The $15,000 Door: How Small Businesses Win Federal Work Without Writing a Proposal

In our last post, we followed the money into contract vehicles, the pre-competed lanes where much of federal IT and services spend moves. If you don't hold a vehicle yet, or the past performance to win one, that post probably left you with a fair question: where do I actually start? 

Start smaller. Much smaller. 

Below $15,000, a federal buyer can purchase from you with no solicitation, no proposal and no evaluation panel. Between $15,000 and $350,000, most buys are reserved for small businesses and run on short quotes, not 80-page proposals. That's the $15,000 door, and plenty of contractors walk right past it while they wait for the big RFP. 

On October 1, 2025, the FAR Council's inflation adjustment rule raised the two numbers that govern small-dollar buying: 

• Micro-purchase threshold (MPT): $10,000 → $15,000 
• Simplified acquisition threshold (SAT): $250,000 → $350,000 

This isn't a niche corner of the market. In its analysis of the rule, the FAR Council reported that from FY2022 through FY2024 agencies averaged about 562,000 awards a year at or below the old $10,000 line, going to roughly 18,400 companies. Another 235,000 or so actions a year fell between the MPT and the SAT. That's a lot of doors. 

Below $15,000, you get bought, not selected- A micro-purchase doesn't require competitive quotes as long as the buyer judges the price reasonable, and the government purchase card, run through GSA SmartPay, is the preferred way to pay. There's no RFP to answer. The cardholder, often someone in a program office rather than a contracting officer, finds a vendor who can do the job at a fair price and buys. 

From $15,000 to $350,000 is the small business lane- Buys in this band are generally set aside for small businesses when the buyer expects at least two capable small firms to offer fair prices. The Revolutionary FAR Overhaul kept that requirement in the rewritten Part 13, even as it moved commercial purchases under Part 12 procedures. In practice, you'll usually respond to a short request for quotation (RFQ), not a full proposal. Because agencies are still adopting the overhaul through class deviations, read each RFQ's instructions rather than assuming last year's format. 

Here's what most "easy federal money" articles leave out: the $15,000 figure doesn't apply to everything. As acquisition.gov's threshold table shows, the MPT stays at $2,500 for services covered by the Service Contract Act and $2,000 for construction covered by Davis-Bacon. Those statutes are excluded from inflation adjustments, so the 2025 increase didn't touch them. 

For IT and professional services firms, coverage depends on who does the work. The Service Contract Act applies to service employees, so roles like help desk, technicians and admin support often fall under it, while many professional roles (architects, developers, analysts) often don't. If your offer is SCA-covered, your real micro-purchase door is $2,500, and the $15,000–$350,000 set-aside band is the smarter target. Not sure? Check the wage determinations for your labor categories and location, and ask the buyer. 

One more rule: never suggest a buyer split a requirement to keep it under a threshold. The FAR prohibits it, and suggesting it marks you as a vendor to avoid. 

Here's an illustrative example of a pattern we see work. 

A five-person cybersecurity firm bids on six full-and-open RFPs in a year and loses all six, mostly on past performance. So they change tactics. They package a fixed-price "vulnerability scan and executive readout" at $12,500 and a "policy gap review" at $9,800, both priced from their commercial rates. They list both on their website and capability statement, state clearly that they accept government purchase cards, and rewrite their profile in SBA's Small Business Search around those exact services. 

Then they find which buying offices issued small cyber awards in their region over the past three years and introduce themselves to the small business specialists there. Over the next two quarters they land three card purchases and one $140,000 small business set-aside RFQ, and none of those responses ran past ten pages. 

That's no guarantee your results will match. The pattern is what counts: small, easy-to-buy offers aimed at offices that already buy small. 

A caveat first: purchase card buys generally aren't reported as individual records in federal award data, so you can't map micro-purchases directly. What you can map are the offices that repeatedly buy your kind of work in small contract actions, and those offices are full of cardholders who need vendors too. 

1. Filter awards by value- In Market Intelligence, open Awards and filter by your NAICS code or PSC, with award amounts up to $350,000 over the last two or three fiscal years. Note which offices keep showing up. 

2. Profile the buying offices- Look those offices up in Offices to see where they sit in the agency hierarchy. New to agency research? Start with How to Research Government Agencies. 

3. Find the people- Use People to identify contracting staff and small business contacts tied to those offices. Our guide on how to get seen by federal buyers covers the outreach. 

4. Watch for RFQs- Set Lead Prospector to your NAICS codes and set-asides so small business RFQs and sources-sought notices reach you early, ranked by fit. 

Then do the unglamorous work outside the platform: fill in your SBS keywords and capabilities narrative, accept cards, publish fixed prices, and keep each package simple enough that a cardholder can buy it without a statement of work. 

Small awards give you something big RFPs can't: a federal customer now. Each one brings a reference, a relationship with a buying office, and a firsthand look at how that office works. That's the raw material for the track record you'll need later (see Succeed in Federal Contracting Without Past Experience) when you go after a vehicle. And small doesn't automatically mean worth it, so run every RFQ through our bid/no-bid guide first. 

Stop waiting for the big RFP. Use GovCon360 Market Intelligence to filter awards under $350,000 by your NAICS code, see which offices keep returning to the small business lane, and reach the people who buy there. 

Want to see which offices buy your NAICS in small amounts? Create a free GovCon360 account and run an Awards search by value in minutes. 

Coming next, Blog 11: Price-to-Win Without a Pricing Department. How to price a government contract using award history and wage determinations.