SBIR & STTR competition data — free
Selection rates, Phase I→II conversion, and who actually wins — computed from sbir.gov's public award records (219,407 awards, 1983–2026) and the SBA's annual reports. The numbers the expensive intelligence platforms charge for, minus the ones nobody actually has.
Phase I selection rate — out of everyone who applied, the percent that won. This one is reported by the SBA in its annual reports; we don't compute it.
Phase I→II conversion — out of the companies that already won a Phase I, the percent that later won the bigger Phase II. We compute this from linked award records.
Worked example. Department of Defense's 18.2% selection and 43% conversion means about 18 in 100 applicants win a Phase I, and 43% of those go on to win a Phase II — so roughly 8 in 100 applicants end up with a Phase II.
The two awards are very different sizes. Phase I is the small proof-of-concept award; Phase II is the larger build award (at Department of Defense, a median $146k against $1.4M in FY2025). Winning a Phase I is the cheap half of the story.
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The cleaned aggregates behind every number on this page. No signup, no account.
sbir-agency-year-stats.csv ↓ · sbir-phase1-phase2-linkage.csv ↓
By agency
6,444 proposals → 1,172 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 43% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 17% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 59% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
1,433 proposals → 278 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 42% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 23% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 51% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
4,121 proposals → 654 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 30% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 31% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 30% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
1,925 proposals → 376 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 35% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 24% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 46% (FY2024)
Data through FY2024.
2,259 proposals → 245 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 31% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 65% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 0% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
523 proposals → 78 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 48% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 49% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 6% (FY2024)
Data through FY2024.
352 proposals → 39 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 51% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 67% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 1% (FY2024)
Data through FY2024.
213 proposals → 12 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 49% (2010 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 54% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 15% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
196 proposals → 12 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 64% (2020 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 49% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 18% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
137 proposals → 30 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 47% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 35% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 39% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
195 proposals → 31 awards (SBA, FY2022)
Phase I→II conversion: 26% (2022 cohort, computed)
First-time winners: 68% · firms with 5+ prior awards: 0% (FY2025)
Data through FY2025.
Look up a topic
Award history and computed conversion per topic where the cohort is old enough to judge. Applicant counts per topic are published by no one — see below.
Or start from a profile: AF192-001 (483 awards, wide open) · J201-CSO1 (392 firms, top firm holds 0.6%) · NASA T1.02 (concentrated: top 3 firms hold half) · all 180 topic profiles →
Download the data (CSV, free)
The cleaned aggregates behind every number on these pages — take them,
check our math, build on them. Each file starts with a few # comment
lines documenting generation date, sources, and the linkage caveat.
Per-agency, per-year stats: awards, median amounts, SBA selection rates, computed Phase I→II conversion (organic and fast-track-inclusive), incumbency shares.
45 kB · updated September 21, 2026 · regenerated with every weekly refresh
Phase I→II linkage output: linked award pairs with match-tier and fast-track metadata, plus unlinked DoD Phase IIs flagged d2p2_proxy (inferred direct-to-Phase-II).
12.2 MB · updated September 21, 2026 · regenerated with every weekly refresh
Public-records aggregates only — award data, no personal or contact information. Attribution appreciated: link to grantsdue.com/sbir.
Method and corrections
Everything on this page is computed from the public sbir.gov bulk award file. Two kinds of number appear, and the difference matters:
Measured. Selection rates come from SBA's own annual report — the only public source that gives applications as well as awards. We reproduce them, we don't compute them. They stop at FY2022 and SBA calls them estimates.
Inferred. Phase I to Phase II conversion is our calculation. No agency publishes an award ID linking a Phase II back to the Phase I it came from, so we match on firm, agency, topic code and a title-similarity fallback. Every conversion figure on this site is an estimate produced by that matcher, and we label it as inferred wherever it appears.
Corrections
2026-08-05 — Phase II awards could be counted more than once. Found while building topic profiles. Our matcher compared each Phase I award against every candidate Phase II independently, so a single Phase II could be counted as the conversion of many different Phase I awards. One Foster-Miller contract was being credited to 25 separate Phase I awards. Across the whole dataset, 4,790 Phase II awards were multiply-counted, affecting 11,020 of 47,515 linked pairs.
The effect was to overstate our own conversion rates, which is the unflattering direction — and it contradicted our published caveat, which until today said our rates were more likely too low than too high. That caveat was wrong and has been removed.
A Phase II now converts at most one Phase I. Where several Phase I awards legitimately compete for one Phase II, the strongest match rule wins: every Phase I gets a chance at an exact topic match before any Phase I may claim a Phase II on fuzzy title similarity. A regression test enforces the one-to-one rule so this cannot recur.
Rates before and after, for the most recent settled cohort:
| Agency | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense | 46.2% | 43.4% |
| HHS / NIH (all-in) | 36.1% | 29.7% |
| HHS / NIH (organic) | 28.2% | 22.1% |
| NASA | 52.3% | 42.0% |
| Department of Energy | 37.1% | 34.6% |
| NSF | 31.2% | 30.9% |
| USDA | 50.6% | 48.1% |
| Department of Education | 54.3% | 48.6% |
DOT, EPA, DHS and Commerce were unchanged. Linked pairs fell from 47,501 to 42,097. The corrected pairs are in the downloadable linkage CSV, so you can check this yourself.
What this data cannot tell you
- These are not your odds. Conversion is the share of Phase I winners who went on to a Phase II. It is not the probability that an application succeeds. Nobody publishes application counts by topic, so that number cannot be computed from public data and we do not estimate it.
- No official Phase I to Phase II link exists. Agencies publish awards, not the relationship between them. Our matching is described above.
- ~2.6% of pairs, nearly all FY2000–2004, match on placeholder titles and rest on firm + agency + window alone; a future release will restrict these.
- Fast-track is inferred, differently per agency. HHS/NIH is detected from Phase II activity codes (R44/R42/U44) on the Phase I record; NSF from the 2024 pilot solicitation NSF 24-582. DoD publishes no marker for direct-to-Phase-II at all, so ours is a proxy — a Phase II with no same-firm DoD Phase I in the prior three years — and it is never presented as a measured fact.
- Firms are identified by federal UEI where available. sbir.gov has backfilled UEIs to 99.5% coverage for 2025 awards, down to 54% for 2001. A company that re-registered may appear more than once in older years.
- Topic profiles cover DoD and NASA only. NIH publishes institute codes (NIAID, NHLBI) and NSF publishes two-letter subject areas. Neither is a topic, so a "topic profile" built on them would describe an entire directorate rather than a solicitation. We would rather omit them than publish something that looks precise and isn't.
- Recent cohorts are provisional. A Phase II can follow a Phase I by up to three years, so cohorts younger than three complete fiscal years are marked provisional and will move.
Sourced vs computed: Phase I/II selection rates (applications → awards) come from the SBA's SBIR/STTR Annual Report — FY2022 is the latest published edition, and SBA itself calls the rates estimates because proposal cohorts span fiscal years. Phase I→II conversion and first-timer shares are computed by us from sbir.gov's public award records. Linked by firm + agency + topic code where topic codes carry (suffix-tolerant for DOE's phase renumbering), with a title-similarity fallback elsewhere. 70% of links match on topic, 30% on title; each pair's match_tier is in the downloadable CSV, so you can recompute under stricter rules. Firms are identified by federal UEI where available (99.5% of 2025 awards, down to 54% for 2001), with a normalized-name fallback for older records.
Fast-track and Direct-to-Phase-II: no agency publishes a fast-track flag, so we derive it — HHS/NIH: a Phase I record carrying a Phase II activity code (R44/R42/U44) plus its linked Phase II; NSF: the 2024 Fast-Track pilot solicitation (NSF 24-582). Where fast-track exists, conversion is shown both organic (fast-tracks excluded) and all-inclusive, because a fast-track Phase II was committed at award time, not competed. DoD's Direct-to-Phase-II share is different in kind: there is no marker at all, so our number is an inference (Phase IIs with no same-firm DoD Phase I in the prior 3 years), always labeled an estimate and kept visually separate from measured stats.
What nobody publishes: per-topic application counts are published by no one — not the agencies, and not the $500–$42,000-a-year intelligence platforms either; the data simply isn't public. Any per-topic number on this site is award-side only (who won, how often winners repeat), never your odds of selection.
Sources: sbir.gov award data · SBA FY22 Annual Report. Free to use; verify anything critical against the originals.
Refreshed weekly from sbir.gov's bulk data (last ingest 2026-09-21). Looking for regular federal grants instead? GrantsDue's main database covers every open grants.gov opportunity.