SBA small-business profile (DSBS)

The SBA Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS) profile for one firm, keyed by its SAM UEI. DSBS is the small-business layer that sits next to the SAM registry, and it answers two questions SAM alone cannot. Which NAICS codes is this firm officially small for under SBA's size standards, and which set-aside programs (8(a), WOSB, EDWOSB, HUBZone, SDVOSB, VOSB) does it hold as a verified SBA registration with entrance and exit dates. The profile also carries the firm's own capability narrative, keywords and firmographic detail.

The endpoint is Pro (see Plans and limits). A Pro caller already fetching the SAM entity or the company profile for a UEI gets this same object inline as an sba_profile block, so a second call is often unnecessary.

One call, with the response trimmed here to the certification block:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/ZKFXGZTCEHJ4"

{
  "uei": "ZKFXGZTCEHJ4",
  "certifications": [
    {"name": "8(a)", "active": true, "entrance_date": "2024-08-16", "exit_date": "2033-08-16", "status": "Active"}
  ]
}

This firm holds one SBA-registered certification, 8(a), reading status Active with an exit_date of 2033-08-16, which is the pair of fields an eligibility screen has to read together.

Endpoints

• GET /api/v1/dsbs/{uei}, the SBA DSBS small-business profile for one UEI (Pro)

A 404 here is an answer, not a lookup failure

DSBS is small-business opt-in. A firm chooses to build a profile, and large primes never do. About half of the SAM-registered directory has one and the other half does not, which is structural rather than a gap in coverage. Check /api/v1/status for the current profile count and freshness.

So a 404 here means the firm never opted in, or is not a small business. The same UEI resolves normally on the SAM entity and award endpoints. Do not retry it, do not treat it as a broken integration, and do not report it to a user as "firm not found": report it as "no SBA small-business profile on file".

No firm name and no firm size in the response

The response identifies the firm by UEI and nothing else. There is no legal-business-name field on this object, on any record. When you need something to display, join /api/v1/entities/{uei} for entity.legal_business_name, or /api/v1/companies/{uei} for its top-level name, which also returns this profile inline. firmographics.dba_name is the only name-shaped field here: it is a trade name rather than the legal name, and most profiles leave it null.

No firm size either, and that is a boundary, not an omission. DSBS publishes neither employee count nor annual revenue, so this endpoint carries neither, on any record. It tells you what a firm is registered and eligible for, not how big it is. If you need scale, read the award history on the contracts and companies endpoints instead.

Read status and exit_date, never active alone

certifications and self_certifications are two separate keys and they never merge. certifications are SBA-registered programs, verified by SBA and dated. self_certifications are labels the firm asserts about itself (Minority-Owned Business, Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business, Limited Liability Company and similar), which SBA does not verify. Treating a self-certification as a registered set-aside is the expensive mistake here: it is the firm's own claim, not an SBA determination.

Within certifications, status is the field to gate on, and active is not a synonym for it. status runs Active, Pending, Expired and Suspended. SBA sets active to true on both Active and Pending rows, so a certification the firm has applied for but not yet been granted arrives with "active": true, "status": "Pending" and a null exit_date. That is SBA's own flag, passed through as published. A screen keyed on active will treat a pending application as a live set-aside.

Expired and Suspended rows both carry "active": false, so the reverse direction is safe, but a firm can hold one Active certification and one Expired certification at the same time. Read the array, match on name, then check status and exit_date against the date your eligibility question is about.

status alone is not the whole gate. SBA publishes the label and the dates as independent fields and we pass both through exactly as published, so on a small number of rows they disagree: a few Active rows carry an exit_date that has already passed, and a few Expired rows carry one still in the future. Read the two together rather than trusting either on its own.

The NAICS arrays answer four different questions

The small_business block holds four fields that look interchangeable and are not.

naics_small_codes is SBA's determination: the NAICS the firm is small for, measured against SBA's published size standard for each code. This is the authoritative answer to "is this firm small for NAICS X", which is the question a set-aside actually turns on, and it is the field behind ?naics_small=. The two search endpoints use that parameter differently. On entity search it filters the whole directory and stands on its own. On company search it narrows an already name-matched set, so pair it with q=; sent alone there it returns a 400 asking for q.

The SAM registry carries a different thing, a per-NAICS suffix on its own naics_codes array, maintained in the firm's SAM registration, which takes Y, N, E or blank (["541330E", "541715E"]). The two sources nearly always agree; the disagreements are the interesting records, where a firm has grown past a size standard in one code while staying small in others.

naics_all_codes is every NAICS the firm lists, small or not, so it is a superset. For most firms the two arrays are identical, and the difference, where there is one, is exactly the set of codes the firm works in but is not small for.

naics_primary is the firm's primary NAICS and it is not guaranteed to appear in naics_small_codes. A small fraction of firms name a primary code they are not small for. Do not infer eligibility from it.

naics_exception_codes is a passthrough artefact and needs handling. SBA publishes size-standard exceptions with its own encoding, a 6-digit NAICS followed by a flag string of zero to four Y/N/E characters, so the values arrive as 541330YYYY, 541519YY, 237990EE and sometimes as a bare 237990 with no suffix at all. We pass SBA's values through exactly as published. An equality join against a 6-digit NAICS will miss every suffixed value: take the leading six characters if you need to match, and do not feed these values to ?naics_small=.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
uei	string	Path segment, required. The 12-character alphanumeric SAM UEI. Case-insensitive, lower-case is upper-cased for you. Anything else returns 400.

This endpoint accepts no query parameters at all, including fields=. Any query string returns a 400 naming the parameter you sent.

Ordering

This endpoint does not accept sort_by or sort_order. It returns a single record, and the arrays inside it (naics_small_codes, naics_all_codes, certifications, self_certifications, keywords, qas_standards) are returned in the order SBA publishes them. Sort them yourself if you need a stable display order.

Pagination

There is none. This is a lookup by primary key returning one flat object with no envelope and no pagination block. To work through many firms, iterate UEIs from entity search or company search and call this route per UEI, within the burst caps noted under Errors.

Those caps are the throughput boundary of this endpoint, and they are deliberate. At 20 requests a minute from one IP, walking every UEI that has a profile takes weeks of continuous calling, so this route is built for interactive and per-firm lookups rather than for mirroring the enriched layer. To work at directory scale, do the selecting on entity search with ?naics_small=, which filters the whole directory in one query, and fetch profiles only for the firms that survive it.

Response

A real response, complete and untrimmed:

{
  "in_dsbs": true,
  "uei": "ZKFXGZTCEHJ4",
  "last_update_date": "2026-08-28",
  "public_display": true,
  "small_business": {
    "naics_small_codes": ["541330", "541511", "541512", "541519", "541715", "541990", "611420", "611430", "611710"],
    "naics_all_codes": ["541330", "541511", "541512", "541519", "541715", "541990", "611420", "611430", "611710"],
    "naics_primary": "541519",
    "naics_exception_codes": ["541330YYYY", "541519YY", "541715YYYY"]
  },
  "certifications": [
    {"name": "8(a)", "active": true, "entrance_date": "2024-08-16", "exit_date": "2033-08-16", "status": "Active"}
  ],
  "self_certifications": [
    "For Profit Organization",
    "Alaskan Native Corporation Firm",
    "Limited Liability Company",
    "Native American Owned",
    "Minority-Owned Business",
    "Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business"
  ],
  "capabilities": {
    "narrative": null,
    "keywords": []
  },
  "firmographics": {
    "cage_code": "9HU44",
    "year_established": "2022",
    "legal_structure": "2L",
    "congressional_district": "05",
    "dba_name": null,
    "current_principals": null,
    "contact_person": "BRETT BARKMAN",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "website": "www.tyonek.com",
    "additional_website": null,
    "non_fed_govt_certifications": null,
    "qas_standards": [],
    "special_equip_material": null,
    "city": "MADISON",
    "state": "Alabama"
  },
  "source": "SBA Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS)",
  "note": "certifications are SBA-registered (verified, with entrance/exit dates); self_certifications are self-asserted by the firm and not verified by SBA. DSBS is small-business opt-in data (no large primes) and does not carry firm size."
}

That record leaves the whole capabilities half empty, which is the common case: most profiles carry no narrative, no keywords and no quality standards, and dba_name, current_principals, additional_website, non_fed_govt_certifications and special_equip_material are null on most of them too. Here is a second real profile, with self_certifications, capabilities and firmographics untrimmed, so you can see the populated shape before you build against it:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/FLELBCAXKRB3"

{
  "uei": "FLELBCAXKRB3",
  "self_certifications": ["For Profit Organization", "Manufacturer of Goods", "Subchapter S Corporation"],
  "capabilities": {
    "narrative": "CONTRACT MANUFACTURING, QUALITY SYSTEM ISO9002,AS9000, SPECIALIZE IN WIRING HARNESSES, CABLE ASSEMBLY,ELECTROMECHANICAL TEST EQUIPMENT,J-STD-001 SOLDERING,PANEL ASSEMBLY, MACHINING, SHEET METAL FABRICATION.",
    "keywords": ["AIRCRAFT TESTERS", "CONTROL PANEL", "WIRE HARNESS"]
  },
  "firmographics": {
    "cage_code": "25039",
    "year_established": "1956",
    "legal_structure": "2L",
    "congressional_district": "07",
    "dba_name": "NOEL SMYSER ENGINEERING CORP",
    "current_principals": "JOHN NOEL - OWNER; JEFF NOEL - PRESIDENT",
    "contact_person": "JOHN NOEL",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "website": "www.noel-smyser.com",
    "additional_website": "http://www.noel-smyser.com",
    "non_fed_govt_certifications": "AS9100; ISO9002; MIL-I-45208",
    "qas_standards": ["ANSI/ASQC Z1.4", "ISO-9000 Series", "MIL-STD-45662A"],
    "special_equip_material": "CNC MILL, CNC LATHE, CNC SHEETMETAL PUNCHING. PNEUMATIC CRIMP EQUIPMENT,WIRE PROCESSING EQUIPMENT, POTTING FACILITIES, HEAT SHRINK EQUIPMENT.",
    "city": "INDIANAPOLIS",
    "state": "Indiana"
  }
}

Every capabilities and firmographics field here carries a value, and every one of them is the firm's own typing, passed through as published: narrative and special_equip_material are upper-cased free text with the source's own spacing (ISO9002,AS9000), qas_standards is a list of standard names while non_fed_govt_certifications beside it is free text carrying an overlapping claim in a different spelling (ISO9002 against ISO-9000 Series). Normalise on your side, and do not assume either field's formatting.

Field	Type	Meaning	Source
in_dsbs	boolean	true on every record this route returns. It exists because the entity and company detail routes embed this same object as an sba_profile block, where {"in_dsbs": false} reports a firm with no profile.	Derived
uei	string	The 12-character SAM UEI, upper-cased. Joins uei_sam on the entity endpoints.	SBA DSBS
last_update_date	date or null	The day the firm last updated its DSBS profile, derived from the epoch timestamp SBA publishes.	Derived
public_display	boolean	The firm's DSBS public-display preference. SBA publishes only profiles the firm has made public, so every record carries true.	SBA DSBS
small_business	object	The eligibility block. Its four fields follow.	SBA DSBS
small_business.naics_small_codes	array	6-digit NAICS the firm is SBA-small for, against SBA's published size standard per code. Backs ?naics_small=, which filters the whole directory on entity search and narrows a q=-matched set on company search. Empty array when SBA has no determination on file.	SBA DSBS
small_business.naics_all_codes	array	Every 6-digit NAICS the firm lists in DSBS, small or not. A superset of naics_small_codes.	SBA DSBS
small_business.naics_primary	string or null	The firm's primary NAICS. Not guaranteed to be one it is small for.	SBA DSBS
small_business.naics_exception_codes	array	SBA size-standard exceptions in SBA's own encoding, a 6-digit NAICS plus a flag string of zero to four Y/N/E characters (541330YYYY, and sometimes a bare 237990). Passed through as published. Empty array when the firm has none.	SBA DSBS
certifications	array of objects	SBA-registered, verified set-aside programs. Empty array for most firms, because most DSBS registrants hold no SBA certification. Member fields follow.	SBA DSBS
certifications[].name	string	The program: 8(a), 8(a) JV, HUBZone, SDVOSB, VOSB, WOSB or EDWOSB.	SBA DSBS
certifications[].active	boolean	SBA's own flag. true on both Active and Pending rows, so it is not an eligibility test on its own.	SBA DSBS
certifications[].entrance_date	date or null	The day the certification began, or the day the application was filed on a Pending row.	SBA DSBS
certifications[].exit_date	date or null	The day the certification ends or ended. null while the row is Pending.	SBA DSBS
certifications[].status	string	Active, Pending, Expired or Suspended. Gate on it together with exit_date, never on either alone: the label and the dates are published independently and disagree on a small number of rows, as the trap section above describes.	SBA DSBS
self_certifications	array	Labels the firm asserts about itself, mixing ownership claims (Minority-Owned Business, Native American Owned) with legal form (Limited Liability Company). Not SBA-verified, and never merged into certifications. Empty array when the firm listed none.	SBA DSBS
capabilities	object	The firm's own description of what it does. Its two fields follow.	SBA DSBS
capabilities.narrative	string or null	Free-text capability statement, sometimes several paragraphs. null on most profiles, because most firms leave it blank.	SBA DSBS
capabilities.keywords	array	Capability keywords the firm supplied. Empty array on most profiles.	SBA DSBS
firmographics	object	Descriptive detail. Any field inside may be null or an empty array. Its fields follow.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.cage_code	string or null	The firm's CAGE code.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.year_established	string or null	Year the firm was established, as a string.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.legal_structure	string or null	The raw DSBS entity-structure code (2L, 2J, 2K, ZZ and similar), passed through with no decode table. SBA publishes no key for it, and self_certifications does not supply one: both samples above read 2L, and one self-certifies as a Limited Liability Company while the other self-certifies as a Subchapter S Corporation. Treat it as an opaque source identifier.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.congressional_district	string or null	The firm's congressional district, zero-padded (05).	SBA DSBS
firmographics.dba_name	string or null	Doing-business-as name, and the only name-shaped field on the object. It is a trade name, not the legal business name, and it is null on most profiles. For a legal name, join the entity or company endpoints as the boundary section above describes.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.current_principals	string or null	Named principals and titles, free text.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.contact_person	string or null	The DSBS-listed contact name.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.email	string or null	The DSBS-listed contact email.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.website	string or null	The firm's URL as it typed it, so scheme-less values (www.example.com) occur.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.additional_website	string or null	A second URL the firm listed.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.non_fed_govt_certifications	string or null	Non-federal certifications the firm lists (state SDB, ISO and similar), free text in the firm's own formatting.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.qas_standards	array	Quality-assurance standards the firm claims (ISO-9000 Series, MIL-Q-9858). Empty array on most profiles.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.special_equip_material	string or null	Free-text description of special equipment or materials.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.city	string or null	The firm's DSBS-listed city, upper-cased at source.	SBA DSBS
firmographics.state	string or null	The firm's DSBS-listed state, spelled out (Alabama), not the two-letter code.	SBA DSBS
source	string	Constant attribution, SBA Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS).	Derived
note	string	The verified-versus-self-asserted and no-firm-size boundaries, restated inline so a consumer reading a single record sees them without leaving the response.	Derived

The response is a flat object with no envelope, because this is a single-record lookup by primary key. Its attribution is the source field above. When you reach the same record through the sba_profile block on an entity or company lookup, that response's _sources array carries sba_dsbs; the array itself is documented under Response sources.

Errors

Code	Trigger
400	The UEI is not 12 alphanumeric characters. Body: {"detail": "uei must be a 12-character alphanumeric SAM UEI."}
400	The path carries a NUL byte or another character the CDN will not forward. The CDN answers before the request reaches the API, so this one returns an HTML error page rather than a JSON detail. Check the content type before parsing a 400.
400	Any query parameter was sent, including fields. The body names the parameters it rejected.
402	The key is not Pro. DSBS enrichment is a Pro capability, and the response is an upgrade link rather than a partial or empty block.
404	A well-formed UEI with no DSBS profile. Expected on about half of SAM UEIs, and on every large prime. See the coverage section above before treating it as a failure.
429	This endpoint adds its own per-minute burst caps on top of your plan's hourly limit, 20 requests a minute from one IP and 30 a minute on one key, which keeps bulk enumeration of the enriched layer impractical while leaving interactive lookups comfortable.

Shared codes and the rate-limit response headers are documented once, under Error codes and Performance.

Examples

A lapsed set-aside. The fields the interpreting sentence reads:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/L8GHFAS7N2M1"

{
  "uei": "L8GHFAS7N2M1",
  "certifications": [
    {"name": "WOSB",   "active": false, "entrance_date": "2022-02-07", "exit_date": "2025-09-15", "status": "Expired"},
    {"name": "EDWOSB", "active": false, "entrance_date": "2022-02-07", "exit_date": "2025-09-15", "status": "Expired"}
  ]
}

This firm held WOSB and EDWOSB from 2022-02-07 and both lapsed on 2025-09-15. It still appears in DSBS and still shows the certification history, so a screen that only asked "does this firm have a WOSB record" would pass it. status is Expired and exit_date is in the past: it is not eligible for a WOSB set-aside today. The response carries no name, so resolve one from the entity or company endpoint if you need to show it.

A pending application, which active reports as true. The certifications block only:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/GK95S9J1RC19"

{
  "uei": "GK95S9J1RC19",
  "certifications": [
    {"name": "WOSB",   "active": true, "entrance_date": "2026-03-26", "exit_date": null, "status": "Pending"},
    {"name": "EDWOSB", "active": true, "entrance_date": "2026-03-26", "exit_date": null, "status": "Pending"}
  ]
}

This firm filed on 2026-03-26 and SBA has not granted the certification: status is Pending and exit_date is null because there is no window yet. Both rows carry "active": true, which is SBA's flag as published. This is the record shape that makes active unsafe as an eligibility test, and the pair to watch for in any set-aside screen.

Small for one NAICS out of three. The eligibility block only:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/LG19MLLKDLY8"

{
  "uei": "LG19MLLKDLY8",
  "small_business": {
    "naics_small_codes": ["333415"],
    "naics_all_codes": ["238210", "238220", "333415"],
    "naics_primary": "238220",
    "naics_exception_codes": []
  },
  "certifications": []
}

This firm lists three NAICS and is SBA-small in exactly one of them, 333415. Its primary code, 238220, is one of the two it is not small for, so a filter built on naics_primary would have counted it as small for 238220. naics_small_codes is the field that answers the set-aside question, and here it answers it differently from every other field in the block.

A UEI with no profile.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_PRO_KEY" \
  "https://govconapi.com/api/v1/dsbs/H11HD5VHGHN3"

{
  "detail": "No SBA DSBS profile for UEI H11HD5VHGHN3. DSBS is small-business opt-in data, so ~half of SAM-registered entities (and no large primes) have no profile."
}

A 404 with the UEI echoed back. The firm exists in SAM and returns normally from the entity and award endpoints. It simply never built a DSBS profile, which is the expected outcome for a large prime and for roughly half the directory. Branch on the 404 and carry on, rather than retrying it.

Related

• Company profile, the SAM registration plus award profile for a UEI. A Pro caller gets this same DSBS object inline as an sba_profile block, so use it instead of two calls when you also want award history.
• Single entity by UEI, the SAM registration record, which also carries the sba_profile block for a Pro caller. Go there when the DSBS 404 needs confirming against SAM.
• Search entities, where ?naics_small= filters the whole SAM directory on the naics_small_codes field documented above. That is the directory-scale companion to this single-firm lookup: find the firms first, then read their profiles here.
• Data freshness, for the current DSBS profile count, the monthly refresh cadence and the as-of date.