SAM.gov (System for Award Management)

SAM.gov (System for Award Management) is the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) centralized, government-wide system for registering entities that do business with the federal government — including every organization that applies for or receives federal grants, cooperative agreements, or contracts. It is not optional paperwork alongside an application; under 2 CFR Part 25 (“Unique Entity Identifier and System for Award Management”), a federal awarding agency may not make an award to an entity that has not obtained a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) and does not maintain an active SAM.gov registration with current information.

What SAM.gov actually does

SAM.gov consolidates several functions that used to live in separate legacy systems. Registering in SAM.gov: (1) assigns the entity a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), a 12-character alphanumeric identifier that GSA generates directly once it validates the organization’s legal business name and physical address; (2) creates the authoritative federal record of the entity’s basic information (legal name, address, taxpayer ID, banking information for electronic payments) that other federal systems — Grants.gov, agency-specific portals, and financial-reporting systems — read from rather than collecting independently; and (3) makes the entity checkable against the SAM.gov Exclusions list, the government-wide record of parties debarred, suspended, or otherwise excluded from receiving federal funds.

SAM.gov absorbed several older, separate systems as it was built out, most notably the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS), which GSA retired in 2012 and folded into SAM.gov along with the old Central Contractor Registration (CCR) and Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA). More recently, GSA moved the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) into SAM.gov as “Assistance Listings” (2021), and FFATA subaward reporting — previously handled through the separate FSRS.gov portal — was migrated into SAM.gov as well. The practical effect for a research administrator: SAM.gov is now the single hub feeding entity eligibility, exclusion screening, assistance-listing lookups, and subaward reporting, rather than four disconnected sites.

The UEI replaced the DUNS number

Before April 2022, federal entity identification ran on the DUNS (Data Universal Numbering System) number, a nine-digit identifier licensed from the private vendor Dun & Bradstreet. GSA retired DUNS government-wide in April 2022 and moved identification entirely in-house: SAM.gov now generates the UEI directly as part of the registration process, at no cost, rather than requiring a separate application to a third-party vendor. Any pre-2022 reference to a “DUNS number” on a form, subaward agreement, or older CASRAI content refers to the identifier the UEI has since replaced — the UEI is not an additional identifier layered on top of DUNS, it is DUNS’s full functional successor.

Registration is required before an award, not just before applying

2 CFR Part 25 is explicit that registration must be active at the point an agency is actually ready to make the award, not merely at the point of application. If an intended recipient’s SAM.gov registration has lapsed by the time an agency is prepared to issue a Notice of Award, the agency may make the award to a different, compliant applicant instead. This makes SAM.gov status a live, monitorable compliance item throughout an application and award cycle — not a one-time box checked at proposal submission.

Annual renewal — what breaks if it lapses

A SAM.gov registration does not stay active indefinitely once created. An entity must review, recertify, and renew its registration at least every 12 months from the date it was last certified, and sooner if any of its information changes (legal name, address, banking details, points of contact). If registration lapses:

• The entity cannot receive a new federal award, and an agency preparing to issue one may withhold it until registration is renewed.
• A pass-through entity checking SAM.gov as part of debarment and suspension verification before issuing a subaward will find the record inactive, which can hold up subaward execution even though the underlying exclusion status hasn’t changed.
• The entity’s Authorized Organization Representative on Grants.gov loses the ability to submit application packages on the organization’s behalf, since Grants.gov relies on an active SAM.gov registration underneath the AOR role.

Registration renewal is free directly through SAM.gov; institutions should budget lead time (GSA has, at various points, cited multi-week validation windows, particularly for new registrations or ones requiring notarized identity verification) rather than renewing at the last plausible moment before an application deadline.

How SAM.gov relates to Grants.gov registration and debarment screening

SAM.gov is the upstream system; Grants.gov registration and debarment and suspension verification both depend on it rather than duplicating it. An organization cannot complete Grants.gov registration — specifically, cannot have an Authorized Organization Representative approved to submit applications — without an active SAM.gov entity registration and UEI underneath it. Separately, when a prime recipient or procuring office needs to verify a subrecipient or contractor is not excluded from federal participation under 2 CFR 200.214 and 2 CFR Part 180, SAM.gov Exclusions is the authoritative source consulted; that check reads the same underlying SAM.gov entity record this term describes, but is a distinct, narrower compliance action performed at a specific point (before a covered transaction), not the registration itself.

Who registers

Any organization intending to apply for federal financial assistance — universities, nonprofit research institutions, state and local governments, tribal entities, and businesses — registers using the same SAM.gov process; there is no separate track by applicant type. Individuals doing business directly with the federal government as sole proprietors also register, but a researcher’s personal identifiers (an ORCID iD, for example) are unrelated to and not a substitute for an institutional SAM.gov registration.