SBA Small Business Scorecard: Where Set-Aside Dollars Actually Go

What Is the SBA Small Business Scorecard?

The SBA Small Business Procurement Scorecard is the federal government's annual report card on how well each agency met its small business contracting goals. It's published by the Small Business Administration, usually six to twelve months after the fiscal year closes (the government's fiscal year runs October 1 to September 30), and it grades every major agency on a letter scale — A+ through F — based on the percentage of eligible contracting dollars they awarded to small businesses and specific socioeconomic categories.

The most recently published full scorecard covers fiscal year 2024 results, released by SBA in summer 2025. Government-wide, agencies again exceeded the overall small business goal, awarding roughly 28.7% of eligible contracting dollars — around $183 billion — to small businesses, against a statutory floor of 23%. That headline number looks great. The problem for most small business owners is that it hides enormous variation by agency and by socioeconomic category, and that variation is exactly where your bid strategy should live.

The Five Government-Wide Goals

Every year, Congress and the SBA set these targets for federal spending:

• 23% of prime contracting dollars to small businesses overall
• 5% to women-owned small businesses (WOSB)
• 5% to small disadvantaged businesses (SDB), which includes most 8(a) firms
• 3% to HUBZone-certified small businesses
• 3% to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses (SDVOSB)

These aren't aspirational — they're statutory minimums under the Small Business Act. Agencies are graded on how close they get, and the grade affects everything from the agency's leadership scorecard to how much political pressure their small business office is under to close the gap before the fiscal year ends.

Who's Meeting the Goals (and Who Isn't)

Government-wide, the small business and SDB goals have been met for several consecutive years. HUBZone is the chronic underperformer — it's been missed government-wide almost every year since the category was created, typically landing somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% instead of the 3% target. SDVOSB and WOSB goals have been hit or come close in most recent years, but agency-level performance is wildly inconsistent.

Some patterns worth knowing:

• Department of Defense is the largest buyer of all and consistently the hardest to move the needle on, since its small business percentage is calculated against a massive denominator. DoD has historically landed in the high teens to low 20s percent-wise, often earning a B or C even while technically making progress.
• Department of Veterans Affairs tends to be a strong SDVOSB performer by design (its "Veterans First" policy drives this), often exceeding 3% by a wide margin.
• GSA, HHS, and Department of Commerce frequently score A or A+ on overall small business goals but can still lag specifically on HUBZone.
• Smaller or newer agencies sometimes miss goals simply because their acquisition shops are thin and they default to existing large vendors out of convenience, not policy.

This is caveated data — the SBA scorecard methodology has had minor adjustments year to year (what counts as "eligible" dollars, how goaling credit works for multiple-award contracts), so treat single-digit percentage differences between years cautiously. The direction and relative ranking across agencies is the reliable signal, not the third decimal point.

Why This Matters for Your Bid Strategy

Here's the part most small businesses never connect to their actual pipeline: an agency that's behind on a socioeconomic goal has an institutional incentive to close that gap before September 30. Contracting officers and small business specialists get evaluated partly on these numbers. If an agency's HUBZone spend is sitting at 1.8% in July, their small business office is actively looking for HUBZone-eligible vendors to push dollars to before the fiscal year closes.

Practically, this means:

• Q4 (July–September) is historically the best window to pitch set-aside work to agencies that are behind on their goals, because there's real urgency to spend remaining budget against unmet targets.
• An agency with a strong HUBZone deficit and a weak SDVOSB record is a better prospect for a HUBZone/SDVOSB-certified firm than an agency that's already over-performing in that category — you're competing against less saturated demand.
• Agencies that consistently score A+ on a given category tend to have mature small business programs, more set-aside solicitations, and more sophisticated competition. Agencies closer to a C or D may have fewer set-asides today but more pressure to create them.

Finding this signal manually means digging through SBA's published scorecard PDFs, cross-referencing with FPDS-NG (the Federal Procurement Data System) for agency-level spend by NAICS code, and tracking it over multiple years to see trend direction — not a one-afternoon project. This is the kind of agency-level matching we automate inside InstaGovOps, flagging which agencies are behind on goals relevant to your certifications before you spend hours building a target list by hand (book a 15-minute walkthrough).

How to Pull Agency-Level Numbers Yourself

If you want to do this research on your own, here's the path:

1. Start with SBA's scorecard page (sba.gov/goals) for the official letter grades and percentage achievement by agency and category.
2. Cross-check with SAM.gov to confirm your own certifications (small business, WOSB, HUBZone, SDVOSB, 8(a)) are current and correctly reflected — a misaligned SAM profile can keep you invisible to goaling-driven searches entirely.
3. Use FPDS-NG's agency-level reports to see actual dollar amounts and NAICS code breakdowns, which the scorecard summarizes but doesn't fully detail.
4. Look at the trend, not just the latest year. An agency that missed HUBZone goals three years running is a more durable opportunity than one with a single off year.
5. Match goal-laggard agencies against your NAICS codes and past performance to prioritize outreach, especially heading into Q3 and Q4.

The Bottom Line

The scorecard isn't just a government transparency exercise — it's a map of where contracting officers have both budget and motivation to work with small businesses. An agency sitting below its HUBZone or SDVOSB goal in June is telling you, indirectly, that they need vendors like you before the fiscal year ends. Most small businesses never look at this data because pulling it together from SBA PDFs and FPDS-NG manually takes real time, which is exactly the kind of grunt work that's easy to underprice when you're deciding between hiring a capture manager and finding another way to get the same intelligence (see what InstaGovOps costs vs hiring this in-house).