HUBZone certification

A Historically Underutilized Business Zone. The SBA designates them from census and unemployment data, and they include qualified census tracts, qualified non-metropolitan counties, land within Indian reservations, and areas around closed military bases.

The designations are redrawn periodically, which is the trap. An address that qualified three years ago may not qualify now, and firms have lost certification without doing anything wrong.

The SBA publishes the official HUBZone map and it is the only answer that counts. No third-party map, including any that claims to be current, is authoritative, because the boundaries and the effective dates both move.

Two things to check rather than one: whether your principal office is in a HUBZone, and whether enough of your employees live in one. People check the first and forget the second, and the second is what most applications fail on.

At least 35% of your employees must live in a HUBZone, and that has to stay true continuously, not just on the day you apply. For a small firm, one person moving can drop you below the line. This is the requirement that makes HUBZone genuinely harder to hold than to obtain, and it is why the certified population stays small.

Set-aside competitions, sole source awards up to $4.5 million for most work and $7 million for manufacturing, and a 10% price evaluation preference in full and open competition. That last one is unusual and underrated: in an open bid your price is treated as 10% lower than it is.

With 105 set-aside solicitations open at the moment, the price preference is often worth more than the set-asides themselves, because it applies everywhere rather than only to a small pool.