SAM.gov registration and the UEI

No federal award reaches an organisation that is not registered in SAM.gov. Registration produces a Unique Entity ID, a twelve-character alphanumeric identifier that replaced the DUNS number in 2022 and now appears on every federal transaction.

It is free. Companies charge to do it for you, and their marketing arrives promptly after you start, but there is no fee and no advantage to paying one.

It is also slow. The bottleneck is ENTITY VALIDATION: proving your organisation's legal name and address against documentary evidence, which for a non-US entity means documents in the right form, transliterated consistently, matching to the character. Weeks is normal, and a mismatch between the name on your incorporation document and the name you typed restarts the wait.

Registration expires annually. A lapsed registration blocks payments and blocks new applications, and the renewal is easy to miss because nothing visible breaks until you need it. Diary it with a month's warning.

Start the day you decide to pursue US funding, not when you find a notice. Deadlines are typically thirty to sixty days from publication, which is not enough time to obtain a UEI from a standing start, and this is the single most common reason a foreign applicant misses an otherwise winnable American deadline.