SAM.gov Search MCP Server

SAM.gov Search MCP Server

An MCP server that lets AI agents search SAM.gov — the U.S. government's System for Award Management — without needing a SAM.gov account or an api.sam.gov API key.

It talks directly to the same internal search endpoint sam.gov's own web UI uses (sam.gov/api/prod/sgs/v1/search/), so setup is zero-config: no login, no key, no rate-limit request form.

Coverage

Domains reachable without login on sam.gov are fully covered:

Tool	sam.gov domain
search_contract_opportunities / get_contract_opportunity	Contract Opportunities (solicitations, RFPs, sources sought)
search_federal_hierarchy / get_federal_organization	Federal Hierarchy (agencies, departments, sub-offices)
search_assistance_listings	Assistance Listings (grants/loans, formerly CFDA)
search_exclusions / get_exclusion	Exclusions (debarred/suspended parties)
search_wage_determinations	Wage Determinations (Davis-Bacon)
search_collective_bargaining_agreements	Collective Bargaining Agreement wage records
search_service_contract_act	Service Contract Act (SCA/WDOL) wage records
search_all_contracts	Cross-domain search over opportunities, awards, other transactions, and subcontracting plan reports

Not covered — these require a signed-in SAM.gov session on sam.gov's own site, which this server does not have and will not attempt to fake: full Entity registration profiles (Entities tab), Contract Awards search, Subcontract/Subcontracting Plan Reports, Other Transactions, Disaster Response Registry, and Entity Status/UEI lookup. Exclusions and Federal Hierarchy remain available publicly and cover the exclusion-flagged-entity and org-lookup use cases.

Caveats

• This is sam.gov's internal, undocumented frontend API, not a published/versioned public API. It can change without notice.
• sam.gov itself caps deep pagination at 10,000 records per query (maxAllowedRecords in every response) — narrow your filters instead of paging past it.
• search_wage_determinations keyword search has been observed to return zero hits for some plain terms; try the CBA/SCA tools or page through unfiltered if you hit that.
• search_exclusions' classification, exclusion_type, and exclusion_program filter values mirror the labels shown on sam.gov's own Exclusions filter panel.

How to connect

Find the Actor's Standby endpoint URL on its API tab in Apify Console (shape: https://rl1987--samgov-mcp.apify.actor/mcp).

Add it with the Claude Code CLI:

claude mcp add --transport http samgov https://rl1987--samgov-mcp.apify.actor/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>"

The token is your own Apify API token (from Apify Console → Settings → Integrations), not the Actor owner's. Verify the connection and tool count with claude mcp list or /mcp inside Claude Code.

A team can share a .mcp.json with just the URL committed to a repo; each teammate runs claude mcp add --scope local once with their own token.

Output shape

Search tools return:

{
  "results": [ { "...": "raw sam.gov record fields" } ],
  "page_number": 0,
  "page_size": 10,
  "total_results": 1234,
  "total_pages": 124,
  "max_allowed_records": 10000
}

Detail tools (get_contract_opportunity, get_federal_organization, get_exclusion) return the raw sam.gov detail-page JSON for that record.

Contract Opportunity results and detail lookups also include a sam_gov_url field — the canonical https://sam.gov/opp/<id>/view public page link for that record.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.01 per successful tool call. Failed calls (bad ID, sam.gov error) are not charged.

Resources

• What is Anthropic's Model Context Protocol?
• How to use MCP with Apify Actors
• FastMCP documentation
• Apify SDK documentation