The Age Filter Hiding in Our Dollar Floor

This morning the desk wrote up three Army installations whose base operations work is on the street right now, and had to note in passing that our own expiration board tracks none of them.

That is the kind of sentence you write once and then have to go measure.

"How much of the base operations market does a $50 million screen actually see?"

So we counted. Every DoD prime award coded NAICS 561210 whose current period of performance ends inside our own forward window, April 5, 2027 through September 26, 2028, no dollar floor applied: 533 contracts carrying $5.73B in obligations.

Our board carries 19 of them.

The Nineteen Are Just the Old Ones

Strip out the noise first, because the honest version of this number has to. 397 of the 533 have obligated under $5,000,000, and most of them are small recurring orders nobody builds a capture plan around.

That leaves 136 contracts anyone in this business would call a real requirement. Nineteen of them clear our screen.

The other 117 hold $1,694,662,002 between them and sit on the board nowhere at all.

Now, the floor is applied to obligated dollars, and obligated dollars on a services contract accumulate a funding increment at a time. So the screen is doing something other than what it says on the tin.

Median elapsed time since award, for the 19 we see: 4.3 years. For the 117 we miss: 1.6 years.

That is a filter on contract age wearing a dollar sign. A requirement crosses $50 million in obligations somewhere in its fourth year, which is roughly when the follow-on is already being drafted, and before that it is invisible to anyone screening the same way we do.