SAM registration
Registration in the federal System for Award Management, required before an organisation can be paid a federal award and renewed every year. It is a property of the applicant rather than of the opportunity, so no record here carries a SAM field.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called SAM.gov registration · System for Award Management
In detail
Registration is free and takes longer than first-time applicants expect: entity validation, a UEI, banking details, and a representations-and-certifications section that has to be worked through rather than skipped. Programmes that require it in hand at submission usually say so; a notice that assumes it says nothing at all.
It expires. Registration has to be renewed annually, and an expired one stops an award being made as firmly as a missing one — which makes it a scheduling fact rather than a one-off task.
Against eligibility
Eligibility is what a notice says about who may apply. Registration is what the government requires before it may pay. A programme can list an organisation type as eligible and still be unable to award to an applicant whose registration lapsed last month. We store the first — `elig_entity_types`, shown on a record as “Eligible entities” — and cannot store the second, because it is a fact about you.
How GrantTrove stores it
- There is no “SAM registration required” flag, and none is inferred. A funder typed `federal` is a classification of the grantmaker, not a statement that this programme routes through SAM, and turning the first into the second is exactly the inference that puts a wrong fact on a page.
- The notice governs and the record links it: `source_url` is on every record, with the day we last read it printed under “Checked”.
Common questions
Does every federal grant require it?
Federal awards are paid through SAM, but whether a particular notice wants a completed registration at application or only before award is something the notice states. We do not restate it as a field.
How long does registration take?
Longer than a day, and not a number we have measured. We do not publish figures we have not measured; SAM.gov publishes its own guidance.
Is “Application effort” the same thing?
No. `application_effort` is our own three-value rating of how heavy a submission looks — light, medium or heavy — written under our name and not a registration status. Its own entry says so in the same words.