The 995 Contracts That Can't Buy Another Year

If you are building an FY27 pursuit list off end dates, you are carrying an assumption you have almost certainly never tested: that a contract ending in 2027 might quietly become a contract ending in 2028, because the government exercises the next option and your capture plan slips a year.

So we tested it, on every row of our own board.

"How many of these contracts can the government simply keep, without doing anything?"

For 995 of the 1,166 DoD contracts and orders over $50M coming off period of performance between April 2027 and September 2028, the answer is none of them. The award record keeps two end dates, the day the contract ends and the day it ends after every pre-determined option is exercised, and on those 995 the two dates are the same day. That is 85.3% of the board by count and $381,957,475,475.79 of the $413,925,722,091.60 on it, which is 92.3% by value (chart below).

What the Two Dates Are

USAspending publishes both and defines each one against the other.

The current end date is "the date that the award ends, as agreed upon by the parties involved without exercising any pre-determined extension options." The potential end date is the same sentence with one word changed: "after exercising any pre-determined extension options."

The gap between them is the only extra time an agency can take without a new contract action. When the gap is zero, the option years are spent or were never written, and the contracting officer's remaining moves are the expensive ones: recompete it, bridge it, or write a justification.

The field does not come back from the search API that builds our expiration pipeline, which is why this has been invisible on the board all along. One call per live row to the award detail endpoint fills it in, and all 1,166 resolved with no 404s and no failures.

We did not take the field on faith either. Eight rows where this desk had already established the option structure from other surfaces on earlier runs all reproduced exactly, in both directions: CACI's FA875023F0080 and Odyssey's FA872124FB004 came back with potential end equal to current end, the way we reported them on October 5, and V2X's N6134021F0007 came back at 2028-05-31 against a 2027-05-31 current end, the way we reported it on October 3.