What This List Covers
Every count below is drawn from our own corpus on August 15, 2026, and covers federal SBIR and STTR solicitations that are open with a stated deadline in calendar 2026. We hold 46 such postings. Collapsed by program, because a single DARPA topic appears both on darpa.mil and on the Department of Defense portal, and because NSF's omnibus is carried on both nsf.gov and Grants.gov, they are 36 distinct solicitations. That number is smaller than most SBIR calendars you will find, and the reason is the filter, not the corpus. This list counts solicitations with a firm posted close date. It does not count agency programs that are technically accepting proposals with no date attached, and it does not count topics that have been announced for a cycle that has not opened. Both of those are real and both are covered further down, separately, because mixing them into one number is how a calendar becomes useless. Two honest limits. First, some agencies run their SBIR programs through omnibus solicitations that our sources publish without a machine-readable deadline, so a program you are tracking may be open and simply not counted here. Second, the Department of Defense figures come from the topics published on the DoD SBIR/STTR portal, where a Direct to Phase II topic and a standard Phase I topic sit side by side under one close date and demand very different things from a proposer. Read the topic, not the count. For whether the program itself survives the current authorization fight, which is a different question from what is open today, see our SBIR and STTR reauthorization brief. This page answers only the calendar question.
The Ten Days That Matter Are the Ones You Cannot Submit Into
Here is the shape of the 36. Thirty-three close on August 19. One more, the Army's xTech|Phantum competition with a $300,000 ceiling, closes August 28. Then nothing at all until September 21, when the National Cancer Institute's Innovative Concept Phase I award program closes, carried in our data as five separate SAM.gov notices. Then nothing again until November 4, when the NSF SBIR and STTR omnibus closes. So two thirds of the calendar year's remaining visible federal SBIR deadlines land four days from now, and if you are reading this and have not started, you are not going to win any of them. That is the obvious reading and it is the wrong thing to act on. The thing worth acting on is running in parallel and almost nobody frames it as a deadline at all. The Department of Defense published its next cycle, release 26.5, on August 5. Fifty-four topics are already public. Proposals cannot be submitted against them until August 26, and they close September 23. Right now those topics sit in what the Department calls the pre-release period, and pre-release is governed by a rule that changes what the period is worth: during pre-release, and only during pre-release, a proposing firm may contact the topic author directly and ask technical questions about the topic. Once the cycle opens on August 26, direct contact with topic authors ends for reasons of competitive fairness, and questions move to the written Topic Q&A, where they are submitted anonymously, answered publicly for every competitor to read, and cut off on September 9 at 12:00 PM Eastern. That is the asymmetry. For ten more days, through August 25, you can have a private conversation with the government engineer who wrote the requirement, on 54 topics. After that, every question you ask becomes a public gift to everyone else bidding, and the person who already had the private conversation writes a better proposal than you do. A firm chasing the August 19 deadlines is competing on four days of writing. A firm working the pre-release window is competing on ten days of access. The second one is a better use of the same fortnight, and it is invisible on every deadline calendar we have seen, because a date you cannot submit against does not look like a date.
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Closing August 19: The 26.4 Topics
Thirty-three Department of Defense topics close on August 19, 2026. By component: Office of the Secretary of Defense 10, Missile Defense Agency 10, Air Force 3, DARPA 3, Army 3, Navy 2, USSOCOM 2. A sample of what is actually on the table, each linked to its official posting: August 19: SBIR MDA26BZ04-NV001, Next-Gen Thermal Batteries for Missile Defense Application, Missile Defense Agency. August 19: SBIR OSW26BZ04-DP013, T3CP Patent Holiday SBIR Open Topic Call, Office of the Secretary of Defense. An open topic, meaning the technology is not specified for you. August 19: SBIR DPA26BZ04-DV016, Fusion of Abstract Learning and Context-Optimized Neural-methods (FALCON), DARPA. August 19: SBIR SOC26BZ04-DV004, Advanced Stand-Off Detection of Concealed Materials, USSOCOM. August 28: SBIR ARM26BX01-NP003, xTech|Phantum Competition, Army. Award ceiling $300,000, the only one of the 34 Department of Defense postings for which our data carries a dollar figure at all. Note what the component split tells you about who to watch. The Missile Defense Agency has 10 topics closing on the 19th and zero in the cycle behind it. The Navy has 2 closing and 24 already published for September 23. If you build for MDA, this week is your cycle and the next one is not. If you build for the Navy, this week is nearly irrelevant and the pre-release window is where your year is.
The Gap: August 29 to November 3
Two solicitations are open in this stretch, and that is the whole of it. A third date falls inside it, September 23, but nothing can be submitted against that one until August 26, which is why it gets its own section below. September 21: the National Cancer Institute SBIR Innovative Concept Phase I award program, run as a contract solicitation through SAM.gov rather than as a grant. We carry it as five notices under one program title. Contract-route SBIR is a different animal from the grant route: deliverables are specified, the government owns a schedule, and the proposal is a bid. November 4: the NSF SBIR and STTR Phase I, Phase II and Fast-Track programs, also posted on Grants.gov, carrying a posted award ceiling of $2,000,000. This is the broadest civilian door in the set, it is topic-agnostic, and it is eleven weeks out, which is roughly the amount of time an NSF Project Pitch and a full proposal actually take. Beyond calendar 2026 our corpus holds three more open postings with 2027 deadlines, in April and May. Everything else in the federal SBIR world between now and November either runs on an announcement cycle that has not opened, or is open without a posted date.
Already on the Table: 54 Topics Closing September 23
The Department of Defense 26.5 release went to pre-release on August 5, opens for submission August 26, and closes September 23. Fifty-four topics, published now, split by component: Navy 24, Office of the Secretary of Defense 10, Air Force 10, DARPA 6, Defense Threat Reduction Agency 2, Defense Microelectronics Activity 2. Eight of the 54 are STTR rather than SBIR, which means they require a research institution partner, and you should be lining that partner up this week rather than in September. Five of them, to show what the Navy's share looks like: SBIR DON26BX05-NP003, NAVSEA Open Topic for Model-Based Systems Engineering Acceleration via Artificial Intelligence. SBIR DON26BX05-NP004, NAVWAR Open Topic for Unified Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Operational Awareness. SBIR DON26BZ05-DV084, Direct to Phase II: Innovative Flexible Fuel Cell Design. SBIR DAF26BZ05-DV031, F-16 Agnostic Rapid Weapons Integration, Air Force. SBIR DPA26BZ05-DV019, Semantically-Aware ISR, DARPA. The two Direct to Phase II entries are worth separating out. A Direct to Phase II topic skips Phase I entirely and requires you to document that you have already completed equivalent Phase I work, funded by anyone. Firms with relevant prior work read these as the shortest path to real money in the entire program, and firms without it cannot bid at all. Seven of the 54 topics carry the Direct to Phase II prefix, and all seven are Navy. Two more DoD topics carry a December 23 close date, and one carries September 11.
How to Work a Calendar Shaped Like This
The federal SBIR calendar is not a stream you dip into. It is a small number of gates that open and shut on fixed dates, and the work that wins is done in the weeks when nothing is due. Three things follow from the data above. First, sort by component, not by date. Your relevant universe is one or two agencies, and their cycles do not line up. Ten of the 33 topics closing this week are Missile Defense Agency and none of the next 54 are. A calendar that shows you everything shows you mostly noise. Second, treat pre-release as the deadline. The date that governs your behavior for the DoD 26.5 cycle is August 25, when direct access to topic authors ends, not September 23, when proposals are due. Nothing on a standard deadline list marks August 25 as anything at all. Third, know which door a solicitation uses before you plan the work. The NCI program on September 21 is a contract bid through SAM.gov. NSF on November 4 is a grant through Grants.gov and wants a Project Pitch first. DoD topics run through their own portal on their own cycle. These are three different processes with three different clocks, and the only thing they share is the acronym. If you want the topics that match what you build, without reading 90 postings across four portals, search the corpus directly and set a watch on the queries that matter to you. The pre-release topics are in there, tagged as opening later, which is the point.