Need help with your APIs? I offer API discovery, governance & evangelism services. Explore services →
API Evangelist API Evangelist
Discovery
Learnings
Guidance
Toolbox
Alignment
API Evangelist LLC
SAM.gov website screenshot

SAM.gov

SAM.gov (System for Award Management) is the official US government system for vendor registration and federal procurement. Operated by the General Services Administration (GSA), SAM.gov consolidates multiple legacy acquisition systems and provides APIs for contract opportunities, entity management, federal hierarchy, and location validation services.

agent aware

Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles SAM.gov the way a machine reads it — 24 machine-readable artifacts across 8 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — SAM.gov scores 40.8/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 39/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 40.8/100 · thin
Contract Quality 14.2 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 3.5 / 20
Commercial Clarity 5.8 / 20
Operational Transparency 5.5 / 13
Governance 3.2 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 39/100 · agent aware
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile SAM.gov

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for SAM.gov. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 8

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

SAM.gov Get Opportunities Public API

The Get Opportunities Public API provides all published contract opportunity details based on request parameters. Returns solicitation notices, awards, and pre-solicitations fro...

SAM.gov Opportunity Management API

The Opportunity Management API allows authorized users to programmatically submit, update, and manage contract opportunity notices in SAM.gov. Requires federal government or con...

SAM.gov Entity Management API

The Entity Management API provides detailed entity (vendor/contractor) information from SAM.gov including registration status, hierarchy, security levels, points of contact, and...

SAM.gov Federal Hierarchy Public API

The Federal Hierarchy Public API allows non-federal users to retrieve Federal Organization details down to the office level. Used to look up agency and organizational hierarchy ...

SAM.gov Contract Awards API

The Contract Awards API provides access to federal contract award information from SAM.gov, including award details, vendor information, award amounts, and performance period data.

SAM.gov Cities API

City lookup and validation

SAM.gov States API

State and province lookup

SAM.gov ZIP Codes API

ZIP code validation

Scroll within the panel for all 8 ·

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Sam.Gov Plans Pricing

1 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Sam.Gov Rate Limits

1 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Sam Gov Context

0 classes · 5 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

SAM.gov API Rules

10 rules · 4 errors · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

SAM.gov API Rules

5 rules · 3 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

SAM.gov City

9 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SAM.gov Contract Opportunity

21 properties

JSON SCHEMA

JSON Structure 3

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Sam Gov City Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Sam Gov Opportunity Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Sam.Gov Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Examples 2

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Sam.Gov Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Sam.Gov Agentic Access

3 operations

3 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for SAM.gov — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/sam.gov · machine-readable index on apis.io