FPDS is gone. The data isn't.

Somebody is following a tutorial written in 2024. It is careful work for its year: screenshots of ezSearch, a walkthrough of the advanced search screen, a tip about exporting a spreadsheet at the end. Step one says go to fpds.gov. The browser goes there and lands on sam.gov/contracting instead, and the tutorial has no step for that.

The tutorial is not wrong about the data, only about the address. Every award record it taught you to read still exists, still grows as agencies report new actions, and is still public. The search screens moved. That is the entire event, and it is worth stating precisely, because a large share of the guides on the internet, and most of the AI answers trained on them, still point at a door that no longer opens.

The dates, stated once and plainly

As of August 2026, this is the state of federal contract award data:

• The public FPDS.gov website, its login, and its ezSearch tool were decommissioned on February 24, 2026. FPDS gov shut down as a public destination on that date and not before, so anything published earlier describing ezSearch was accurate when written.
• fpds.gov now redirects to sam.gov/contracting. Old bookmarks and old hyperlinks resolve there, without a notice explaining what happened.
• The reporting system behind the old site lives on. Contract writing systems feed it and agencies report their awards into it the same way they did before. What retired was the public window, not the record.
• The public window is now SAM.gov Contract Data, the Contract Awards domain of SAM.gov. Searching it requires a free SAM.gov account signed in through Login.gov. No special role, no fee, but no more anonymous access.
• Coverage did not change: unclassified contract actions above the micro-purchase threshold, which has been $15,000 since October 1, 2025. That floor comes from FAR 4.606(a)(1), the same rule that governed what FPDS displayed.

If you are checking a claim from an older article against this one, the February 24, 2026 date is the hinge. Everything written before it about where the data lives is out of date. Everything written before it about what the data contains mostly still holds.

The migration map: where each old workflow went

The FPDS replacement is not one screen, it is a set of them, and each old habit has a specific new home.

• FPDS ezSearch keyword queries became keyword search in SAM.gov Contract Data. Type a vendor, a program name, or a contract number fragment and the results read much like ezSearch results did, as individual contract actions rather than summarized totals.
• The advanced search screen became Contract Data’s filters. The headline filters are keyword, agency, and legal business name. The finer cuts you used to make in FPDS, by NAICS, PSC, date range, or set-aside type, run through the Keyword Search’s Search Editor, where conditions stack into a single query instead of sitting in one long form. Contract Identification searches on the PIID, which matters more than it sounds, because the issuing office’s six-character code is the front of every contract number it signs.
• FPDS standard and ad hoc reports became the SAM.gov Data Bank. The pre-formatted reports and the build-your-own variety both run there, and exports come out of the Data Bank rather than from a search screen.
• The FPDS ATOM feed, the machine-readable stream that fed third-party tools, is on its own clock. GSA’s decommissioning notice says it follows later in fiscal 2026, with the SAM.gov Contract Awards API as its successor. If a tool you rely on was built on the feed, ask its vendor which side of that migration they are on.

One behavioral change deserves its own line. ezSearch was anonymous, and Contract Data is not. The account is free and takes minutes, but a link in an old guide that once dropped readers straight into results now drops them at a sign-in screen, and some fraction of them conclude the data is gone. It is not.

How to date a stale guide in ten seconds

Because so much federal sales advice circulates secondhand, it helps to know the tells that a document, a course, or an AI answer predates the migration. None of them means the author was careless. They mean the ground moved after the ink dried.

• It says to run FPDS ezSearch, or links to any page on fpds.gov. Both stopped working on February 24, 2026. The same instruction now reads: search SAM.gov Contract Data.
• It quotes a $10,000 micro-purchase threshold or a $250,000 simplified acquisition threshold. Those became $15,000 and $350,000 on October 1, 2025, so any arithmetic built on the old figures lands on the wrong lines.
• It sends you to the Dynamic Small Business Search. That tool became the SBA Small Business Search, formerly DSBS, in July 2025, at a new address under search.certifications.sba.gov.
• It asks for your DUNS number. The UEI replaced DUNS, and a form still requesting DUNS has not been touched in years.

A guide with one of these tells can still be worth reading, since the reasoning about how buyers behave ages far more slowly than the URLs do. Correct the addresses and the numbers, keep the method.

Why a small firm should read award history at all

Award history is the record that answers the questions a marketing plan usually guesses at. Who buys what you sell. Which vendors they buy it from. Through which vehicles, standalone contracts or task orders under a parent you would need to hold. At what dollar levels, which decides the rules of the game: below $15,000 a purchase card does the work and much of the buying never reaches award data at all, between there and the $350,000 simplified acquisition threshold FAR 19.502-2(a) reserves the buy for small business automatically, and above it the set-aside decision rests on the contracting officer’s read of the market.

Forward-looking tools cannot answer those questions. Contract Opportunities shows you requirements that are already written, which means the useful decisions are already made. Federal contract award data shows you the pattern those decisions came from: the offices that bought in your codes in each of the last three fiscal years, the incumbents holding that work, and the dates it comes free.

Our advisors have written up the full method for turning that record into a target list, working from the six-character office code inside every contract number, in finding the offices that already buy what you sell. This article is the shorter companion: where the data lives now, and the first few pulls worth making.

Five searches worth running this week

Each of these runs in SAM.gov Contract Data with a free account, and each produces something you can act on rather than admire. Run them in order; the later ones borrow from the earlier.

1. Your NAICS codes at your target agency, last complete fiscal year. Look at action counts before dollars. Twenty awards of $80,000 is a habit you can enter; one award of $1.6 million is an event that already happened. Note which sub-tier the actions cluster under, and read the front six characters of the contract numbers to see which offices actually signed.
2. Your top competitor, searched as the vendor. Their award history is your market map drawn by somebody else. Read which agencies they bill, whether their work arrives as standalone contracts or as task orders under a parent vehicle, and what their typical action size is. A competitor living on task orders holds a contract you may need before you can meet their customers at all.
3. Expiring contracts in your codes with end dates inside 18 months. The recompete conversation happens twelve to eighteen months out, before the requirement is rewritten, so an end date next quarter is a lesson and an end date next year is an opening. Check whether the date on the record is the current period end or a potential end sitting behind unexercised options, because those are different clocks.
4. Set-aside usage at your target offices. Tabulate the set-aside field across a few years of an office’s awards in your codes and you learn which authorities it actually uses: 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, WOSB, plain small business, or none. History describes habits, not commitments, and no pattern entitles anyone to the next award. It does tell you whether your certification is a live factor at that office or a decoration at that one.
5. Your own firm, searched as the vendor. This is what a buyer doing market research sees when they check you out, and it is worth knowing before they do. Confirm your past awards are attributed to your current legal business name and UEI, and read the NAICS and PSC codes recorded on them, because those codes, not the ones in your capability statement, are the history a buyer will cite.

Save each search once it returns something useful. The value is not the first run, it is the same run repeated quarterly.

USAspending and Contract Data: same awards, different glass

Both sites sit on the same underlying award records, which confuses people into treating them as rivals. They are two lenses. USAspending presents the money: obligations rolled up by agency and sub-agency, trend charts, and a Download Center that hands you bulk files with no account required. SAM.gov Contract Data presents the procurement record: the individual action with its set-aside authority, its vehicle type, its Last Date to Order on a parent IDV, and the rest of the fields a contracting office actually filled in.

The practical split falls out of that. Rank markets and pull bulk downloads on USAspending, where the aggregation is the product. Read individual awards and procurement fields in Contract Data, where the record is the product. The office-code method linked above uses both in sequence, USAspending to shrink the government to a list of candidate offices, Contract Data to read each survivor’s habits in detail.

A caution that applies to either lens: the data is entered by busy humans in contract writing systems, so codes get miskeyed and names get abbreviated inconsistently. Treat a single odd record as noise and three matching records as signal.

A second caution, specific to targeting. Awards carry both an awarding office and a funding office, and on an assisted acquisition they differ, because one office writes the contract with another agency’s money. The awarding office is the one that can sign your next contract, so build your list on that field and treat the funding office as context about whose budget is behind the work.

The part that did not change

FPDS ran for decades, and for all of them the striking fact was how few sellers read it. The address change does not alter that. The firms that read award history before calling an office were rare when the data sat at fpds.gov, and they are rare now that it sits behind a Login.gov screen, which means the edge from reading it survived.

Reading it well takes hours, and keeping a target list current takes a calendar, which is a real cost for a firm whose people also deliver the work. That maintenance problem, not access, is what our federal market research service exists to carry: the same public record, read on a schedule, delivered as office-level targets with the dates that matter.

The tutorials will catch up eventually. The data never left, and the address is the only line that needed editing.