What's Left on the Board After September 30?

"If you cleared your desk on October 1, what would still be open?"

We pulled every active DoD solicitation and combined synopsis off SAM.gov on Wednesday morning and kept the ones with a response deadline still in front of them. That is 5,301 open bids.

4,442 of them close on or before September 30. Call it 84% of everything the Department currently has on the street, all of it due inside eleven business days (chart below).

October gets 766. November and everything after it gets 93.

The Wall Has a Monday

September 21 carries 1,030 deadlines by itself. That is one Monday holding more closing bids than the whole of October and November combined.

September 24 takes another 711. September 18, this Friday, takes 535.

So the crunch your proposal shop is feeling right now sits almost entirely on three days.

Most of That Pile Isn't Yours

Here is the catch, and it is the reason a raw SAM.gov count misleads anyone planning capacity off it.

3,135 of those 5,301 bids belong to the Defense Logistics Agency. That is 59% of the board, and on September 21 it is 788 of the 1,030. DLA Maritime alone accounts for 1,283 of the deadlines closing by the 30th.

Those are spares and consumables moving on combined synopses. If you run capture at a services prime or a mid-tier, you are not bidding them and you never were.

Strip DLA out and the board you actually compete on is 2,166 open bids. Of those, 1,520 close by September 30, which is 70%, a real wall but a noticeably softer one than the headline number suggests.

The buying offices carrying it, in order: NAVSUP at 520, Army Materiel Command at 168, USACE at 151, the National Guard Bureau at 122, Air Force Materiel Command at 67, NAVSEA at 55.

That Trough Is a Posting Lag

The empty right half of that chart is the part to read carefully.

October looks quiet because most of the notices that will set October deadlines have not posted yet.

A snapshot taken today can only show you the deadlines that already exist, so the far side of any fiscal-year boundary always looks thin. Frankly, anyone reading that trough as a forecast of a slow October is reading a posting artifact.

What the snapshot does tell you is how fast the refill arrives once it starts.

Across the 8,298 DoD solicitations published between August 12 and Wednesday, the median gap between posting and deadline was 10.4 days.

Three-quarters of them, 76.5%, gave 15 days or less. Just under half, 42.9%, gave ten days or less.

Weekly medians over those five weeks run 11.1, 8.9, 14.3, 10.4, 10.6 and 9.4 days, which is noise around a level.

The windows are holding steady. They were already short.

Two that closed today make the point concretely. The Office of Naval Research posted its Code 011 strategy, policy, plans and assessment support solicitation (N0001426R4003) on September 2 and took responses through 1:00pm Central today, a 14-day window on a portfolio-management services buy. NAVSUP posted the SeaPort ACU-5 administrative engineering support requirement (N0024426R3109) on September 11 and closed it at 11:00am Pacific today. Five days.

Final Thoughts

The practical read is a staffing one. Your proposal capacity is fully consumed between now and the 30th, most of it against three specific days, and then the visible pipeline goes quiet for roughly a fortnight while new-year money finds its way to contracting officers.

That quiet is the window, and it is short. Whatever posts in the back half of October will land with about two weeks on the clock, which is not enough time to start a capture from cold. The teams that convert in November are the ones using the trough to finish the work they can do before a solicitation exists: the teaming calls, the past-performance write-ups, the pricing assumptions that always take three days longer than anyone budgets.

None of that is new advice. What is new is that you can now put a date on when the desk clears, and it is October 1.

Thanks for reading.