Getting certified as a diverse supplier is the hard part — the ownership documents, the control questions, sometimes a site visit — and once a firm holds its MBE, WBE or DBE certification and starts winning set-aside work, the natural next thought is: when does this need renewing? For the federal transportation program, the answer is that it doesn't. It never does.
The DBE rule is unusually direct about it. Once a certifier has certified a firm, the firm remains certified unless and until the certifier removes that certification — and the certifier may not require the firm to reapply, renew, undergo recertification, or impose anything functionally equivalent. There is no expiry date to diary, because there is no expiry.
What there is instead is stranger and easier to miss. Every year, on the anniversary of your original certification — a date that appears nowhere in your operations and drifts away from every other deadline the business keeps — you owe your certifier a fresh signed Declaration of Eligibility, and with it your gross receipts for the last completed fiscal year, calculated on a cash basis whether or not that is how you keep your books. Those receipts are then averaged and tested against caps. Which means the filing is not a formality that preserves the credential. It is the measurement that can end it.
That is the shape worth understanding before you build a calendar around any of these programs. Every other credential a business tracks asks whether its paperwork is current. This family asks whether you are still the same company — still owned the same way, still controlled by the same people, still small enough, still disadvantaged enough — and answering honestly and on time is exactly how a growing firm reports itself out of the program. Here is how these dates actually behave.
General information, not certification or legal advice. Rules differ sharply between programs and between certifying bodies, and corporate certifications from NMSDC and WBENC are governed by those councils' own standards rather than by federal regulation — confirm what applies to you with your certifying body and the official sources in section 11.
1. What are supplier-diversity certifications?
A supplier-diversity certification is a formal finding that a business is owned and controlled by people in a qualifying group, made by a body whose finding buyers are willing to rely on. DBE covers disadvantaged business enterprises working on federally assisted transportation contracts and is granted by state Unified Certification Programs under U.S. DOT rules. MBE is the minority-owned designation certified through the National Minority Supplier Development Council and its regional affiliates. WBE comes from the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. Alongside them sit the federal contracting programs run by the Small Business Administration — 8(a) Business Development, the Women-Owned Small Business program, HUBZone, and the service-disabled veteran-owned designation. Each unlocks something specific: set-aside and sole-source awards, subcontracting credit, and a place in the databases that corporate supplier-diversity teams search. Remindax helps you hold the dates attached to keeping them and reminds the people responsible; it doesn't certify businesses, file or prepare declarations, determine eligibility, or advise on procurement rules.
The important thing about that definition is what is being certified. A business license certifies that you may operate. A quality-management certificate certifies that your processes meet a standard. These certify a fact about your cap table and your management structure — and facts of that kind can change without anyone filing anything, on an afternoon when nobody was thinking about compliance at all.
1.1 What each program actually asks of you afterwards
- →DBE — a perpetual certification with an annual declaration. 49 CFR 26.83(h) makes the certification open-ended: it holds until removed, and no certifier may require renewal or recertification. In its place, 26.83(j) requires a new Declaration of Eligibility every year on the anniversary of original certification, accompanied by gross receipts for the most recently completed fiscal year. Non-compliance is treated as a failure to cooperate, not as a lapse.
- →DBE — a 30-day report on material change. Under 26.83(i)(3) a certified firm must notify its certifier of a material change in circumstances affecting continued eligibility within 30 days of the change, explain it fully, and include a duly executed declaration with the notice. Changes in management responsibility among the members of an LLC are expressly covered.
- →DBE — a review that can arrive unannounced. The same paragraph that forbids recertification permits the certifier to conduct a review at any reasonable time, or at regular intervals of at least two years, and to make an unannounced visit to your offices or a job site. There is no date to prepare for, which is the point of it.
- →8(a) — a fixed term, plus an annual review inside it. 13 CFR 124.2(a) grants a program term of nine years from the date of SBA's approval letter, shortened only by termination, early graduation or voluntary withdrawal. Within that term, 124.112 requires an annual submission including a certification that the firm still meets the eligibility requirements, and a written notice to SBA of any change adversely affecting eligibility.
- →Corporate certifications — the councils' own cycles. NMSDC and WBENC are private councils, not agencies, and set their own recertification cadence, documentation and fees; their timing is a matter of council policy rather than of regulation, and it differs from the federal shape described above. Confirm yours with the council or affiliate that certified you.
Set those side by side and the pattern is not a set of renewal dates of varying length. It is a mixture of an anniversary that never ends, a countdown that cannot be extended, an event-driven report measured in days, and a review with no date at all — four different kinds of obligation, only one of which a renewal calendar can even represent.
2. Do supplier-diversity certifications expire?
49 CFR 26.83(h) provides that once a certifier has certified a firm, the firm remains certified unless and until the certifier removes certification, and that the certifier may not require a DBE to reapply for certification, renew its certification, undergo a recertification, or impose any functionally equivalent requirement.
Under 26.83(j) a DBE must give its certifier a new Declaration of Eligibility every year on the anniversary of its original certification, with gross receipts for the most recently completed fiscal year — calculated on a cash basis regardless of the firm's overall accounting method.
The rule labels non-compliance with the annual declaration — whether full or partial — a 26.109(c) failure to cooperate, which is a pathway to removal under 26.87 rather than a certificate quietly running out.
13 CFR 124.2(a) sets a program term of nine years from SBA's approval letter, and 124.108(b) makes eligibility one-time: once a firm, or the disadvantaged individual on whom eligibility was based, has participated, neither will be eligible again.
A material change affecting continued eligibility is reported within 30 days of its occurrence under 26.83(i)(3), with a duly executed declaration attached — separately from, and usually nowhere near, the annual anniversary.
The wording of 26.83(h)(2) rewards a second reading. It does not merely decline to require renewal; it forbids the certifier from requiring one, or from imposing “any functionally equivalent requirement.” The drafters were closing a door that had been left ajar for years, during which firms genuinely did face periodic recertification. Which is why a great deal of secondhand guidance still describes these certifications as annually renewed, and why a firm working from that guidance ends up watching for a renewal notice that is not coming while an anniversary it never wrote down goes past.
Most recurring obligations a business carries are anchored to something the whole organization already feels. A fiscal year-end pulls the finance team with it. A license expiry is printed on the certificate. A statutory deadline is shared with every peer, so the industry talks about it in the same weeks each year. The date in 26.83(j) has none of that: it is the anniversary of the day this particular firm was first certified, which might be the eleventh of August, and which nothing in the business or the market will ever mention again. It is also the date least likely to survive a change of the person who handled the original application — because the only place it is written down is the original approval letter.
3. Why tracking these certifications matters
The reason to track this family isn't that the paperwork is heavy. By the standards of most compliance filings it is light. It is that four structural properties make the obligation behave unlike any other credential on the same calendar:
There is no expiry date to miss
The certificate does not run out, so nothing about it ever turns red. What falls due is a declaration on a private anniversary, and the absence of an expiry is precisely what removes the prompt every other credential gives you for free.
The annual filing is the measurement
The receipts you report feed a three-year average tested against the statutory cap and a five-year average tested against the SBA size standard. Filing correctly and on time is the mechanism by which a growing firm is measured out of the program.
An 8(a) term is a countdown, not a cycle
Nine years from the approval letter, and one-time eligibility that attaches to the owner as well as the firm. Perfect compliance for nine years still ends in departure, and there is no version of the process that lets you begin again.
The change report re-swears what it may end
The 30-day notice under 26.83(i)(3) must carry a duly executed declaration — so reporting the event that threatens your eligibility and re-attesting to that eligibility are the same act, filed in the same envelope.
Property 3.2 is the one that changes what a tracking system is for, and it is worth being blunt about. In almost every other obligation a business carries, compliance and self-interest point the same way: file the report, keep the license, keep operating. Here they can point in opposite directions. The declaration required by 26.83(j) is not a confirmation that nothing has changed — it carries a number. That number joins the previous years' numbers, and 26.65(b) makes a firm ineligible to perform DBE work on FHWA or FTA assisted contracts if its affiliated annual gross receipts, averaged over the previous three fiscal years, exceed a statutory cap set at $30.72 million as of March 2024 and adjusted annually. Separately, 26.65(a) tests receipts averaged over five preceding fiscal years against the applicable SBA size cap. One filing, two averaging windows, and a firm can be comfortably inside one while crossing the other.
The same logic runs through the personal side. Under 26.68(a), an owner whose personal net worth exceeds $2,047,000 is not presumed economically disadvantaged — a figure the Department adjusts, and one that a decade of successful contracting is entirely capable of carrying somebody past. The 8(a) program takes it further still: 13 CFR 124.112 treats excessive withdrawals of funds or assets from the participant by its owners as a reason to conclude that a socially disadvantaged individual is no longer economically disadvantaged. Paying yourself too well is, in that specific and formal sense, a compliance event.
A money transmitter license is the closest thing in this library, because there too a purely commercial decision — take the investment, sign the agents — silently creates a federal filing obligation. But the resemblance stops at the trigger. There, growth creates a deadline, and meeting it keeps you licensed; the obligation is the price of success. Here, growth can end the credential outright, and no filing repairs that. The deadline is not what success creates. It is what success is measured by.
4. Who needs to track supplier-diversity certifications
Two quite different groups carry these dates: the firms that hold the certifications, and the buyers whose diversity-spend reporting depends on those firms still holding them.
Minority- & women-owned firms
MBE and WBE certifications held through councils with their own cadences, often alongside a state or federal designation on a completely different clock. Being current with one council says nothing whatsoever about the next.
Learn More
DBE firms on transportation work
The annual declaration on an anniversary nobody else in the business observes, running beside the weekly certified-payroll reports the same public projects already demand.
Learn More
8(a) participants mid-term
A nine-year term with an annual eligibility certification inside it, and an end date known from the approval letter onward — which makes the years before graduation a planning window rather than a renewal cycle.
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Firms approaching the caps
Finance teams who know that this year's receipts join a three-year and a five-year average, and that the declaration reporting them is the moment the question gets asked. The number is knowable long before it is filed.
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Procurement & supplier-diversity teams
The other side of the same fact. Spend only counts toward a diversity goal while the supplier is certified — and because nothing expires, there is no date on file to watch. It has to be asked for.
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Firms certified several ways
A minority woman-owned business may hold MBE, WBE, a state designation and DBE at once — four bodies applying four sets of standards, with caps and definitions that do not agree. One can end while the others continue.
Learn MoreThe buyer's version of this problem deserves its own sentence, because it is the mirror image of the supplier's and it fails for the opposite reason. A procurement team tracking certified suppliers is used to collecting documents with dates on them — insurance certificates, licenses, the ordinary contents of a vendor and subcontractor compliance file — and a register built around expiry dates has nowhere to put a credential that has none. The supplier's certificate looks permanently valid because it is, right up to the day the certifier removes it, which is a day the buyer will not learn about from the document.
5. What happens when supplier-diversity eligibility ends
Because nothing expires, nothing lapses in the ordinary sense. Eligibility ends in one of four ways, and only the first resembles a missed deadline at all.
The declaration was never filed. The closest thing to a conventional failure, and the easiest to fall into precisely because the date is private. 26.83(j) states that non-compliance, whether full or partial — and partial is worth noticing, since a declaration submitted without the receipts documentation is partial — is a 26.109(c) failure to cooperate. That is not an automatic loss of certification. It is an entry on the path to removal under 26.87, which is a proceeding with notice and a right to respond. The firm therefore does not wake up decertified; it wakes up in a process, usually some months after the anniversary it did not observe.
The firm reported itself past a cap. The one that is genuinely hard to describe as a failure, because everything was done correctly. Receipts were calculated on a cash basis as required, submitted on the anniversary, averaged over three fiscal years, and found to exceed the statutory cap. The firm is now ineligible to perform DBE work on FHWA or FTA assisted contracts. No deadline was missed, no rule was broken, and there is no remedial filing, because there is nothing to remedy. This is the outcome the program is designed to produce for a firm that succeeds, and it arrives through the compliance process rather than in spite of it.
The ownership or control picture moved. An investor takes a stake that dilutes the qualifying owner below the threshold. A founder brings in a chief executive and hands over the operational control the certification was granted on. A marriage ends, a partner dies, an estate is settled, an LLC reshuffles management responsibility among its members — which 26.83(i)(1) names specifically. Each is a legitimate business or personal event, none of them is a compliance decision, and each starts a 30-day clock to notify the certifier with a signed declaration attached. The thirty days run from the occurrence of the change, not from the moment somebody in the business realizes a filing is owed.
The 8(a) term simply ran out. Nine years from the approval letter, and then it is over. What makes this different from every graduation in the library is 124.108(b): once the firm, or the disadvantaged individual on whom eligibility was based, has participated in the program, neither is eligible again. Eligibility attaches to the person, so a founder cannot form a second company and re-enter. There is one nine-year window per lifetime, and the only question is whether the firm used it to build something that survives the exit.
The practical damage in all four cases is the same, and it is not a penalty. It is that buyers, primes and agencies rely on a status the document cannot report. A certificate in a vendor file shows the date it was issued and nothing else — not the anniversary that has since gone unobserved, not the change reported six months ago, not the removal proceeding under way. So a prime counts subcontracted spend toward a contract goal it may not be meeting; a corporate team reports diversity spend for a supplier whose certification has ended; and the supplier keeps bidding into set-asides on a designation it no longer holds. Nobody is concealing anything. The document simply cannot carry the fact.
Which is why the useful thing to hold is not the certificate. It is the anniversary, the term end date, the caps the next declaration will be measured against, and a prompt to ask whether anything about ownership or control has moved since the last time anyone asked. Those four are what actually determine whether the credential is still doing its job — and none of them is printed on it.
6. How Remindax holds these dates
Remindax is built for obligations that recur without announcing themselves. The anniversary sits in the same register as the rest of the firm's dated commitments, and the reminders reach the people who can actually act on them. Four pieces do the work:
The anniversary as a real date
Your original certification date, entered once, becomes a recurring annual obligation with its own owner and status — so the one date that exists nowhere in your operations exists somewhere.
Long lead time, because receipts take time
Staged alerts well ahead of each anniversary, by Email, SMS and WhatsApp — early enough to close the books, recast receipts on a cash basis, and see the averages before the declaration is signed.
A scheduled question, not just a deadline
A recurring prompt to ask whether ownership, management or control has moved — with the answer recorded either way, so a 30-day report starts on the day of the change rather than the day someone remembers.
Every body and every term together
MBE, WBE, DBE and federal program dates side by side, each on its own clock, including an 8(a) term end you can see years out — and the same view works for a buyer tracking suppliers.
Remindax tracks the dates and reminds you. It doesn't certify businesses, prepare or file declarations, calculate your receipts or personal net worth, determine whether you qualify, or advise on procurement, contracting or eligibility rules. It isn't a certification-filing service or a supplier-diversity management platform. The declarations are made by you to your certifying body. Remindax makes sure the date they are owed on never passes unnoticed first.
7. Why spreadsheets fail for certification tracking
A compliance workbook has one column that does most of the work, and it is the expiry date. Everything else — the conditional formatting, the sort order, the filter that produces the monthly review — is derived from it. Take that column away and the file quietly stops functioning while continuing to look correct.
That is exactly what a perpetual certification does to it. There is no expiry to enter, so the row is either left blank, in which case it never surfaces in any view, or it is filled with something invented — a year from issue, the date on the certificate, a guess — which is worse, because now the register reports a date the certifier does not recognize. The real date, the anniversary of original certification, is usually recoverable only from the approval letter, and a workbook gives nobody a reason to go looking for it.
A grid also cannot hold an obligation whose trigger is an event rather than a date. “Notify within 30 days if ownership, management or operational control changes” is not a deadline a calendar understands, because the calendar cannot know the change happened. Forced into a row it either fires every month, training everyone to dismiss it, or never fires at all. What is needed is a prompt to ask a question on a schedule, with the answer recorded either way — the same discipline a trust account reconciliation needs, and for the same reason: the record that somebody checked and found nothing is the record that matters.
And a spreadsheet has no way to express that a value in it is being tested against a threshold somewhere else. Gross receipts sit in the accounts. The three-year and five-year averages sit nowhere. The personal net worth cap sits in a regulation. Nothing in the workbook connects them, so the first time the comparison is performed is the moment the declaration is signed — which is the last moment at which any of it can still be planned around.
A system that carries anniversaries as first-class dates, holds a term end years in advance, asks the ownership question on a schedule, and gives the finance team enough lead time to see the averages before anyone signs, is what turns this from a credential people hope is still valid into a set of dates the business can actually plan around.
8. Key takeaways
- ✓A DBE certification does not expire and cannot be made to renew: 49 CFR 26.83(h) holds it in force until the certifier removes it and forbids any recertification or functionally equivalent requirement.
- ✓What recurs is a Declaration of Eligibility every year on the anniversary of your original certification, with gross receipts for the last completed fiscal year calculated on a cash basis regardless of your accounting method — 26.83(j).
- ✓Those receipts are the measurement, not a formality: a three-year average is tested against the statutory cap (set at $30.72 million as of March 2024 and adjusted annually) and a five-year average against the applicable SBA size cap — 26.65(a) and (b).
- ✓An owner whose personal net worth exceeds $2,047,000 is not presumed economically disadvantaged under 26.68(a), and 13 CFR 124.112 treats excessive withdrawals from an 8(a) participant as evidence that its owner no longer is either.
- ✓Material changes to ownership, management or control are reported within 30 days of occurrence with a duly executed declaration attached — 26.83(i)(3) — not saved for the anniversary.
- ✓An 8(a) program term is nine years from SBA's approval letter, and 13 CFR 124.108(b) makes eligibility one-time for the firm and for the individual it was based on — so it ends on schedule and cannot be re-entered.
- ✓Missing the annual declaration is a 26.109(c) failure to cooperate leading toward removal under 26.87, not a certificate quietly expiring — and a declaration filed without its documentation counts as partial non-compliance.
- ✓Because nothing expires, the certificate in a vendor file cannot report the status — which is why both certified firms and the procurement teams buying from them need the anniversary held somewhere other than the document.
Never miss an anniversary that isn't written anywhere
Track every declaration, program term and 30-day change report across every body that certified you — automatically. Remindax holds each date and reminds the owner, finance and compliance while there is still time to act.
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9. Frequently Asked Questions
Not in the way most credentials do, and for DBE the rule is explicit that they do not. Under 49 CFR 26.83(h), once a certifier has certified a firm the firm remains certified unless and until the certifier removes that certification, and the certifier may not require the firm to reapply for certification, renew it, undergo a recertification, or impose any functionally equivalent requirement. There is no expiry date. What recurs instead is a declaration: section 26.83(j) requires a new Declaration of Eligibility every year on the anniversary of your original certification, submitted with gross receipts for your most recently completed fiscal year. The 8(a) program works differently again - 13 CFR 124.2(a) grants a program term of nine years from SBA's approval letter, which ends on schedule rather than renewing. MBE and WBE certifications come from private councils that set their own recertification cadence, so confirm those with the council that certified you.
It is a signed Declaration of Eligibility, and under 49 CFR 26.83(j) it is due every year on the anniversary of your original certification - not on a fixed calendar date, not at your fiscal year-end, and not on any date the certifier will remind you of. It must be accompanied by the documentation specified in section 26.65(a), including gross receipts for your most recently completed fiscal year calculated on a cash basis regardless of how your business otherwise keeps its books. The rule identifies audited financial statements, a CPA's signed attestation of correctness and completeness, or the income-related portions of signed federal tax returns as filed as documents that may generally be considered safe harbors, provided they include all reportable receipts for the full period.
Yes, and the annual declaration is how it is measured. The receipts you report do not simply confirm continued eligibility - they join earlier years in two separate averages. Section 26.65(b) makes a firm ineligible to perform DBE work on FHWA or FTA assisted contracts if its affiliated annual gross receipts averaged over the previous three fiscal years exceed the statutory cap, stated as $30.72 million as of March 1, 2024 and adjusted annually. Section 26.65(a) separately tests receipts averaged over the preceding five fiscal years against the applicable SBA size cap. On the personal side, section 26.68(a) provides that an owner whose personal net worth exceeds $2,047,000 is not presumed economically disadvantaged. Nothing is done wrong in any of this: a firm that files accurately and on time is the firm whose growth is recorded.
No. Section 26.83(i)(3) requires a DBE to notify its certifier of a material change in circumstances affecting its continued eligibility within 30 days of the change occurring, explain the change fully, and include a duly executed Declaration of Eligibility with the notice. The thirty days run from the occurrence, not from when someone in the business realizes a filing is owed, and the obligation is separate from the annual anniversary. Section 26.83(i)(1) makes clear that changes in management responsibility among the members of a limited liability company are covered. Non-compliance is treated as a failure to cooperate under section 26.109(c). For 8(a) participants, 13 CFR 124.112 imposes a parallel duty to inform SBA in writing of any changes in circumstances that would adversely affect program eligibility, especially economic disadvantage and ownership and control.
Nine years, and no. 13 CFR 124.2(a) provides that a participant receives a program term of nine years from the date of SBA's approval letter certifying admission, and that the term may be shortened only by termination, early graduation including voluntary early graduation, or voluntary withdrawal. Inside that term, 13 CFR 124.112 requires an annual submission including a certification that the firm still meets the eligibility requirements. What makes the end of the term unusual is 13 CFR 124.108(b): once a concern, or the disadvantaged individual upon whom eligibility was based, has participated in the 8(a) program, neither the concern nor that individual will be eligible again. Because eligibility attaches to the individual as well as the firm, forming a new company does not reopen it. There is one nine-year window, and its end date is known from the approval letter onward.
The certification does not automatically end, because there is nothing to expire. Section 26.83(j) provides that non-compliance, whether full or partial, is a section 26.109(c) failure to cooperate - and partial matters, since a declaration submitted without the required receipts documentation counts. A failure to cooperate is a route toward removal of certification under the procedures in section 26.87, which involve notice and an opportunity to respond, rather than an instant loss of status. The practical effect is that a firm does not discover the problem on the anniversary it missed; it discovers it later, when the certifier initiates a process. Separately, section 26.83(h)(2) permits a certifier to conduct a review at any reasonable time or at intervals of at least two years, and to make an unannounced visit to your offices or a job site.
No. Remindax tracks the dates and reminds the people responsible for them - your certification anniversary and the declaration due on it, an 8(a) program term end, and any 30-day change report - and records whether each has been done. It does not certify businesses, prepare or file declarations or affidavits, calculate your gross receipts or personal net worth, determine whether you qualify for any program, or advise on procurement, contracting or eligibility rules. It is not a certification-filing service or a supplier-diversity management platform. Certification decisions are made by your certifying body, and the filings are made by you to them.
Yes to both. A firm holding MBE, WBE, a state designation and DBE at once can hold each body's obligations side by side, each on its own clock, including an 8(a) term end visible years in advance. Procurement and supplier-diversity teams can track their certified suppliers the same way, which matters here more than it does elsewhere: because these certifications carry no expiry date, a certificate sitting in a vendor file cannot tell a buyer whether the status behind it is still current. What is tracked is the anniversary and the request to confirm, not the document.
The DBE program is governed by 49 CFR part 26 and administered by state Unified Certification Programs; the 8(a), WOSB, HUBZone and service-disabled veteran-owned programs by SBA under 13 CFR; and MBE and WBE certifications by NMSDC and WBENC under their own standards. Remindax tracks the dates and reminds you; it doesn't certify businesses, prepare or file declarations, determine eligibility, or advise on procurement rules. Confirm what applies to your business with your certifying body and the official sources below; this is general information, not certification or legal advice.
11. Sources & references
This page summarizes public requirements and isn't certification or legal advice. The federal rules below govern the DBE and SBA programs; MBE and WBE certifications are granted by private councils under their own standards, and state and local programs add their own. Dollar caps are adjusted periodically. Confirm what applies to your business with the body that certified you and the official sources below.
- •49 CFR 26.83 — Procedures for certification decisions — the source of paragraph (h): a firm remains certified unless and until the certifier removes certification, and the certifier may not require it to reapply, renew, undergo recertification or impose any functionally equivalent requirement, while retaining the right to review at any reasonable time, at intervals of at least two years, and to visit unannounced. Paragraph (i)(3) is the source of the 30-day material-change notice with a duly executed Declaration of Eligibility attached, and (i)(1) of the reference to changes in management responsibility among LLC members. Paragraph (j) is the source of the annual declaration on the anniversary of original certification, the cash-basis gross receipts requirement, the “safe harbor” documents, and the treatment of full or partial non-compliance as a 26.109(c) failure to cooperate.
- •49 CFR 26.65 — Business size determinations — the source of the two averaging windows described in sections 3 and 5: paragraph (a) tests receipts computed on a cash basis and averaged over the firm's preceding five fiscal years against the applicable SBA size cap, and paragraph (b) makes a firm ineligible to perform DBE work on FHWA or FTA assisted contracts if affiliated annual gross receipts averaged over the previous three fiscal years exceed the statutory cap, stated as $30.72 million as of March 1, 2024 and adjusted annually by the Department.
- •49 CFR 26.68 — Personal net worth — the source of the figure used in sections 3 and 8: an owner whose personal net worth exceeds $2,047,000 is not presumed economically disadvantaged. It also sets out the required declaration and corroborating net-worth statement, the treatment of a primary residence and of retirement assets, and the mechanism by which the Department adjusts the cap.
- •13 CFR 124.2 — What length of time may a business participate in the 8(a) BD program? — the source of the nine-year program term running from the date of SBA's approval letter, and of the rule that the term may be shortened only by termination, early graduation including voluntary early graduation, or voluntary withdrawal.
- •13 CFR 124.108 — What other eligibility requirements apply for individuals or businesses? — paragraph (b) is the source of one-time eligibility: once a concern, or the disadvantaged individual upon whom eligibility was based, has participated in the 8(a) BD program, neither the concern nor that individual will be eligible again. See also 13 CFR 124.112 for the annual eligibility certification, the duty to inform SBA in writing of changes adversely affecting eligibility, and the treatment of excessive withdrawals.
- •U.S. Department of Transportation — Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program — the Department's program page, and the route to the state Unified Certification Program that certifies DBEs in your state. The UCP is the certifier referred to throughout section 26.83 and is the only place your own certification date, declaration status and any pending review can be confirmed.
- •U.S. Small Business Administration — Contracting assistance programs — SBA's overview of the 8(a) Business Development, Women-Owned Small Business, HUBZone and service-disabled veteran-owned programs, including how each is applied for and what continuing obligations attach to participation.
- •Your certifying body — NMSDC, WBENC, your state UCP or SBA — NMSDC and WBENC certify MBE and WBE firms under their own standards through regional affiliates and partner organizations, and set their own recertification cadence, documentation and fees. Nothing in 49 CFR part 26 or 13 CFR part 124 governs their timing, so the cycle that applies to a corporate certification can only be confirmed with the council or affiliate that issued it.