Awardly Toolbox
Federal Size Standard Checker
Current and proposed SBA size standards by NAICS code. Enter your average annual receipts and average employee count to see whether you count as a small business under each code, today and under the rule proposed on 20 August 2026.
Your five-year average, in dollars. Enter 12500000 for $12.5 million.
Your 24-month average, counting everyone: full-time, part-time, temporary, and employees of any affiliates.
Multi-industry remediation work
Only affects NAICS 562910.
This is about a particular job, not about your firm. Tick it if all three are true of a specific piece of work you are considering:
- The job is to clean up contamination, or directly support cleaning it up.
- It takes three or more different kinds of trade or service.
- No single one of those is half the job or more by value.
If one of them is half the job or more, that trade’s own size standard applies instead, not this one.
Every code, current and proposed
Fourteen codes plus the 562910 exception. The current and proposed columns are not always the same kind of measurement, so each cell says which test it is. Enter your figures above and the verdict columns fill in.
What a size standard is
A size standard is the largest a business can be and still count as small for federal contracting purposes. The federal government sets one for every industry, and the industry is identified by a NAICS code. When a contracting officer writes a solicitation they assign it a NAICS code, and that code decides which size standard applies to that particular contract.
The same company can be small for one contract and not small for another, because the codes carry different standards. A firm with $20 million in receipts is small under NAICS 561210 at $47 million and is not small under NAICS 561790 at $9 million. Nothing about the firm changed; the code did.
Being small is what makes a firm eligible for work set aside for small businesses, and for the programmes built on top of that status, such as 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB and WOSB. It is not a judgement about the firm. It is a threshold.
How receipts and employees are measured
Both figures have a defined method, and neither is simply the number from last year's accounts.
Average annual receipts
Receipts are averaged over the most recent five completed fiscal years. Receipts means total income plus cost of goods sold, as reported on federal tax returns, before deducting most expenses. The calculation is set out at 13 CFR 121.104.
Number of employees
Employees are averaged over the preceding 24 completed calendar months. Everyone is counted, whether full-time, part-time, temporary or on leave, and it is a headcount rather than a full-time-equivalent calculation. The method is at 13 CFR 121.106.
Affiliates count too
Both figures include the receipts and employees of any affiliates: broadly, businesses that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with yours. This is why a small firm owned by a large parent is generally not small. Affiliation is at 13 CFR 121.103, and the size standards themselves are in the table at 13 CFR 121.201.
What the 20 August 2026 proposed rule would change
SBA has proposed a substantial restructuring of how size standards work. It is a proposed rule, not a final one, which means it may change before it takes effect and may not take effect at all. The main changes are:
What that means in practice
The phrase "the standards are rising" is the wrong summary, and this is the part most worth understanding before assuming the change helps you.
Not every code moves the same way. Most of the service codes here rise, some sharply: environmental consulting goes from $19 million to $295 million. But the six construction codes do not rise at all in the ordinary sense, because they stop being measured in dollars. A construction firm currently tested against $19 million of receipts would instead be tested against a headcount of 550 employees. Whether that is better or worse depends entirely on the shape of the firm. A capital-intensive contractor with high revenue and few staff may become small when it was not; a labour-intensive one may lose small status it currently has.
One code does not move at all. NAICS 562112, hazardous waste collection, stays at $47 million under both the current table and the proposal.
And one path disappears. NAICS 562910 currently has a second route to small status for multi-industry remediation work, tested on employees rather than receipts. The proposal removes it along with all 18 subindustry exceptions. For a firm that relies on that route, the change is a straightforward loss, not a gain.
The 562910 multi-industry exception
Remediation work often spans several trades at once: assessment, engineering, earthmoving, waste handling, laboratory testing. A procurement like that does not sit neatly in one industry, so SBA provides a separate route for it. Where the exception applies, the test is 1,000 employees instead of $25 million in receipts.
Three conditions must all hold. The procurement's general purpose must be to restore, or directly support the restoration of, a contaminated environment. It must be composed of activities in three or more separate industries. And no single one of those industries may account for 50% or more of the value, because if one does, that industry's own size standard applies instead.
A different system uses the opposite threshold, and the two do not agree.
GSA's Multiple Award Schedule has a Special Item Number for the same kind of work, 562910RMI, described as covering multi-industry remediation spanning three or more NAICS codes with 50% or more remediation work.
SBA's exception requires that no industry reach 50%. GSA's SIN requires that remediation does reach 50%. Both are quoted correctly from their own systems. They are two different rules, written by two different agencies for two different purposes, and holding the GSA SIN does not mean you meet the SBA exception. This page states the difference rather than resolving it, because it is not ours to resolve.