Research & Development Government Tenders in United States

How public bodies contract for research they cannot specify in advance

Research procurement has a structural problem: the buyer is purchasing an answer to a question, and if the answer were known the contract would be unnecessary. Public bodies deal with this by buying in phases. A feasibility or concept phase is awarded to several suppliers in parallel, each paid a modest fixed sum; a subset is then funded to prototype; a smaller subset again reaches demonstration. Each phase is a competition among the survivors of the last, so a bidder should read the notice for the phase structure and the progression criteria before pricing anything.

Intellectual property is the term that decides whether the contract is worth winning. Arrangements range from full assignment of results to the buyer, through a licence to the buyer with the supplier retaining ownership and the right to commercialise elsewhere, to background and foreground IP splits that must be catalogued before work starts. Development-focused schemes often deliberately leave ownership with the supplier so that a market can form around the result, while procurement of research for internal use tends toward assignment. The two produce very different bid economics.

Evaluation weights the proposal's scientific and technical merit, the team's record, and the credibility of the risk assessment, and it rewards candour about what might fail. Deliverables are reports, data and demonstrations rather than products, so acceptance criteria are written around defined technical readiness levels or measurable milestones. Where human participants, animals, personal data or dual-use technology are involved, ethical approval and export control clearance are conditions precedent with their own timetables, and they are a common cause of a project starting months after award.

This section describes how this category is bought generally, across the public buyers that publish it. The figures elsewhere on this page are measured for this market alone.

Who buys research & development in United States?

GlobalGov holds 8,171 research & development records from 427 distinct buying organisations in United States. The most frequent publishers are National Institutes Of Health (1,975 records); Defense Health Agency Contracting Activity - Dhaca (620 records); NASA Headquarters (558 records); National Park Service (474 records); U.s. National Science Foundation (325 records); Fish And Wildlife Service (234 records). Between them the 6 largest account for 51% of everything published, so buying here is concentrated in a few authorities.

What are research & development contracts worth in United States?

157 of the 8,171 records publish a contract value. The median is $4.0M and the largest single published value is $8.0B. By size, 14 under $100k, 32 between $100k and $1M, 64 between $1M and $10M, 47 above $10M. The remaining 8,014 publish no value at all, so every figure here describes the priced subset only, and values are as stated by the buyer rather than as finally awarded.

How long do bidders get to respond to research & development tenders in United States?

Across the 6,503 United States research & development notices that publish both a publication date and a closing date, the median response window is 65 days. A quarter of them allowed 32 days or fewer and a quarter stayed open for more than 107. Short turnarounds are the exception rather than the rule here: only 848 (13%) closed within a fortnight of being published.

How often are research & development tenders published in United States?

United States publishes about 71 notices a month in this category, 847 in the last twelve months. That is 276% more than the 225 published in the twelve months before that. Over the last three years there were 1,360, spread across 252 separate months of activity since 22 March 2004. June is historically the busiest month. The most recent was published 30 September 2026.

How does United States compare with other research & development markets?

Among the 35 countries where GlobalGov holds a comparable research & development market, United States ranks 2nd by number of records. The largest is Australia (13,059 records against 8,171 here). Within United States itself, research & development is the 2nd largest of the 85 procurement categories tracked here.

Where do the United States research & development records on this page come from?

These 8,171 records are collected from 6 official sources: Grants.gov (7,452), SAM.gov (592), Simpler.Grants.gov (114), USAspending (9) and 2 smaller sources. GlobalGov is an independent aggregator and is not affiliated with any of them; each record links back to the notice on its issuing portal. The set is rebuilt nightly, and the counts on this page were taken on 2026-10-01.

Open Research & Development tenders in United States

Showing 10 of the 159 notices open in this category today. Openness uses the same definition as the United States market page: active, not marked awarded, cancelled, closed or expired, and either closing in the future or published within the last 90 days with no stated closing date.

Other procurement categories in United States

Research & Development procurement in other markets