Publicizing Awards

FAR Subpart 5.3 covers what happens after you award. Topic 12 covered synopses before the solicitation — this is the other side: telling the public what you bought, from whom, and for how much. There are three distinct requirements in this subpart, and they serve different purposes:

Award notice (FAR 5.301) — a GPE posting that tells the world you awarded a contract. Promotes transparency and helps subcontractors find opportunities.

Public announcement (FAR 5.302) — a same-day media-facing announcement for large awards over $5.5 million. This is the one that shows up in press releases.

Subcontracting opportunity notice (FAR 5.303) — allows contractors and subcontractors (not you) to post notices to the GPE advertising subcontracting opportunities under your contract.

Let's walk through each one.

You need to post an award notice to the GPE for contract actions greater than $25,000 that meet either of these conditions:

Covered by the WTO GPA or an FTA — more on what those are in a moment.

Likely to result in subcontract awards — meaning the prime contractor will probably need to hire subs to perform parts of the work.

The notice itself is straightforward. You include a description of the supplies or services, your contracting office and address, who got the award, the dollar amount, and the award date. That's it.

When you do need to post one, the timing depends on whether the contract is likely to generate subcontracting opportunities:

The "as soon as possible" standard for subcontracting opportunities makes sense — the whole point is to let small businesses and other potential subcontractors know about the work while there's still time to get in the door with the prime.

You'll see these terms pop up in FAR Part 5 and Part 25. Here's the short version:

The WTO GPA (World Trade Organization Government Procurement Agreement) is an international agreement where participating countries agree to open their government procurement markets to each other. If the U.S. is buying something covered by the WTO GPA, we're agreeing to treat suppliers from those countries fairly — and part of that deal is transparency, which means posting award notices so foreign suppliers can see what we bought.

An FTA (Free Trade Agreement) works similarly but on a bilateral or regional basis. The U.S. has FTAs with specific countries (like Chile, Australia, Korea, etc.) that include procurement provisions. Same idea: we agreed to be transparent about our buying, and posting award notices is part of holding up our end.

This is a separate requirement from the award notice. For awards over $5.5 million, you need to make information available so your agency can publicly announce it by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the day of award. Agencies cannot release the information before that 5 p.m. cutoff.

This is the press-release requirement. When you see a news article that says "DoD awards $50M contract to XYZ Corp for widget maintenance," that information flowed through this process. Your job as the CO is to make sure the right people in your agency have the award details in time to meet that deadline.

This one is different from the other two because the contractor posts it, not you.

FAR 5.303 allows a contractor who was awarded a contract greater than the SAT (and that's likely to result in subcontract awards) to post a notice to the GPE advertising subcontracting opportunities. It also allows subcontractors or suppliers at any tier to post their own opportunities, as long as the parent contract is over the SAT and the sub opportunity is greater than $20,000.

This is the FAR's way of opening up the GPE as a marketplace for subcontracting work. The government doesn't post these — the primes and subs do. Your role as the CO is mostly awareness: know that this exists, and if a prime contractor on one of your larger contracts asks about posting subcontracting opportunities on SAM.gov, you can point them to FAR 5.303.

Here's the quick mental model for what happens after you award:

Every award >$25K that involves trade agreements or likely subcontracting → post an award notice to the GPE (FAR 5.301).

Every award >$5.5M → make sure your agency can issue a public announcement by 5 p.m. ET on award day (FAR 5.302).

Contractors with large contracts → they can post subcontracting opportunities to the GPE on their own (FAR 5.303). Not your action, but good to know about.