Federal Contractor Index

    What Is a UEI, and How Do I Find a Company's UEI?

    A Unique Entity ID (UEI) is the identifier the U.S. federal government uses for every organization it does business with — contractors, grant recipients, and federal agencies themselves. If a company holds a federal contract, it has a UEI.

    What the UEI replaced

    Before April 2022, federal contractors were identified by a nine-digit DUNS number, issued by Dun & Bradstreet, a private company. The General Services Administration retired DUNS and moved entity identification in-house, issuing UEIs directly through SAM.gov. A UEI is 12 characters, uppercase letters and digits, with no dashes or spaces — for example, G4KDGE4JFFK7. Unlike a DUNS number, a UEI is free to obtain and does not depend on a third-party registry.

    The switch was a straight identifier swap, not a re-registration: an entity's SAM.gov registration, past award history, and CAGE code (covered in a separate guide) carried over under the new UEI.

    Who has a UEI

    Any entity registered in the federal System for Award Management (SAM.gov) has one — not just contractors, but grant recipients, universities, hospitals, tribal governments, and the awarding agencies themselves. A UEI on its own does not mean an entity has won a federal contract; it only means the entity is registered and eligible to. This site publishes profiles only for entities that have actually received federal contract awards above a minimum threshold — see the methodology page for the exact cutoff.

    How to find a company's UEI

    1. Search this site. The search box at the top of every page accepts a company name and returns its UEI directly if the company has a published federal-contracting profile — for example, searching "Lockheed Martin" surfaces its Fort Worth, TX profile, UEI G4KDGE4JFFK7.
    2. SAM.gov's entity search. SAM.gov is the authoritative source: search by legal business name at sam.gov's public entity search, and the UEI appears on the entity's public registration summary, no login required for a basic lookup.
    3. Ask the company directly. Any business that holds federal contracts or grants keeps its own UEI on file, usually with whoever manages its SAM.gov registration (often the same person who handles proposals or contracts).

    What the UEI is used for

    Every federal contract award, on every federal spending database — this site's data source, USAspending.gov, included — is tied to the recipient's UEI. It is what lets figures for the "same company" be added up consistently across years and across different contracting offices, even when the company's name on file changes slightly between award records. On a contractor profile page on this site, the UEI appears as a chip directly under the company name, and it is what the "Parent company" and "Other UEIs under this parent" sections use to connect a subsidiary's contracts to its parent's.

    UEI vs. a subsidiary's own UEI

    A large company can hold more than one UEI — a parent corporation and its operating divisions or acquired subsidiaries can each be registered separately in SAM.gov, and federal awards get attributed to whichever UEI actually signed the contract. That is why a search for a large contractor on this site can surface several distinct profiles: each one is a real, separately registered entity, not a duplicate. A profile's "Other UEIs under this parent" list, when present, points to the related registrations under the same parent company.

    UEI vs. a tax ID (EIN)

    An Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a tax identifier, issued by the IRS, and it existed long before the UEI and serves an entirely different purpose: it is how the IRS and payroll systems track a business for tax reporting. A UEI is how the federal procurement and grants system tracks an entity for contracting and award purposes. A company provides both when it registers in SAM.gov — the EIN for tax and banking verification, the UEI as the identifier that then appears on every award record. Neither one substitutes for the other on a federal filing, and this site publishes UEIs only, never an EIN — a tax identifier is not part of the whitelisted field set the pipeline reads from USAspending.gov in the first place.

    Why a UEI sometimes appears without a matching contract history

    Registering in SAM.gov and obtaining a UEI is a prerequisite for federal contracting, not proof of it. Plenty of businesses register in anticipation of pursuing federal work, to be eligible for a specific solicitation, or because a subcontract required it, without ever receiving a prime contract award themselves. If a UEI lookup on SAM.gov shows an active registration but the same company does not appear on this site, the most likely explanation is exactly that: registered and eligible, but not yet — or not currently — an actual prime contract recipient above the threshold this site tracks.

    See also: what a CAGE code is and how it differs from a UEI, and how to look up a company's federal contract history.