Every year GAO reports its bid protest numbers to Congress. Here they are, FY2001–FY2025, in one place — what gets filed, what gets sustained, and why the protest you're worried about probably isn't the threat you think it is.
The funnel: what actually happens to a protest
Most protests never reach a decision on the merits — they're dismissed, withdrawn, or resolved when the agency takes corrective action. Of the ones that do go the distance, GAO denies most of them.
Each bar as a share of all cases closed that year
Protest filings over time
Filings climbed after 2008 — largely because Congress expanded GAO's jurisdiction to task and delivery orders that year — peaked in FY2016, and have fallen steadily since. Protests today are at their lowest level in over 15 years.
Cases filed at GAO by fiscal year
Includes protests, cost claims, and requests for reconsideration
The sustain rate is the share of merit decisions GAO sustains — the government formally "loses." The effectiveness rate counts any case where the protester got some relief, which is mostly the agency choosing to take corrective action on its own. The gap between those two lines is agencies fixing their own record, not losing at GAO.
FY2023's sustain-rate spike is an outlier: one procurement (NIH's CIO-SP4 GWAC) generated a large block of related sustains. FY2019 was amended by GAO in a revised report. Hover for exact values.
Where the government actually loses
Since FY2013, GAO's annual report has named the most prevalent grounds for sustaining protests. Tally how often each ground makes the list and the pattern is unmistakable: protests are won and lost in the evaluation record.
Appearances in GAO's "most prevalent sustain grounds," FY2013–
Number of annual reports listing each ground among the top reasons protests were sustained
Ground #1
Document the technical evaluation
Unreasonable technical evaluations top the list nearly every year. The fix isn't a better outcome — it's a record that shows evaluators followed the stated criteria and explains why ratings were assigned.
Ground #2
Show your price analysis work
Cost and price evaluation failures are the perennial runner-up. Conclusory "price is fair and reasonable" statements without analysis are how these sustains happen.
Ground #3
Make the tradeoff traceable
Flawed selection decisions get sustained when the SSA's best-value tradeoff isn't documented or contradicts the evaluation record. The decision can be judgmental — it just has to be explained.
The common thread
Follow your own solicitation
Unequal treatment, unstated criteria, inadequate documentation — nearly every recurring ground is a version of "the agency didn't do what its own solicitation said." That is entirely within your control.
Pre-award vs. post-award risk
The two protest windows carry different risks — and different stakes for your schedule.
Pre-award protests
What gets protested: the solicitation itself — restrictive specs, ambiguous evaluation criteria, improper set-aside decisions, unduly short response times.
The deadline: solicitation-improprieties protests are due before proposals are due (4 C.F.R. § 21.2(a)(1)) — so this risk window closes at receipt of proposals.
The upside: a pre-award protest surfaces a fixable problem while it's still cheap to fix. An amendment now beats corrective action after award.
Post-award protests
What gets protested: the evaluation and the award decision — which is exactly where the recurring sustain grounds live.
The deadline: generally 10 days from when the basis is known, or from a required debriefing; filing within the debriefing window triggers the CICA automatic stay of performance.
The upside: a tight, well-documented debriefing answers the questions that would otherwise become protest grounds. Many protests are filed just to get the record.
Straight talk on the data: GAO's published statistics don't break out pre-award vs. post-award filings, so any hard split you see quoted is an estimate. What the data does show is where sustains come from — overwhelmingly evaluation and selection-decision issues, which are post-award grounds. Build a clean evaluation record and you've addressed the bulk of the measurable risk.
The full dataset
Every fiscal year as reported in GAO's annual reports to Congress. Where GAO amended a prior year's figures, the most recent report's numbers are used.
Sources & method: Compiled from GAO's Bid Protest Annual Reports to Congress, including
GAO-26-900695 (FY2025),
GAO-21-281SP (FY2020),
GAO-19-248SP (FY2018), and earlier reports in the same series; FY2001–FY2004 figures per GAO annual report tables as reproduced at
WIFCON.
"Cases" include protests, cost claims, and requests for reconsideration. Sustain rate = sustains ÷ merit decisions. Effectiveness rate = share of all closed cases where the protester obtained some relief (sustain or voluntary corrective action), as reported by GAO.
GAO publishes the next annual report each November–December; this page is updated once a year when it drops.