NAICS code
NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes classify businesses by industry — six digits, e.g., 561720 for janitorial services. US federal solicitations carry a NAICS code that determines the applicable small-business size standard and who may bid set-asides.
In commercial life NAICS is statistical taxonomy; in federal contracting it is eligibility machinery. Each solicitation's assigned code maps to an SBA size standard (revenue or employee ceiling), which decides whether a company is 'small' for that competition — the same firm can be small under one code and large under another. Contractors therefore care which codes appear in their SAM.gov registration, track the codes their target agencies buy under, and occasionally challenge a solicitation's code assignment when it distorts the competition. For market research, NAICS is the query key: spending databases, forecast lists, and sources-sought notices all index by it.
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