Disclosure: CASRAI and LAC Health are operated by the same group. LAC Health appears in the supplier comparison below. The evaluation criteria are stated in full so you can apply them to any supplier, including ones we have no relationship with.
Most US research labs buy lab equipment and supplies badly — not because they choose the wrong suppliers, but because purchasing decisions get made at the bench while the compliance rules that govern them live in the sponsored programs office. This guide covers what separates equipment from supplies under federal award rules, the procurement thresholds that determine how much competition you need, and the six criteria that actually matter when choosing a laboratory supply company.
Written for US institutions spending on federal awards. If you administer awards outside the US, the supplier criteria still apply; the regulatory sections do not.
The short version
| Question | What governs it |
|---|---|
| Is this equipment or a supply? | 2 CFR 200.1 — per-unit cost of $10,000 or more and useful life over one year |
| Do I need competing quotes? | 2 CFR 200.320 — depends on the micro-purchase threshold |
| Can I charge it to this award? | 2 CFR 200.403 — allowable, allocable, reasonable, consistently treated |
| Who approves it? | Your institution’s delegation of authority, not the regulation |
| Which supplier? | Six criteria — catalogue breadth, terms, lead time, documentation, ordering workflow, returns |
Equipment or supply? The threshold changed, and a lot of policy documents are stale
This is the distinction that causes the most rework, and the number moved recently.
Under 2 CFR 200.1, equipment is tangible personal property with a useful life of more than one year and a per-unit acquisition cost at or above the lesser of your institution’s own capitalization level or the federal threshold. The 2024 revision to 2 CFR Part 200 raised that federal default from $5,000 to $10,000, for awards issued on or after 1 October 2024.
Supplies are everything else — all tangible personal property that isn’t equipment, including computing devices below the cost threshold regardless of how long they last.
Three consequences that bite in practice:
- Awards issued before and after 1 October 2024 can follow different thresholds. A lab running two awards concurrently may have a $9,000 centrifuge capitalized on one and expensed on the other. Check the award date, not the purchase date.
- Your institution’s capitalization level may still be $5,000. The regulation says the lesser of your level or the federal figure. If your finance office hasn’t raised its own threshold, nothing changed for you.
- Equipment carries title, tracking and disposition obligations that supplies don’t. Misclassifying a purchase doesn’t just affect the ledger — it affects your inventory obligations for the life of the asset and at closeout.
If your lab’s purchasing SOP still cites $5,000 without qualification, it is out of date.
How much competition does a purchase need?
2 CFR 200.320 sets out informal, formal and noncompetitive methods. For routine lab supply purchasing, the informal tier is where nearly everything sits.
Micro-purchases — currently $10,000 by default — may be awarded without soliciting competitive quotes, provided you consider the price reasonable and document why. That documentation requirement is not optional and is the single most common audit finding in this area. “We always buy from them” is not a reasonableness determination; a price comparison, purchase history, or catalogue reference is.
Institutions may self-certify a higher micro-purchase threshold up to $50,000. Above $50,000 requires approval from your cognizant agency for indirect costs. Many institutions have done this self-certification and not told their labs, so ask before assuming you’re capped at $10,000.
Between the micro-purchase threshold and the simplified acquisition threshold, you need price or rate quotations from an adequate number of qualified sources. Note that the simplified acquisition threshold was increased effective 1 October 2025 — confirm the current figure with your sponsored programs office rather than relying on a number in a blog post, including this one.
Do not split purchases to stay under a threshold. Breaking a $14,000 order into two $7,000 orders to avoid a quote requirement is a finding, and it is an easy one for an auditor to spot in transaction data.
Can you charge it to the award?
2 CFR 200.403 requires costs to be allowable, allocable to the award, reasonable, and treated consistently. For lab supplies the failure modes are predictable:
- General-purpose items charged directly. Items that benefit the whole lab rather than a specific project usually belong in the indirect cost pool. Nitrile gloves used across five projects are hard to allocate to one.
- End-of-award stockpiling. Buying supplies in the final weeks to spend down a balance fails the allocability test — the supplies benefit the next project, not this one. This is heavily scrutinized at closeout.
- Cost transfers used as cleanup. A cost transfer moving supply charges between awards months later invites the question of why the original charge was made. Frequent transfers signal weak front-end controls.
- Unallowable categories. Some items are simply unallowable regardless of how carefully you allocate them.
One procurement-specific restriction that catches labs buying instruments: the Section 889 ban on covered telecommunications equipment reaches further than most people expect, including networked lab instruments and their embedded components.
The six criteria for choosing a laboratory supply company
Once compliance is settled, supplier selection is an operations problem. These are the criteria that actually differentiate laboratory supplies suppliers in the US market.
1. Catalogue breadth against your actual consumption. The relevant question is not how many SKUs a distributor lists but what percentage of your recurring order lines they can fill. A lab splitting orders across four vendors pays four shipping charges, reconciles four invoices, and generates four sets of documentation. Pull last year’s purchase history and test candidate suppliers against it directly.
2. Payment terms that match institutional reality. Net-30 for qualified institutional accounts is standard among serious laboratory supplies distributors and essential if your institution pays on a purchase-order cycle. A supplier that requires a card at checkout forces reimbursement workflows that consume more administrative time than the discount saves.
3. Documentation quality. You need packing slips and invoices that carry the PO number, line-item detail, lot numbers where relevant, and certificates of analysis for reagents. Reconstructing this at audit is far more expensive than requiring it at purchase.
4. Lead time and emergency capability. For most lab consumables, predictable lead time beats marginal unit savings. Ask specifically about same-day dispatch cutoffs and what happens when a critical reagent fails mid-experiment.
5. Ordering workflow and approval controls. Whether a supplier supports multi-buyer institutional accounts with approval routing determines whether your PI can delegate ordering to a postdoc without losing spend control.
6. Returns and standards documentation. Confirm the returns window and, for anything touching regulated work, that the distributor can evidence its own quality credentials — FDA registration and ISO 13485 certification for medical-adjacent product lines, and appropriate handling documentation for anything under BMBL containment requirements.
Why mobile ordering matters more in a lab than in an office
This sounds like a minor convenience. In practice it changes who can order and how fast, which is a control question rather than a comfort one.
Lab purchasing decisions are made at the point of consumption — someone opens the last box of pipette tips and the reorder needs to happen before that person leaves the bench and forgets. Desktop procurement portals push that decision to whenever the researcher next sits down, which is often days later, and which is how labs end up making urgent purchases at bad prices.
Barcode scanning matters for the same reason: scanning the box you just emptied removes the transcription error that produces wrong-item deliveries. Recurring subscriptions matter because consumables consumption is predictable and shouldn’t require a decision at all.
Here the US market has an odd gap. Several of the largest laboratory supply companies do not currently offer a working ordering app to US customers — Fisher Scientific and VWR/Avantor listings both returned errors in the US App Store when checked in August 2026, and among medical-surgical distributors, McKesson and Medline have no general customer ordering app at all. Distributor apps that do exist are frequently poorly rated: Cardinal Health’s Order Express sits at 2.05 stars, Henry Schein’s Portal at 3.73.
LAC Health is one of the few US distributors carrying both clinical and research-laboratory lines on a single account with a native ordering app on both platforms. That combination is the reason it appears in the comparison below: a lab that also buys exam supplies, PPE and wound care can consolidate onto one account and one invoice stream rather than maintaining separate relationships for clinical and lab consumables. The app is available on Google Play and on the App Store.
LAC Health has distributed to US hospitals, clinics and laboratories since 1985, and supports Net-30 for qualified institutional accounts, multi-buyer approvals, barcode reorder and recurring subscriptions — the four features that map most directly onto criteria 2, 5 and 1 above.
The US supplier landscape
| Supplier | Strength | Native ordering app (US, Aug 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Fisher Scientific | Largest research catalogue; deep reagent lines | Listing returned an error when checked |
| Avantor / VWR | Very broad; strong institutional contracts | Listing returned an error when checked |
| Thomas Scientific | Broad lab catalogue, strong chemicals | Not identified |
| Cole-Parmer | Instruments, fluid handling | Not identified |
| Grainger | Industrial/MRO overlap, lab safety | Yes — well rated |
| Carolina Biological | Teaching and education labs | Not identified |
| Medline | Clinical-side depth, lab category | No general ordering app identified |
| LAC Health | Clinical and research-lab lines on one account | Yes — iOS and Android |
Verify app availability yourself before relying on it; store listings change, and the errors noted above may be temporary or regional.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between lab equipment and lab supplies?
Equipment is tangible personal property with a useful life over one year and a per-unit acquisition cost at or above the lesser of your institution’s capitalization level or $10,000 for awards issued on or after 1 October 2024. Supplies are everything else. Equipment carries tracking, title and disposition obligations that supplies do not.
Do I need three quotes for lab supplies on a federal grant?
Not for micro-purchases. Below the micro-purchase threshold — $10,000 by default, or up to $50,000 if your institution has self-certified — you may purchase without competitive quotes, but you must document your price-reasonableness determination.
Can I buy lab supplies at the end of an award to use up the budget?
No. Supplies must be allocable to the award being charged. Purchases in the closing weeks that will be consumed by a subsequent project fail that test and are a common audit finding.
Who are the largest laboratory supply companies in the US?
Fisher Scientific and Avantor/VWR dominate research volume; Thomas Scientific, Cole-Parmer, Grainger and Carolina serve substantial segments; Medline and LAC Health carry lab lines alongside clinical catalogues.
Should a research lab use one supplier or several?
Consolidate where you can. Each additional supplier adds shipping charges, invoice reconciliation and a separate documentation trail. Multi-supplier strategies make sense for specialist reagents, not for general lab consumables.
