Registering your business on SAM.gov is a prerequisite for receiving any federal contract award. No registration, no payment—even if an agency wants to hire you. This guide walks through the entire process end-to-end and how to avoid the mistakes that send most first-time registrants back to the start. If you’re still deciding whether you need to register at all, read our overview of what SAM.gov is first.

Before you start: what you need on hand

Most failed registrations fail because something doesn’t match an external record—your IRS file, your bank’s ACH directory, or a third-party business registry. Gather all of this before you log in.

  • Legal business name. Exactly as it appears on your IRS EIN confirmation letter (the CP 575) or SS-4. Punctuation, spacing, and entity suffix (Inc., LLC, L.L.C.) all matter.
  • Physical street address. PO Boxes are not accepted. The address must be a real location where the business operates. It also has to match the address the IRS has on file.
  • EIN(or SSN if you’re a sole proprietor using your Social Security number for federal tax purposes).
  • Banking information for EFT. The ABA routing number and account number for the account you want federal payments deposited into. The account must be in the legal business name.
  • CAGE code, if you already have one.The Defense Logistics Agency assigns CAGE (Commercial and Government Entity) codes. If you don’t have one, SAM.gov will request one for you automatically during registration—you don’t need to do this separately.
  • Names and ownership percentages of every individual or entity owning 10% or more of the business. SAM.gov requires immediate-owner and highest-level-owner disclosure for beneficial-ownership transparency.
  • NAICS codes you intend to work under. You can add many; pick a primary that best matches your core revenue. See our guide to NAICS codes for how to choose.

Step 1: Create a Login.gov account

SAM.gov no longer has its own username/password system. Login.gov, the federal government’s shared identity service, handles all authentication. One Login.gov account belongs to one person—not one company—so each individual who will access SAM.gov on behalf of your business needs their own.

  1. Go to login.gov and click Create an account.
  2. Use a real email address you control long-term, not a shared inbox.
  3. Set a strong password. Login.gov enforces multi-factor authentication; you’ll be required to add at least one second factor, with an authenticator app or hardware security key strongly preferred over SMS.
  4. Verify your email and complete the MFA setup. Save your backup codes somewhere durable.
  5. Now go to SAM.gov and click Sign In. You’ll be redirected to Login.gov; sign in there and you’ll be sent back to SAM.gov authenticated.

Step 2: Get your Unique Entity ID (UEI)

The Unique Entity ID replaced the DUNS number in April 2022. It’s a 12-character alphanumeric identifier that SAM.gov itself issues, for free, as part of entity registration. You don’t need a DUNS number and you don’t need to pay any third party. For more background on what the UEI is, see our guide to SAM.gov.

You get a UEI by going through entity validation: SAM.gov takes the legal name and physical address you entered and matches them against a third-party entity-validation service that confirms your business is a real, distinct legal entity at that address. This is the single most common place new registrants get stuck.

  1. From the SAM.gov workspace, choose Get Startedunder Entity Registration, then select “Register Entity.”
  2. Enter your legal business name and physical address exactly as they appear on your IRS records.
  3. If the validator finds a single confident match, you’ll see your business listed and you can claim it. SAM.gov will assign a UEI immediately.
  4. If the validator finds multiple possible matches, pick the one that’s yours. If it returns nothing, double-check the spelling of your name and the address format.

If your business does not validate

Newly formed entities, businesses that recently moved, and businesses operating under DBAs are the most likely to fail validation. If yours fails, SAM.gov provides an incident-based appeals path: you upload documentation that proves the business exists at the address (state formation documents, an IRS EIN confirmation letter, a utility bill in the business name, a commercial lease). The validation team reviews and either approves or asks for more documents. Expect this to take a few business days. Once cleared, you continue from where you left off.

Step 3: Complete the entity registration

With a UEI in hand, you fill out the actual registration. It’s a single long workflow grouped into four major sections. You can save and resume between sections.

Core Data

  1. Business information: legal name (locked from validation), DBAs, business start date, state of incorporation, and entity structure (LLC, S-corp, partnership, etc.).
  2. IRS Consent to Disclose Tax Information:you authorize the IRS to confirm your name/EIN/address combination to SAM.gov. If the IRS can’t match, your registration stalls here. The matching is case-sensitive and punctuation-sensitive in ways that surprise people.
  3. CAGE code: if you have one, enter it. Otherwise leave blank and SAM.gov will request one during processing.
  4. Ownership:declare any immediate or highest-level owner of 10% or more. Get this right—misstatements here are the kind of thing that creates real legal exposure later.
  5. Banking (EFT) information: routing and account number, account type, and the name on the account. Most failures here are typos. Re-check digit by digit.

Assertions

This is where you describe what your business does and what categories it falls under. NAICS codes are the load-bearing field; see our NAICS-code guide for how to pick a primary and add secondaries. You’ll also enter:

  1. Product Service Codes (PSC) you work under.
  2. Optional disaster-response interest (whether you want to be contacted for disaster-response work).
  3. Whether you accept the government purchase card.
  4. Size representations for each NAICS—SAM.gov calculates small business status based on your revenue or employee count against the SBA size standard for each code.

Representations and Certifications

A long set of yes/no statements about your business, covered in detail in Step 5 below. You answer them once during initial registration and re-affirm at annual renewal.

Points of Contact

  1. Required: an Electronic Business POC and a Government Business POC. These can be the same person.
  2. Optional but recommended: a Past Performance POC and a Government Business Alternate.
  3. Each POC needs a real name, working email, and phone. Agency contracting officers actually call these numbers.

Step 4: Reps and certifications (FAR/DFARS)

The Reps and Certs section is a series of attestations required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and, for defense work, the Defense FAR Supplement (DFARS). You are signing each of these under penalty of perjury. Read them. The ones most likely to matter to a small business:

  1. Section 889 (Part A and B):you certify whether your company uses or sells covered telecommunications equipment or services from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, Dahua, or their subsidiaries. A “yes” doesn’t automatically disqualify you, but it triggers additional review.
  2. Buy American Act:whether the products you deliver are domestic end products and, if not, where they’re manufactured. This affects evaluation preference on supply contracts.
  3. Small business size representations:for each NAICS code you registered under, you affirm whether you are small under that code’s SBA size standard. This is self-certification, and Contracting Officers check it.
  4. Tax delinquency and felony conviction: any unresolved federal tax delinquency or recent felony conviction must be disclosed.
  5. Equal-opportunity, affirmative action, and anti-trafficking: a cluster of policy compliance attestations.

Walk through each one slowly. If you don’t understand a clause, look it up in the FAR before you click yes.

Step 5: Submit and wait

After Reps and Certs, you review the full registration, sign electronically, and submit. From there it’s out of your hands for a stretch.

  1. SAM.gov sends your TIN/name/address to the IRS for matching.
  2. If you didn’t have a CAGE code, SAM.gov forwards your info to DLA, which assigns one and returns it.
  3. The combined back-end validation typically takes about 7 to 10 business days. It can be longer in heavy periods (end of fiscal year, post-shutdown).
  4. You get an email when your registration goes active. Until that email arrives, you are not yet registered, even though the system shows you as “Submitted.”
  5. Check status at any time by going to SAM.gov, choosing Entity Information, and searching for your UEI. The public status page shows whether the registration is Active, Submitted, or has an issue.

Annual renewal

SAM.gov registration expires every 365 days. A lapsed registration disqualifies you from receiving new awards and can halt payments on contracts you already hold—the Contracting Officer cannot legally cut you a check while your registration is inactive.

  1. Put a calendar reminder 60 days before your expiration date. That gives you room to re-validate, re-confirm banking, and re-affirm Reps and Certs without a gap.
  2. Renewals follow the same flow as the original registration but most fields are pre-filled. The Reps and Certs section is the one that takes the longest because clauses get updated yearly and you have to re-read what changed.
  3. Renewals also have to clear IRS and CAGE re-validation, so don’t leave it for the day before.

Common reasons registrations get rejected

Most rejections trace back to a small number of root causes. If you hit one, the fix is almost always documentation.

  1. Name or address mismatch with IRS records.An extra comma, “Inc” vs. “Inc.”, or a street abbreviation mismatch will fail the IRS check. Pull out your CP 575 letter and match character for character.
  2. Banking info typos. One transposed digit and the EFT setup fails. Some banks also have multiple routing numbers (ACH vs. wire); use the ACH routing number.
  3. Ownership disclosure missed. Forgetting to list an immediate parent company or an individual at the 10%+ threshold will fail review.
  4. CAGE name vs. legal name divergence. If you already had a CAGE code under a slightly different business name (e.g., from a prior incorporation), DLA may reject the mismatch. Update the CAGE record first, then return to SAM.gov.
  5. Expired EIN letter or unverifiable address. Brand-new entities sometimes hit the IRS before their EIN has fully propagated. Wait two weeks after EIN issuance before starting registration.

Cost: it’s free

Registering on SAM.gov costs nothing. Not for the UEI, not for the CAGE code, not for any part of the entity registration. The federal government does not charge a fee for any of it.

Third-party services regularly charge $300 to over $1,000 to “help” with registration. Many simply re-type what you give them into the same forms you could fill out yourself. If you need help, free support is available from the Federal Service Desk (federalservicedesk.com), from the IRS for tax-record questions, and from local Procurement Technical Assistance Centers (PTACs / APEX Accelerators). Spend the money on capture, proposal writing, or past-performance documentation instead—that has actual leverage on winning contracts.

What comes next

An active SAM.gov registration is necessary but not sufficient. Once you’re Active, the practical next steps are:

  1. Audit your NAICS code list and make sure your primary code actually reflects how you want to be found by Contracting Officers. See our NAICS-code guide for how to choose strategically and how size standards interact with your code list.
  2. Determine whether you qualify for socioeconomic certifications—8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, WOSB—and start those applications in parallel. They take weeks to months and meaningfully expand the contracts you can compete for. Start with our guide to federal set-asides.
  3. Set up your search routine. SAM.gov publishes thousands of new opportunities per week; the win condition for small businesses is knowing about the right ones early. You can start now even while your registration finishes processing— search the live opportunity feedand get a sense of what’s out there.
  4. Build a capability statement. Contracting officers ask for it constantly and most newly registered firms don’t have one ready.

When you’re ready to actually go after an opportunity, our playbook for winning your first federal contract walks through sourcing, qualifying, and writing a credible first bid—including how to compete when you have no prior federal past performance.