RecompetedTwo Weeks Is the Whole Proposal Schedule
Fifty-one services solicitations hit SAM.gov in the first eighteen days of September. Three in five close inside two weeks, and the median gives you 11.3 days from posting to offers due. Here is what that does to a capture plan.
Fifty-one services solicitations arrived on SAM.gov in the first eighteen days of September. Thirty of them close inside two weeks.
We pulled every notice typed Solicitation in NAICS 541, 561 and 517 published on SAM.gov from September 1 through this morning, and measured each one from its own posting timestamp to the offers-due date printed on it. Professional and engineering services, facilities and base support, telecom. The median arrival gives you 11.3 days, and fifteen of the fifty-one give a week or less (chart below).
The tail is where the competitions you recognize live
Ten of the fifty-one run 30 days or longer, and they read like a pursuit list.
NAVAIR posted the FTSS V Maritime COMS RFP on September 17 with offers due October 29 (N6134026R1014, 41.8 days) and PMA CSS Competition PMA 261 two days earlier with 38.4.
NAVSEA gave the PMS 470 professional support services RFP 29.3 days, the Marine Corps gave PM MAGTF C2 program office support 28.9, and a USACE multiple-award IDIQ for construction-support services got 35.1.
One Army commercial solutions opening, AIE-ITS (W50NH9-26-S-0001), stays open until September 2027. That is what a CSO is for, and it is why the median carries this chart while the mean (22.8 days) sits off to the side.
Everything else is the ordinary run of the solicitation board. Air Combat Command's HQ ACC Tech Refresh: 5.0 days (FA480026Q0122). The Army's FY26 ODS OEMTD REFoRM work order: 6.1 (W9124926RA025).
A Virginia National Guard drinking-water service got 3.0, posted Tuesday afternoon and closed today at noon.
So the flagship competitions get a month, and the task-order-sized work that actually fills a services P&L gets a week.
Three of every four postings are amendments
Strip the census down to postings with a readable due date and you get 201 of them. 150 carry a parent notice. They are amendments: answers to questions, a revised PWS, a new Section M, a moved deadline.
Now the number that should reorganize your week. The median amendment lands with 6.8 days left on the clock. Seventy-nine of the 150 post with a week or less to go, thirty with three days or less, five inside twenty-four hours. NAVSUP amended the SeaPort ACU-5 LCAC engineering support solicitation (N0024426R3109) at 3:25pm Eastern on September 16, against a deadline at 7:00pm that same evening.
The clock also moves the other way when the government needs it to. Amendment 0003 to the NAWS China Lake base operations recompete (N6247326R9953) posted September 11 and pushed proposals from September 14 to November 12, the third extension in that chain and 125 days of total slip, which this desk walked version by version on Sunday.
Either way, the schedule belongs to the contracting officer.
Who can bid on eleven days?
"Who already has the proposal written when the RFP posts?"
The incumbent, and whoever spent the summer shaping the requirement.
Eleven days is enough to price work you already perform, because the staffing plan is your current roster, the rates are last year's rates plus escalation, the past performance narrative is the contract you are sitting on, and the PWS is a document you helped write during market research. Eleven days is not enough to source a subcontractor team, get letters of commitment, build a basis of estimate from scratch, and put a cost volume through review.
September makes it worse. It is the lowest sources-sought month of the fiscal year in four consecutive years, averaging 789.8 notices against 1,163.2 in the other eleven months, and the highest justification month of every one of those years.
The market research that would have told you this work was coming happened in March, or it did not happen at all.
Final Thoughts
Run the same eighteen days in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and the medians come back at 9.4, 5.9 and 6.8 days on smaller counts.
So this September is normal. That is the part worth sitting with.
Your real proposal schedule started twelve months ago, when you were deciding which expiring contracts to track and which spring sources-sought to answer. By the time the notice posts, the only live question is whether you can turn what you already built into a submission in eleven days.
Thanks for reading.