Federal contractors hoping to newly qualify as small businesses under a sweeping rewrite of the government's size standards now have two more months to weigh in — and far less reason to expect the rule will help nearly as many of them as first advertised. The Small Business Administration extended the public comment period on its proposed size-standards overhaul by 60 days, pushing the deadline from September 21 to November 20, 2026, even as the agency quietly cut its own estimate of how many firms the rule would actually help by roughly 95 percent.

The extension, published in a Federal Register notice on September 24 (91 FR 60524-60525, RIN 3245-AI67), covers two linked dockets: SBA-2026-0199, the proposed rule changing size standards for 338 industry groups and industries, and a companion docket for SBA's Revised Size Standards Methodology. Both were originally published August 20 with a standard 30-day comment window, meaning the agency has now more than tripled the time the public gets to respond. In the notice, Ryan Lambert, SBA's Associate Administrator for the Office of Industrial Base Resilience & Contracting, wrote that "in response to requests for additional time to comment and following the SBA's clarification of the impacts of SBA's proposed changes, the Agency is extending the comment periods for an additional 60 days after September 21, 2026, the date the initial comment periods were scheduled to close."

Why SBA Cut Its Own Number by 95 Percent

That reference to "clarification of the impacts" points to a number SBA had been sitting on for days before it surfaced. When the size-standards overhaul was first proposed, SBA estimated it would let roughly 114,000 additional firms qualify as small businesses — a figure the agency used to sell the rule as a major expansion of federal contracting eligibility. On September 17, the same day SBA held a virtual town hall to hear feedback on the proposal, the agency revised that estimate down to a range of just 4,000 to 6,000 additional contractors. SBA has not published the underlying data or methodology behind the new figure, leaving outside observers unable to check how the agency arrived at either number, let alone reconcile the two.

The government contracts law blog SmallGovCon, which has tracked the rulemaking closely, did not mince words about the gap between the two numbers. "This is, to say the least, quite the far cry from the SBA's initial estimate that approximately 114,000 businesses would gain small business status," the firm wrote in its coverage of the extension. A revision of that size, disclosed without supporting data and on the same day as a town hall convened specifically to address industry complaints, has left contractors and trade groups with little clarity on what the rule would actually accomplish if finalized as proposed. It also raises an obvious question the comment period is now designed to force SBA to answer: which number, if either, the agency will actually rely on when it writes the final rule.

A Comment Period Already Running Hot

SBA's decision to add 60 days did not come out of nowhere. By the original September 21 deadline, the docket had already drawn a heavy volume of feedback, most of it critical. Covington & Burling's Inside Government Contracts blog reported that "as of September 21, SBA had received 2,117 comments, most of which opposed the proposals as drafted." The Federal Register's own docket tally showed a far larger raw count — SmallGovCon put it over 60,000 — but noted that figure is difficult to verify since only roughly 2,700 of those submissions had actually been published at the time, a discrepancy that itself became a point of confusion among commenters trying to gauge how much opposition the proposal was really drawing.

The proposal drawing that response would raise size standards for many industries and, for some, replace the current receipts-based test with an employee-count test instead — a structural shift that changes not just where the eligibility line sits but how it is measured in the first place. Industry commenters have used the extended window to press SBA on both the magnitude of the changes and the methodology behind them, which is itself the subject of the second, companion docket now also running through November 20. Because the two dockets were extended together, any comment challenging the methodology can now feed directly into arguments about the size-standard numbers themselves, and vice versa.

What It Means for Contractors

For businesses near an existing size threshold, the practical stakes have not changed even though SBA's messaging has: the rule, if finalized, could still shift which firms qualify as small for specific NAICS codes, affecting eligibility for small-business set-asides, subcontracting goals, and related certifications. What has changed is the confidence contractors can place in SBA's own account of the rule's reach. An agency that told the public to expect 114,000 newly eligible firms and then, within weeks and without data, cut that figure by roughly 95 percent has given commenters reason to scrutinize every other assumption in the proposed rule — including which industries see standards move, by how much, and whether the receipts-to-employee conversion was modeled accurately for their sector.

Contractors and trade associations now have until November 20 to file comments on both the size-standards proposal itself and the methodology SBA used to build it. Firms that operate near current size thresholds, especially in industries slated to move from receipts-based to employee-based standards, have a longer window to model how the change would affect their small-business status and to press SBA for the data behind its revised impact estimate before the rule is finalized. Given the volume and tone of the comments already filed, and the size of the gap between SBA's two impact estimates, a further revision to the rule's scope before a final version issues is a real possibility worth watching over the next two months.

Sources