How do I search contracts on SAM.gov?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

SAM.gov is the U.S. General Services Administration's site for federal contract opportunities, and searching it does not require an account. Its Contract Opportunities page describes them as "procurement notices from federal contracting offices" and answers the account question in one line: "Anyone may search contract opportunities without an account." An account is what lets you save searches, follow changes to an opportunity and join interested vendor lists, and the same page sends you to login.gov to create one (SAM.gov — Contract Opportunities, read 23 September 2026).

Opportunities and awards are two different searches

The search box on that page is a single text field with a Show active only control beside it. SAM.gov's public pages do not list the filters on the results screen, so this page does not either.

Past awards live somewhere else. The opportunities collection does carry award notices, but contract award data is its own search: SAM.gov's Contract Data page says "To search for specific contract award data, use the "Contracting" domain and select "Contract Awards."" That search has its own filters — contracting organisation, entity, product or service codes, place of performance, contract identifiers such as the PIID, dates signed and competition details — and a keyword search with any-words, all-words and exact-phrase options (SAM.gov — Contract Data, read 23 September 2026). If you are hunting for who won something rather than what is open, start there.

One habit that helps either way: start narrow and widen, rather than reading a long list and filtering by eye.

The search the portal cannot do

Once you have downloaded an opportunity's documents — the solicitation, a statement of work, amendments — they are PDFs on your machine, and the portal's search no longer reaches them.

The questions that follow are all inside those files: which amendment changed the due date, does the statement of work mention this clause, which attachment holds the past-performance requirement, what page says anything about small-business set-asides. Each of them is a search across a folder of PDFs, which no portal search touches.

When an attachment is a scan

A PDF exported from a word processor carries its words as text. A scan of a signed page, or an image pasted into a PDF wrapper, carries none — so a find-in-page returns nothing and you conclude the clause is not there, when it is simply not readable yet. How to tell the two apart.

Where DocFind fits

DocFind searches inside many PDFs at once — a whole downloaded package in one query — and each result shows the file, the page and the surrounding text, so you can see which attachment said it before opening anything. Tap a result and the document opens at that page with your keywords highlighted. Scanned attachments are read on your device (Apple's Vision on iPhone, Google's ML Kit bundled into the app on Android) and then searched like the rest, with those matches labelled.

You can export what you found as a CSV spreadsheet, a Markdown file, a PDF report, or a PDF of just the pages that matched — and every export records what was searched and anything that was skipped, which is the part that matters when the search is evidence rather than curiosity. Searching, indexing and exporting all work with no internet connection, and your documents never leave your device.