, 517 and 518 published between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026: sources sought, presolicitations, solicitations, combined synopsis/solicitations. 6,529 notices.
Of those, 5,312 (81.4%) carry a number in standard PIID shape, meaning a six-character activity code, two digits, and one of the FAR 4.1603(a)(3) instrument letters in position nine. The rest are local project titles and date-style numbers that cannot be decoded, so we left them out rather than guess.
Among the readable ones, 4,760 (89.6%) carry the fiscal year they posted in.
The misses lean hard one way. 451 notices (8.5%) carry an earlier fiscal year and only 101 (1.9%) carry a later one, which puts stale ahead of early by better than four to one.
October is the month the number is worth least
The annual figure hides the part you can plan against. Cut it by month and the two error directions run in opposite directions all year (chart below).
In October 2025, the first month of the fiscal year, 45.3% of notices carried a number from the year before. By September that was down to 3.4%, while the forward-coded share had climbed from 0.6% to 6.9%.
The October spike is mostly arithmetic: 76 of that month's 81 off-year notices were off by exactly one year, which is last fall's paperwork crossing the line into the new fiscal year. The long tail is a different animal. AFRL re-posted its Structural Materials Open BAA on April 22 under FA8650-18-S-5010, responses open to September 2027, eight fiscal years after the number was assigned. Space Technology Advanced Research is still running on FA9453-19-S-0002, with a March 2030 deadline.
Those numbers aren't wrong so much as permanent. The trap is the saved search that keys off the year.
The forward tail is the one to read
Here's where it gets useful. Split the 101 later-coded notices by notice type and they are not spread evenly at all:
- Sources sought: 66 of 1,268, or 5.2%
- Presolicitations: 16 of 817, or 2.0%
- Combined synopsis/solicitations: 13 of 1,718, or 0.8%
- Solicitations: 6 of 1,509, or 0.4%
Thirteen times the rate at the market-research stage. That makes sense once you say it out loud: the only moment an office has a reason to reach forward is the moment it is describing work it has not yet funded, and the fiscal year in the number is the office telling you when it expects to sign.
Navy writes 47 of the 101. Exactly five notices all year carry digits two fiscal years out, and all five are Navy: Strategic Systems Programs put N0003028R1005 on the street in May for FY28 fire control sustainment, NAWCAD posted a sources sought in April titled "Software Engineering Recompete" under N00421-28-RFPREQ-AC20000-0002, and MSC asked about shipboard firefighting support in August as N32205-28-FF. NAWCAD's PMA-231 program management support went all the way to a combined synopsis/solicitation on September 17 still carrying FY28 digits.
And offices keep the number once they pick it. USACE Honolulu ran a mechanical-electrical A-E sources sought in April under W911KB27RA006 and put the combined synopsis out on the same number five months later.
Final Thoughts
The clean example of what this signal is and isn't sits in our own coverage. USACE posted a presolicitation for the North Atlantic Division Air Force fuels requirement on November 3, 2025, numbered W912DY27RA001, and we led a radar on that program twice since. On September 29, eleven months later, Huntsville signed W912DY26CA075 instead: a bridge, justified, papered under FY26 digits because that is the year it was signed in.
The FY27 claim is still out there, unsigned, and still looks right.
Two digits date a requirement. What they never promised was a month, and if you have been reading them as a schedule, October is when that bill comes due.
Thanks for reading.