How to Win Your First Government Contract With No Past Performance?

No past performance, no contract. No contract, no past performance. It is the loop that stalls most new government contractors right after they get their UEI and CAGE code. Here is how to break through it and how asking the right questions before you bid changes everything.

Category: Strategy & BD · 11 min read · Published 2026-05-03

Key takeaways

Simplified acquisition procedures, covering contracts valued at 9 million dollars and below, do not require agencies to evaluate past performance.
Below that threshold, proposal quality is more often the differentiator than track record.
Subcontracting is the most direct route to building real, countable past performance, and it opens relationships with primes.
State and local contracts are a legitimate bridge, with lower competition and less complex requirements, and the experience translates directly to federal work.

The number one question in government contracting right now is not about certifications, NAICS codes, or proposal writing. It is simpler and more fundamental than any of that.

How do I get my first government contract when I have no past performance?

People understand the opportunity. The federal government awards hundreds of billions in contracts every year to businesses of every size. But they hit the same wall: agencies want past performance, and you cannot have past performance without a contract. The loop is real, and it stops a lot of capable companies before they ever get started.

The contractors who break through do not find a secret door. They find a different path.

Why Past Performance Is Not Always the Barrier You Think

Here is something most new contractors do not know: past performance is not a universal requirement.

A Contracting Officer in a popular GovCon forum put it plainly: simplified acquisition procedures (contracts valued at $9 million and below) do not require agencies to evaluate past performance. And beyond the formal threshold, many COs simply do not weight past performance heavily because they do not consider it a meaningful discriminator between bidders at that level.

This changes the math significantly. A large portion of the federal market operates below the simplified acquisition threshold. Within that space, what actually differentiates proposals is not who has the longest past performance record. It is who writes the clearest, most compliant response.

At the simplified acquisition level, past performance is less of a barrier but proposal quality becomes the differentiator. A clearly written, compliant technical proposal beats a more established company with a mediocre one.

The Paths That Actually Work

For companies that do need to build past performance before pursuing larger contracts, the paths that actually work share a common theme: they do not wait for the perfect prime opportunity.

Subcontracting is the most direct route. Find companies already delivering work in your domain and get on their approved vendor lists. The past performance you build as a subcontractor is real. It counts. And it opens relationships with prime contractors who may bring you in on future bids.

State and local contracts are often overlooked but can be a legitimate bridge. Competition is typically lower, requirements are less complex, and the experience you build translates directly when you move to federal work.

Commercial work positioned correctly can also serve as evidence of capability. If you have delivered comparable work in the commercial sector at similar scope, scale, or technical requirement, document it the way you would document a government contract. Past performance is about demonstrating you can do the work. Commercial evidence, presented clearly, can satisfy that need for evaluators with discretion.

Working from inside the industry first is the path that produces the highest long-term win rates. If you are still in a position to spend time working for a company that delivers the type of support you plan to sell, use that time. Learn the business from the inside, build a network, develop a reputation. Transitioning to your own entity after that foundation is in place is dramatically easier than starting cold.

Micro-purchases are one of the fastest and most underused on-ramps for a brand new entity. The federal micro-purchase threshold, the dollar level below which a contracting officer can buy directly with a government purchase card without a formal solicitation, has moved from

0,000 to

5,000. That is a real amount of work that can be awarded to your company without you ever competing against fifty other bidders on SAM.gov. The buyers making these purchases frequently are not waiting for proposals to fall out of the sky. They search registries like SAM.gov's Dynamic Small Business Search, and the state and local equivalents, looking for a vendor who already meets their criteria. If your capabilities narrative and certifications are filled out and easy to find by keyword, NAICS code, or set-aside status, a buyer with a small purchase to make may reach out to you directly rather than the other way around. A handful of micro-purchases in your first year will not make headlines, but they generate real revenue, a real relationship with a real contracting office, and past performance you can cite in the SAR format described below, which is a meaningfully stronger starting position than a resume with no government work on it at all.

The Past Performance Hierarchy (And What to Cite When You Have None)

Every new business has a past performance gap, because the entity itself is new and has not yet delivered anything as that entity. That gap is real, but it is not a dead end, and understanding the hierarchy evaluators actually use helps you decide what to lead with.

Federal past performance sits at the top of that hierarchy. If your company or your team has delivered work directly for a federal agency, in any capacity, prime or subcontract, lead with it. Next is state and local government experience. Evaluators still recognize a governmental delivery environment, even if it is not federal, as more directly comparable than pure commercial work. Third is relevant commercial industry experience: work you delivered to a private sector client at similar scope, scale, or technical complexity to what the government is asking for now. Fourth, and still worth citing when nothing higher on the list is available, is the individual experience of the people on your team. If your entity is new but your staff previously delivered similar work at other companies, including a Fortune 500 employer, document what those individuals actually did and how well they did it. A company built from a bench of individuals with real, relevant experience, framed clearly as a new team assembled around proven capability, beats a blank space on the past performance page every time. The rule of thumb: use the highest tier you actually have, and never leave the section blank when a lower tier is available to you.

Writing Past Performance That Actually Proves Something: The SAR Format

Once you know which reference to use, how you write it matters almost as much as which one you pick. A structure many evaluators recognize, and one worth adopting as your default, is Situation, Action, Result, sometimes called the SAR format. In two sentences each: describe the Situation, meaning the context, the customer, the scope, and the environment you were operating in; describe the Action, meaning specifically what you did, including your method, scale, and tools; and describe the Result, meaning quantified outcomes such as time saved, quality achieved, cost avoided, or risk reduced.

This structure forces a distinction that trips up a lot of new contractors: the difference between past experience and past performance. Past experience is simply what you have done. Past performance is how well you did it. A reference that only describes the Situation and the Action, without a quantified Result, reads like an experience narrative, not a performance narrative, and evaluators are specifically looking for the latter. If you have a CPARS record or an equivalent client-provided performance rating available, cite it. If you do not, quantify your own results as specifically as you can: percentage of on-time delivery, dollar value of cost avoidance, reduction in backlog, uptime achieved, or any other concrete number that shows the outcome, not just the activity.

The Question Most New Contractors Skip: Should I Even Bid on This?

Here is where a lot of new contractors waste time they cannot afford to waste.

They find an opportunity, get excited, and start working on a proposal without ever asking the fundamental questions that determine whether they should bid at all.

Is past performance actually evaluated here, or is this a simplified acquisition where it does not matter? Does this require on-site delivery or installation, and if so, does that change my competitive position? What does the scope of work actually ask for when you read it carefully, not just skim the title?

One experienced contractor in the GovCon community made a point that deserves more attention: if installation is required, roughly half your competition disappears immediately, because most bidders who can deliver product cannot install it. If a site visit is required on top of that, another large chunk of the field drops out. The contractors who read the full SOW and understand exactly what is being asked are the ones who find opportunities where their position is stronger than it appears.

How ProposalApp Proposal Assistant Helps You Qualify Before You Bid

This is exactly the kind of analysis that ProposalApp's Proposal Assistant is built to accelerate.

When you upload an opportunity's documents into ProposalApp and open the Proposal Assistant, you can ask the questions that determine whether you should bid before you invest hours writing a proposal.

The Proposal Assistant can answer:

Does this bid require past performance? The assistant reads the evaluation criteria and solicitation requirements and tells you directly whether past performance is a scored factor, whether it is required or simply requested, and what the stated threshold is. For new contractors, this is the single most important question to answer before doing anything else.

Does this bid require on-site delivery or installation? A delivery-only opportunity and an installation-required contract are fundamentally different competitive situations. If you can install and many competitors cannot, that is an advantage worth knowing about. If you cannot and the contract requires it, that is a disqualifier worth knowing about even faster.

Is this a simplified acquisition? Understanding the procurement type tells you what rules apply, what the agency can do without competition, and what your proposal actually needs to include to be compliant and competitive.

Beyond these pre-bid qualification questions, the Proposal Assistant can also summarize the key requirements from the opportunity documents, assess how well your company's capabilities match what is being asked for, identify the evaluation criteria the agency will use to score proposals, and help you draft the sections of a response.

But the most valuable thing it does for a new contractor may be the simplest: it helps you decide faster which opportunities are worth your time and which ones are not.

The Daily Pipeline Discipline

One of the most practical insights from experienced GovCon practitioners is the importance of volume combined with selectivity. The goal is not to find one perfect bid and spend three months writing it. It is to build a pipeline where you are consistently reviewing opportunities, qualifying them quickly, and submitting on the ones where your position is genuinely competitive.

Aim for roughly equal investment in quality and quantity. Go through bids regularly, pick the ones that pass your qualification criteria, submit a strong proposal, then repeat. If you are only submitting once a quarter, the feedback loop is too slow to get better.

ProposalApp is built to support exactly this kind of pipeline discipline. The bid matching feature surfaces opportunities matched to your NAICS codes and capabilities. The Proposal Assistant helps you qualify each one quickly. And when you find a bid worth pursuing, the proposal generation tools help you produce a compliant first draft in hours instead of weeks.

Starting the Clock

The contractors who break through the no-past-performance loop share one characteristic: they start. They take a subcontract, pursue a small simplified acquisition, go after state work to build a record, or target an agency and write a genuinely good proposal on a solicitation with low competition.

Getting a CAGE code and UEI is step one. It is a long way from finishing. But the contractors who treat registration as a starting line are the ones who have something to show for it twelve months later.

If you are at the beginning of that journey, start with the right questions. Let ProposalApp's Proposal Assistant help you ask them.

Frequently asked questions

Can I win a government contract with no past performance?

Yes. Simplified acquisition procedures, which cover contracts valued at 9 million dollars and below, do not require agencies to evaluate past performance, and many contracting officers do not weight it heavily at that level because they do not consider it a meaningful discriminator between bidders. A large portion of the federal market operates below that threshold.

What is the fastest way to build past performance?

Subcontracting. Find companies already delivering work in your domain and get onto their approved vendor lists. The past performance you build as a subcontractor is real and it counts, and it opens relationships with prime contractors who may bring you in on future bids.

Do state and local contracts count toward federal past performance?

They are a legitimate bridge. Competition is typically lower, requirements are less complex, and the experience you build translates directly when you move to federal work.

What differentiates proposals below the simplified acquisition threshold?

Proposal quality. At that level, what separates bidders is not who has the longest past performance record but who writes the clearest, most compliant response. A clearly written, compliant technical proposal beats a more established company with a mediocre one.