Can you bid on a Sources Sought notice?

No. A Sources Sought notice is market research under FAR Part 10. There is no contract to win and no proposal to submit. You respond with a capability statement, and the agency uses the responses to decide whether to set the work aside for small business and how to scope the eventual solicitation.

How many days do you get to respond to a federal solicitation?

For actions expected to exceed the simplified acquisition threshold of $350,000, FAR 5.203(c) requires at least 30 days from solicitation issuance to the due date for bids or proposals. Research and development actions get at least 45 days. Commercial products and services are excepted from both minimums, which is why a commercial buy can land with two weeks on the clock.

What is the difference between a Presolicitation and a Solicitation notice?

A Presolicitation notice announces that a solicitation is coming and must publish at least 15 days before it issues. A Solicitation notice is the actual request for proposals, quotes, or bids, with the documents attached and a deadline.

What dollar amount triggers a public notice on SAM.gov?

Proposed contract actions expected to exceed $25,000 generally must be published on SAM.gov, the Governmentwide Point of Entry. Agencies may post smaller actions voluntarily, so the absence of a notice does not prove the work was never competed.

Federal RFP Notice Types, Explained

Most people new to federal work treat every SAM.gov posting as a bid opportunity. Most postings are not. Nine notice types share one feed, and they sit at completely different stages of the buying process. Reading the type wrong is how teams spend a week on a capability statement for a requirement that was already wired, or skip the one notice where they could have shaped the scope in their favor.

Here is what each type means and what it is worth to you.

The nine notice types

These are the active values in the SAM.gov Get Opportunities API, which is the same taxonomy the website filters on:

Code	Notice type	Stage
`r`	Sources Sought	Market research
`s`	Special Notice	Information, industry days, draft documents
`p`	Presolicitation	A solicitation is coming
`o`	Solicitation	Submit an offer
`k`	Combined Synopsis/Solicitation	Submit an offer, commercial items
`a`	Award Notice	Someone already won
`u`	Justification (J&A)	Sole source, already decided
`i`	Intent to Bundle Requirements	DoD-funded consolidation
`g`	Sale of Surplus Property	The government is selling, not buying

Two codes are retired. f (Foreign Government Standard) and l (Fair Opportunity / Limited Sources) no longer apply, and the API documentation directs you to use Justification instead of the old fair-opportunity code.

Which notices can you actually bid on?

Solicitation and Combined Synopsis/Solicitation. That is the short list.

Everything else is either too early, in which case there is no offer to submit yet, or already over. An Award Notice tells you who won and for how much, which is useful competitive intelligence and useless as an opportunity. A Justification is the government explaining why it did not compete something, which is occasionally worth a protest conversation and never worth a proposal.

What is a Sources Sought notice?

Market research. The agency is trying to learn whether capable vendors exist, how many of them are small businesses, and what the commercial market actually offers.

You respond with a capability statement, not a proposal. No contract gets awarded from a Sources Sought.

This is the notice type most worth your attention, and the one most teams skip because nothing can be won from it. That logic is backwards. The responses to a Sources Sought determine whether the agency sets the work aside for small business, which NAICS code it lands under, and how the requirement gets written. By the time the solicitation publishes, those decisions are made. Competing on a requirement someone else helped shape is a worse position than helping shape it.

What is a Presolicitation notice?

An announcement that a solicitation is coming. Under FAR 5.203(a), the notice has to publish at least 15 days before the solicitation issues, or before a sole-source action under FAR 6.302 gets solicited and negotiated.

For commercial products and services, the contracting officer can shorten that period or skip it by using the combined synopsis/solicitation procedure in FAR 12.603. So a Presolicitation is a reliable 15-day warning on non-commercial work and no guarantee at all on commercial work.

Use the window to decide whether you are bidding and to line up teaming partners. Fifteen days is not enough time to find a partner you have never worked with and still write something good.

What is a Combined Synopsis/Solicitation?

The synopsis and the solicitation published as one document, which FAR 12.603 permits for commercial products and services. There is no advance warning and no separate announcement. The notice appears and the clock is already running.

These are where the short fuses live. Because commercial acquisitions are excepted from the 30-day response minimum, a combined synopsis/solicitation can give you two weeks, or less.

How long do you have to respond?

FAR 5.203 sets the floors. Most guides get this wrong by quoting a single number, and there is no single number.

Notice before solicitation: at least 15 days before the solicitation issues. Shorter is allowed for commercial products and services.
Above $25,000, up to the simplified acquisition threshold: a "reasonable" period. No fixed day count. The contracting officer weighs complexity, commerciality, availability, and urgency.
Above the simplified acquisition threshold ($350,000): at least 30 days from solicitation issuance to receipt of bids or proposals. Commercial products and services are excepted.
Architect-engineer services above the threshold: at least 30 days from publication of the notice of intent.
Research and development above the threshold: at least 45 days.
WTO Government Procurement Agreement and Free Trade Agreement acquisitions: at least 40 days from synopsis publication to receipt of offers, which can drop to as few as 10 days if the acquisition appeared in a published annual forecast.

The pattern worth internalizing: commercial buys move fast because the FAR lets them, and R&D moves slowly because the FAR makes it.

The publication date is not when the notice appeared

FAR 5.203(g) lets contracting officers presume publication happened one day after transmission to the Governmentwide Point of Entry, unless they have evidence otherwise. The regulation is explicit that this presumption does not waive the mandatory waiting and response times.

In practice this means the timestamp you see and the date the clock legally started can differ by a day. On a 30-day response that is noise. On a combined synopsis/solicitation with a 10-day fuse, a day matters, and it is the kind of day that gets lost waiting for someone to check the feed on Monday.

What this means for monitoring

If you watch only Solicitation and Combined Synopsis/Solicitation, you see opportunities at the moment you have the least leverage over them. If you watch Sources Sought and Presolicitation too, you see the same requirements weeks or months earlier, while the scope is still soft.

The cost of watching everything is noise. A single agency can post hundreds of notices a day across all nine types, and almost none of them are yours. That filtering problem is the actual problem, and it is not solved by checking SAM.gov more often.

Sources. FAR 2.101 definitions and FAR 5.203 publicizing and response times, both current as of FAC 2026-01, effective March 13, 2026. Notice type codes from the SAM.gov Get Opportunities Public API documentation. Verified October 14, 2026.