Q3 2025 RFP volume, by sector and state
What SAM.gov and state procurement portals tell us about Q3 2025 RFP volume. The sectors growing, the states moving, the federal categories rebounding from a slow Q2, and the data we cannot reconcile.
This post is the Q3 follow-up to our Q1 SAM.gov volume report. Same methodology, three months later. We pulled federal solicitation counts from SAM.gov and award data from USAspending.gov for July through September 2025, and cross-tabbed against publicly available state procurement portals from California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington.
A methodology note on the counts. The SAM.gov query used the Contract Opportunities export filtered to notice types Solicitation, Combined Synopsis/Solicitation, and Pre-solicitation, posted July 1 through September 30, 2025, with amendments collapsed to parent solicitations. The pull was taken in early October 2025. A reader rerunning the same query later will see different counts because solicitations are amended, cancelled, reposted, and in some cases withdrawn on rolling schedules. State-portal counts were scraped at the same time and are subject to the same rolling-edit drift. Read these as directional — the shape of the quarter, not a ledger.
The headline: Q3 federal solicitation volume was up 6.3% year over year. State volume was flat. Two federal categories — IT services and professional services — drove most of the growth. Construction was down. Healthcare was up sharply but lumpy.
Federal volume by NAICS
We bucket solicitations by primary NAICS code. Top five sectors by Q3 2025 volume, with year-over-year change:
| NAICS sector | Q3 2025 solicitations | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| 541 — Professional, scientific, technical services | ~12,400 | +9% |
| 23 — Construction | ~4,800 | -7% |
| 62 — Health care and social assistance | ~3,100 | +18% |
| 33 — Manufacturing | ~2,700 | flat |
| 51 — Information (incl. publishing, data) | ~1,900 | +4% |
Numbers are rounded; the underlying SAM.gov data has counting ambiguities (a single solicitation can be amended five times and appear five times depending on the query). We collapsed amendments to the parent solicitation. Anybody pulling raw counts from SAM.gov without that collapse will see different numbers.
The 541 growth is concentrated in 541512 (computer systems design services) and 541611 (administrative management consulting). Both grew double-digit YoY. This matches what we are hearing anecdotally from federal IT contractors — the agencies that froze IT spending in early 2025 reopened the spigot in Q3.
State volume — flat aggregate, lumpy distribution
State procurement portals do not report on a unified schema. We harmonized as best we could. Aggregate volume across the seven states we track was flat YoY. But the distribution was not flat:
- California up ~12% YoY, driven by health and human services.
- Texas down ~8% YoY, driven by a slowdown in education-sector RFPs.
- New York up ~5%, broad-based.
- Florida flat.
- Illinois down ~4%.
- Georgia up ~22%, driven by a state IT modernization initiative we covered in the Georgia state RFPs teardown.
- Washington flat.
States with growing IT modernization mandates (California, Georgia) are visible in the data. States with budget pressure (Illinois, Texas in non-education sectors) are visible in the data.
Healthcare RFPs — up 18%, but lumpy
Healthcare federal volume was the strongest growth signal. Eighteen percent YoY is large. The lumpiness matters: about 40% of the volume came from VA Medical Centers and HHS sub-agencies running multi-award IDIQ task orders against existing vehicles. Strip those out and the underlying agency-level volume is closer to +9%.
We have a separate post landing next week on healthcare RFP compliance patterns that goes deeper on what these solicitations are asking for. The short version: HIPAA and HITRUST language has become standard; data-residency clauses are showing up in places they did not show up two years ago.
What we cannot reconcile
A few things in the data we do not have a clean explanation for.
Construction is down 7%, but federal infrastructure spending is up. The two should correlate. They do not in Q3. One theory: more spending is flowing through existing IDIQ vehicles (no new solicitation) rather than new procurements. We cannot prove this from public data. USAspending.gov shows obligation volume, but the linkage from obligation back to solicitation is brittle.
Manufacturing flat YoY despite reshoring narrative. The reshoring story would predict growth. Q3 data does not show it federally. Either the reshoring is happening through DoD prime contractors and not flowing into open solicitations, or the narrative is ahead of the procurement reality. We are not taking a position.
Set-aside ratios shifted. Small business set-asides as a share of 541 solicitations dropped from 61% in Q3 2025 to 56% in Q3 2025. We do not have a clean explanation. Worth watching.
Award size distribution
Volume counts are one half of the picture. Award size is the other half. Pulling Q3 award data from USAspending.gov for the same NAICS sectors:
| Sector | Median award value | Top decile award |
|---|---|---|
| 541512 (computer systems design) | $1.4M | $42M |
| 541611 (admin management consulting) | $890K | $18M |
| 23 (construction) | $2.1M | $87M |
| 62 (health care) | $760K | $11M |
The 541 sectors have lower median awards and a long tail of large awards — that means a high concentration of small task orders against IDIQ vehicles plus a small number of large new contracts. Construction is the inverse: fewer awards, larger each, fewer task orders. Healthcare’s median is low because much of the volume is per-event (single-discipline service contracts) rather than multi-year vehicles.
The implication for proposal teams: a vendor focused on 541 work needs a high-throughput proposal function that can ship many small responses; a vendor focused on construction needs a low-throughput, high-quality function that wins fewer but larger bids. Different proposal staffing models for different sectors.
Set-aside and small-business signals
The set-aside ratio shift we flagged earlier deserves more analysis. Across all federal solicitations in our Q3 sample:
- Total small business set-asides (all sub-types): 47% in Q3 2025, 43% in Q3 2025.
- 8(a) set-asides specifically: 11% in Q3 2025, 9% in Q3 2025.
- WOSB / EDWOSB set-asides: 6% in Q3 2025, 6% in Q3 2025 (flat).
- HUBZone set-asides: 4% in Q3 2025, 5% in Q3 2025 (slight rise).
- Service-disabled veteran-owned set-asides: 7% in Q3 2025, 7% in Q3 2025 (flat).
The aggregate decline is concentrated in 8(a) and in unrestricted small-business set-asides, not in the demographic-specific programs. We do not have a clean policy attribution for this. If you do, we’d love to read your reasoning.
Federal vs. state cycle alignment
A pattern we have not seen called out elsewhere: federal Q4 (calendar Q3) and state Q1 (calendar Q3) overlap each year. State fiscal years vary, but six of the seven states we track run on a July-to-June cycle, which means state Q1 lands in July through September. Q3 is the densest cross-cycle quarter on the calendar — federal year-end procurement plus state year-start procurement.
For vendors who sell to both federal and state buyers, Q3 is the worst-case staffing quarter. Q4 federal opens (October) is busier than Q3 because federal Q1 volume is concentrated, but at least state procurement throttles back by then. The Q3 squeeze is the one to staff against.
Vehicle preferences
Federal solicitations split between new-contract solicitations and orders against existing vehicles (IDIQs, GWACs, BPAs). The Q3 split:
- New full-and-open contracts: ~22%.
- Orders against IDIQ or GWAC vehicles: ~58%.
- Set-aside specific solicitations (combining vehicle types): ~16%.
- Other (BPA calls, simplified acquisitions, sole source): ~4%.
The 58% figure is up from roughly 51% three years ago. The shift toward task-order procurement against existing vehicles continues. For vendors not on the major vehicles, this is meaningful — fewer of the Q3 opportunities are reachable via open competition. The largest IT vehicles (CIO-SP3, Alliant 2, GSA Multiple Award Schedule) collectively absorb a substantial share of the order volume.
For vendors evaluating whether to invest in getting on a particular vehicle, the Q3 task-order count against that vehicle is the single most useful number. Vehicles with low Q3 task-order activity are not worth the investment cost regardless of total ceiling value.
What this means for proposal teams
If you sell to federal IT and professional-services buyers, Q4 calendar (federal Q1) volume is likely to be elevated. Staff for it.
If you sell to state and local governments, the picture is by-state, not by-aggregate. A team focused on California, Georgia, or New York is in a different volume environment than a team focused on Illinois or Texas.
If you sell to healthcare buyers, expect more solicitations; expect them to compress around IDIQ task orders rather than spread across new vehicles. The mechanics matter — task orders typically have shorter response windows and tighter compliance requirements.
If you sell to set-aside-eligible vehicles, the trend in 8(a) volume is worth monitoring. A 2-point year-over-year drop is not a crisis, but a 5-year trend in that direction would be.
Agency concentration
A handful of agencies drive a disproportionate share of federal solicitation volume. In Q3 2025, the top 10 agencies by solicitation count accounted for roughly 56% of all federal solicitations in our sample. The top three were the Department of Defense (across components), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
DoD volume is itself concentrated within sub-components. The Defense Health Agency, the Air Force Materiel Command, and the Naval Sea Systems Command together accounted for over a third of DoD’s Q3 solicitations. Vendors selling into DoD without a clear sub-component focus should pick one — the procurement cultures, vehicle preferences, and timeline rhythms differ enough that “DoD” is not a coherent buyer profile at the proposal-strategy level.
VA volume was up 11% YoY, driven by a wave of medical-center IT modernization solicitations and a continued push on community-care vendor onboarding. HHS volume was up 8%, with most of the growth in NIH and CMS subcomponents.
Solicitation duration
The window between solicitation post and proposal due date is a meaningful operational variable. Q3 2025 windows by sector:
| Sector | Median days to due | 25th percentile | 75th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 541 (professional services) | 28 | 18 | 42 |
| 23 (construction) | 35 | 21 | 50 |
| 62 (health care) | 22 | 14 | 35 |
Healthcare windows are the tightest, professional-services and construction windows are larger. The 14-day 25th-percentile in healthcare is the case where a solicitation drops on Tuesday and the response is due in two weeks. Teams that bid into healthcare need a quick-turn workflow; teams that bid into construction can afford longer capture cycles.
A note on this: the median “days to due” includes the original posted deadline, not amendment-extended deadlines. Buyers extend deadlines fairly often (we saw extensions on roughly 22% of solicitations in the sample, with a median extension of 7 days). The effective deadline is usually a bit later than the posted one. We cannot rely on extensions; we can plan to the posted deadline and treat extensions as bonus runway.
Methodology notes
This analysis pulled from three sources: SAM.gov’s contract opportunities API for solicitation counts; USAspending.gov for award data; and the seven state procurement portals we track via scraped public listings. We collapsed amendments to parent solicitations using the SAM.gov solicitation-number key. We deduplicated across portals when a state solicitation was also cross-listed federally.
The biggest methodology caveat: SAM.gov’s data quality varies. Some agencies post comprehensive solicitation records; some post minimal records and update via amendments. A solicitation count is a count of records, not a count of agency intent. We have done our best to normalize.
A second caveat: the seven states we track are not representative of the full U.S. state-and-local market. They are the largest and most data-accessible. Smaller states’ data is in less consistent shape; we did not include them.
We will run this report again at the end of Q4. The federal fiscal year is fresh; the volume dynamics in October to December are what matters most for FY2027 win rates.