SBIR success rates by agency
"Success rate" hides two different numbers, and most sources blur them. Selection rate is applications → Phase I awards; it comes from SBA's annual report and it's the only public applications data that exists. Phase I→II conversion is the share of Phase I winners who later won a Phase II; no agency publishes it, so we compute it from award records — method and corrections here.
| Agency | Phase I selection SBA FY2022, measured |
Phase II selection SBA, where published |
Phase I→II conversion computed, inferred |
Winner's path of 100 applicants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense | 18.2% 6,444 → 1,172 | 28.1% | 43.4% 2022 cohort | ~8 in 100 |
| NASA | 19.4% 1,433 → 278 | 44.6% | 42.0% 2022 cohort | ~8 in 100 |
| HHS / NIH | 15.9% 4,121 → 654 | 31.6% | 22.1% 2022 cohort, organic | ~4 in 100 |
| Department of Energy | 19.5% 1,925 → 376 | 35.9% | 34.6% 2022 cohort | ~7 in 100 |
| NSF | 10.8% 2,259 → 245 | 48.9% | 30.9% 2022 cohort | ~3 in 100 |
| USDA | 14.9% 523 → 78 | 50.0% | 48.1% 2022 cohort | ~7 in 100 |
| Commerce / NIST & NOAA | 11.1% 352 → 39 | — | 51.3% 2022 cohort | ~6 in 100 |
| Department of Education | 5.6% 213 → 12 | — | 48.6% 2010 cohort | ~3 in 100 |
| DOT | 6.1% 196 → 12 | — | 63.6% 2020 cohort | ~4 in 100 |
| DHS | 21.9% 137 → 30 | — | 46.7% 2022 cohort | ~10 in 100 |
| EPA | 15.9% 195 → 31 | — | 25.8% 2022 cohort | ~4 in 100 |
"Winner's path" multiplies the two rates: of 100 Phase I applicants, roughly how many end up holding a Phase II. It is an illustration, not a prediction — the two rates come from different sources and different years. "Organic" excludes fast-track awards, where the Phase II was committed at award time rather than competed.
What this page can't tell you
Your odds on a specific topic. Application counts per topic are published by no one — not the agencies, not the paid platforms. Anything presented as per-topic odds is invented. What IS knowable per topic: who won, at what size, and how concentrated the winners are — see the topic profiles.
Quarterly-ish, only when something's actually new. No account, one-click unsubscribe, and every number here stays free either way.
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.