We were speaking with someone from a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) that wanted to look at contracts set-aside for companies that qualify. This started a discussion about how common the various set-aside types are in open solicitations. To provide some clarity we looked at all open solicitations (29,267 at the time of this article) and pulled a tally of the various set-aside types including small business, Service Disabled Veteran, HubZone, and others.
As we can see below, Service Disabled Veteran Small Businesses are receiving the most set-aside contracts.
| Set-aside type | Solicitations | Percentage |
| Small business set-aside | 5,094 | 17.41% |
| Service Disabled Veteran (SDVOSB) | 803 | 2.74% |
| Woman Owned Small bus sole-source | 155 | 0.53% |
| Hubzone Set-Aside | 85 | 0.29% |
| Indian Small Bus | 91 | 0.31% |
| 8a program | 27 | 0.09% |
| Indian Economic Enterprise | 23 | 0.08% |
| Small Bus partial set-aside | 12 | 0.04% |
| Economically Disadvantaged Woman Owned | 9 | 0.03% |
| Very small business | 7 | 0.02% |
Small business set-asides are defined in FAR 19.5. Hubzones are economically disadvantaged geographic areas as define by FAR 19.13.
Tired of DIBBS / SAM and bid services that don’t understand defense contracting? Try BidLink for free at www.bidlink.net.
