How to Find Government Contracts and RFPs - Easy Guide 

Federal, state, and local agencies together spend more than $3.5 trillion a year on goods and services, and almost every one of those purchases is posted publicly before it's awarded. The real challenge isn't a shortage of opportunities. It's knowing which platform to search and how to use it. This guide walks through exactly where to find live RFPs and past contract data, starting at the federal level and then moving to state, local, and education (SLED) agencies.

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1. Finding Federal RFPs

1) Go to sam.gov/opportunities. It's free, and no registration is required to search or view RFPs. To access additional features, like saving searches, setting alerts, viewing historical awards, or using the API, you'll need to create a free account.

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2) Search for your industry, contract type, or the specific product you're looking for. If you already know your NAICS code or PSC (Product Service Code), search by that instead, since it narrows results far more precisely than a plain keyword search.

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In the example below, I searched for active RFPs related to antivirus software procurement.

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3) You'll now get a list of RFPs from federal agencies matching your search. These results can be filtered further by

• keyword
• agency, 
• set-aside type, 
• notice type, 
• posted date, 
• response date, 
• place of performance

and several more.

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If you click on the “Contracting” tab, you can also search federal assistance listings, entity information, the federal hierarchy, and wage determinations, as shown in the image below.

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4) Save your search and turn on email alerts (requires a login.gov account), so new opportunities land in your inbox instead of requiring daily manual checks. You can also join the Interested Vendors List on a specific opportunity so the buyer can see you're pursuing it, and pull DataBank reports or use SAM.gov's public API if you want to automate monitoring beyond email alerts.

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5) Worth noting: SAM.gov retired FPDS.gov's award-search tool ("ezSearch") in February 2026 and folded historical contract-award data directly into SAM.gov. That means you can now check an agency's past awards on the same platform you use to find opportunities. More on this in Section 3 below.

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2. Finding RFPs and Government Contracts for SLED (State, Local Municipalities, Education, Special Districts) 

Unlike the federal government, there is no single centralized platform for state and local RFPs. The SLED market (state, local, and education agencies) spans more than 170,000 individual government and education entities and accounts for over $1.5 trillion in annual spending, roughly double the size of the federal contracting market. But because every agency posts its own solicitations on its own website, that spending is scattered across tens of thousands of separate portals. Fortunately, private platforms like Pursuit.us use AI to continuously scan these individual sites and bring RFPs together on one central platform for vendors.

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1) To find SLED RFPs, go to Pursuit.us and log in to your account. Registration is required, and it's a paid platform.

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2) Search for RFPs relevant to your industry or product. You'll get results from states, counties, municipalities, education institutions, and more, all in one search. From there, you can filter results by state, county, population, and 10 other criteria.

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Beyond RFPs, Pursuit.us also surfaces:

• Existing contracts
• Upcoming RFPs (Pre-RFP intelligence)
• Purchase orders (POs)
• Budget allocation 
• Competitors’ contract analysis 
• Expiring grants
• Decision-makers’ contact info 
• Leadership changes
• FOIA analysis
• And more.

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3. Finding Past Awards and Existing Contracts (Federal)

For past federal awards, go to https://www.usaspending.gov/. It's also free, and no registration is required. As of February 2026, SAM.gov also hosts its own contract award search (this replaced FPDS.gov's "ezSearch" tool, which was retired), so you can cross-check award history directly on the same platform you used to find the opportunity, which is useful for comparing what an agency actually paid against what it advertised.

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Search using keywords, then filter results by recipient, fiscal year, award amount, and roughly 15 other criteria. See the example below.

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Between SAM.gov for federal opportunities and award history, and platforms like Pursuit.us for the fragmented SLED market, most of the government contracts and RFPs are easily searchable online. The vendors who win consistently usually aren't the ones with the best product. They're the ones with a search running in the background every single day.