The $75.6B Federal Contract Cliff: 6,756 Re-competes Expiring in 2027

Three departments account for 83%of the 2027 cliff dollars: DoD, VA, and DHS. This isn't surprising — they're the top federal spenders overall — but the concentration matters for capture strategy. If your firm doesn't have a footprint at one of these three, your addressable 2027 pipeline is a much smaller slice.

The DoD number is worth sitting with.4,529 contracts averaging $9.3M each — that's not one big program, that's thousands of independent opportunities spread across every military service, research lab, and contracting office. For small and mid-size primes with any DoD past performance, this is the densest pipeline on the planet.

The industry mix tells a different story than the agency mix. Construction dominates — $15.3B in a single NAICS code (236220).That's 20% of the entire 2027 cliff, and it's wholly explained by the VA and DoD's ongoing facilities investment cycles. After construction, the mix gets more fragmented: healthcare insurance, aircraft parts, ammunition, R&D.

Note: NAICS 524114 (Medical Insurance) looks inflated because just 8 massive TRICARE contracts account for the entire $12.6B. That's one market with three or four real competitors — not a small-business opportunity.

Of the $75.6B, about $7.2B (9.5%)is reserved for small business set-asides. Another $51.5B is full-and-open (no set-aside), and $16.8B is marked “no set-aside used” (which usually means the contract went competitively but with no small-business reservation). The set-aside breakdown:

The set-aside story is more nuanced than the dollar totals suggest. While small-business-reserved dollars are only ~10% of the cliff, small businesses also win a meaningful share of the full-and-open work. Additionally, many of these current set-aside contracts will rotateto different set-aside types when they re-compete — we've measured that set-aside rotation accounts for roughly 25% of all re-compete displacements. If you're an 8(a), watch for SDVOSB rotations that could push these off your competitive list. If you're WOSB, watch for contracts rotating toward 8(a).

Not every re-compete is a real opportunity. Most incumbents hold their ground — across our full dataset, incumbents retain roughly 70% of re-competes and only 20% are true competitive losses (see our displacement segmentation analysis). The 2027 cliff follows the same distribution:

The 34 high-vulnerability contracts worth $7.1Bare the most concentrated opportunity list in federal procurement right now. Those contracts share characteristics that correlate with incumbent displacement: the incumbent won with few competing offers originally, the agency has a history of competing this work, and there's typically no strong incumbent lock-in. These are the contracts where a challenger with the right past performance can realistically win on merit.

Some practical guidance, whether you're an incumbent trying to defend or a challenger looking to displace:

• Start 24 months out. If a contract ends in early 2027, the agency is writing the next solicitation in mid-2026. Capture planning should be underway now.
• Filter by vulnerability, not value.A $50M contract with a 15 vulnerability score is a worse target than a $5M contract with a 45 score. Concentrate your B&P budget where win probability is actually meaningful.
• Check the set-aside trend. If the incumbent contract is full-and-open, check whether the agency has been rotating similar work onto 8(a), SDVOSB, or WOSB. That tells you whether your certification is about to become a tailwind or irrelevant.
• Check for vehicle migration.For DoD and GSA especially, watch whether the follow-on is likely to land on OASIS+, Alliant 3, SeaPort NxG, or a similar MAC. If you're not on the vehicle, the contract isn't really on your addressable list.
• Past performance matters most. For re-competes in your NAICS, prior wins at the same agency or in the same product family are the single biggest predictor of win rate.

Data source: USAspending.gov contract awards (FY2022-FY2026). “Re-compete candidates” are contracts whose end date falls in 2027 and whose characteristics match our recompete filter: obligated amount above $1M, has a known agency / NAICS / vendor, and isn't a pure modification. Vulnerability scores are computed from the 6-factor methodology described in our methodology page. Numbers reflect data as of the most recent ingestion and update nightly.