GSA has long envisioned the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) as the one-stop-shop for all your federal procurement needs to make, receive, and manage federal awards. This vision is hopefully soon to become a reality as GSA’s Integrated Award Environment (IAE) continues to modernize and consolidate their federal awards systems. The goal is for GSA Schedule contractors to use one modernized site for most of their contracting needs rather than to navigate several archaic sites. In this blog, we’ll review what recent changes GSA has made to SAM.gov and what the upcoming forecast looks like for system consolidation.
Right now, SAM.gov is the site you’ll want to visit when you are searching for contract opportunities, registering your entity to get a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), searching wage determinations, and browsing subaward reporting (formerly FSRS.gov).
GSA federal acquisition sites all revolve around a federal procurement cycle, which currently has the broadest scope of any type of government procurement system. As we see it now, SAM covers the Pre-Award phase from Solicitations, Protests, and Bids. When we move into the award cycle, FPDS.gov and SAM handle document award details. With post award, eSRS, SAM, and FDPS are involved in reporting, the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) deals with annual evaluations, and FPDS.gov and SAM handle contract close-out.
GSA plans to add more capabilities to SAM, including the electronic subcontracting reporting system (eSRS), CPARS, and more features from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS).
We’ll dive into more of these systems below and what the timeline looks like.
Over the last 10 years, GSA has consolidated legacy systems from 13 down to four. The plan in the near future is to narrow them down further into two. Recently, GSA has reached some major milestones toward their modernization goal. They include:
Fully retiring FSRS.gov and consolidating all the subaward reporting data into SAM.
Migrating first two groups of entity registration modules into modernized SAM, enabling Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) overhaul.
Migrating FPDS.gov report functionality to SAM.
So, what are the next steps in the IAE modernization process? The immediate plan for GSA is to kick-off the transition of eSRS subcontracting capabilities into SAM.gov, and finalize the migration of FPDS contract awards data and search capabilities into SAM.gov.
Further down the line, GSA wants to start transitioning over CPARS.
As mentioned above, GSA wants to start transitioning eSRS capabilities to SAM.gov on an incremental basis with a primary release expected this year. The subcontracting reporting system in SAM.gov will incorporate statutory and regulatory requirements such as the Small Business Act and the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul (RFO) changes. The reporting process will also be streamlined because it’ll pull from existing entity and contract data already available in SAM.
This would affect your contract if you are an “Other than Small Business” and currently use the eSRS system for your SubK reporting. The anticipated timeline for this right now is March 2026 through September 2026.
GSA is very close to finalizing the migration of FPDS.gov functionality into SAM. Contract awards searching is now available in SAM, and you can easily navigate between Contract Opportunities, Contract Awards, and Subaward Reporting records. The search filters in SAM were not previously available on FPDS.gov. You can also create and run contract data reports in SAM, but this is not new as it was transitioned earlier.
GSA’s anticipated timeline for exiting the legacy FPDS.gov system is from now until March 2026.
As mentioned above, GSA plans to start a new phase later this year to transition the CPARS.gov system over to SAM. This is the last phase GSA has planned out for this Fiscal Year, and we anticipate this move to be completed in phases much like the other systems.
If you need support with SAM.gov and other systems, you can visit the Federal Service Desk (FSD). GSA has made strides in improving this system along with the others including transitioning from a virtual first model. By the end of FY2026, GSA plans to increase Federal Service Desk automation.
The updates to SAM.gov are just a small part of the changes GSA is going through right now. From the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul (RFO) to the expansion of Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) and the FAS Catalog Platform (FCP), GSA is taking on a lot more of acquisition responsibility and changing the way certain things have been done in the past. If you want to track these updates more closely, check out our weekly blog and monthly newsletter. For help managing your GSA Schedule contract through all of these changes, we are here to help!