SAM.gov User Roles: How to Add Staff, Keep a Backup Admin, and Get Back In When Your Admin Leaves
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How SAM.gov entity roles work, who can be an Entity Administrator, how to add staff or a consultant, and how to regain access if your only admin is gone.
Most small businesses think about SAM.gov access exactly once: the day the owner registers the company. Then a year goes by, the renewal notice shows up, and the one person who can log in to the entity record is a former office manager who left in the spring. Nobody else can touch the registration, the renewal clock keeps ticking, and a bid you wanted to submit needs an active record. That mess is almost always avoidable. SAM.gov has a role system built for exactly this, and it takes a few minutes to set up properly.
This article walks through how roles work on the vendor side of SAM.gov, which role to give to whom, why you should always have a second administrator, and what the recovery path looks like if you already lost access. It is not a full registration walkthrough. If you have never registered, start with our step-by-step SAM.gov registration guide, and for the yearly renewal itself see how to renew your SAM.gov registration and keep it active. The sources here were read today: GSA's SAM.gov Roles and Privileges guide, GSA's Quick Start Guide for Updating Entity Registrations published through the Federal Service Desk, the Federal Service Desk article on becoming the administrator for a non-federal entity, and the Federal Acquisition Regulation on acquisition.gov at FAC 2026-01. Screens and menus on SAM.gov change from time to time, so treat the click paths as a guide rather than gospel.
Why access matters more than people expect
Being registered is not optional for most federal work. FAR 4.1102(a) says offerors and quoters are required to be registered in SAM at the time an offer or quotation is submitted, with a short list of exceptions such as certain micro-purchases paid by government purchase card. And "registered" has a specific meaning. The SAM maintenance clause at FAR 52.204-13 defines it to include completing the Core, Assertions, Representations and Certifications, and Points of Contact sections, the government validating your mandatory data including your taxpayer ID with the IRS, and the government marking the record "Active."
GSA's quick start guide adds the part that bites people: you must renew your registration every 365 days for it to stay active, and updates require IRS and CAGE validation that can take up to ten business days. It also says to allow at least ten business days after you submit for a registration to become active. Put those together and the risk is obvious. If you discover in week 51 that nobody on staff can open the record, you may not have time to fix access, renew, and clear validation before the expiration date. Access is the step that comes before all of that.
How SAM.gov roles are organized
GSA's roles guide explains that roles in SAM.gov are assigned by "domain," meaning a functional area, and what a role allows differs from domain to domain. For a vendor, the domains that matter are Entity Registration and Entity Reporting. Federal staff have their own roles in other domains, such as Contract Opportunities, which is how a contracting officer publishes notices. None of those federal roles are anything you need to request.
Within Entity Registration, the guide lists three non-federal roles, from most to least powerful. An Administrator can administer the viewer, data entry, and administrator roles, manage hierarchy registration requests, deactivate, view, and update active and expired registrations, delete, view, and update draft registrations, and register entities. Data Entry can view and update active and expired registrations, delete, view, and update draft registrations, and register entities. Viewer can view active and expired registrations and view draft and submitted registrations. Each role inherits the permissions of the one below it. The key difference between Administrator and Data Entry is role management. A Data Entry user can do the work of keeping the registration current, but cannot add or remove other people.
Entity Reporting is a separate domain with its own Administrator and Data Entry roles. According to the same guide, those roles cover uploading and editing service contract reports and BioPreferred reports. Many small firms never need this domain, but if you win a service contract with reporting requirements, the person filing those reports needs a role there, not just in Entity Registration.
Roles are also tied to specific entities. The guide's federal and non-federal sections both make the point that a role applies to the organization it was granted for. If you own two companies with two Unique Entity IDs, being the Administrator of one gives you nothing on the other.
Who can hold which role
The rule that trips up a lot of owners is about outsiders. GSA's quick start guide says the Entity Administrator role can only be held by a SAM.gov user who has a position in the entity, for example an employee, officer, or board member. Third-party agents cannot hold an Entity Administrator role, but can be assigned a Data Entry role, which lets them help with registrations, renewals, and updates but not role management.
That has a practical consequence. If you hire a consultant or a registration service to handle SAM.gov for you, they should be working under a Data Entry role you grant, while someone inside your company keeps the Administrator role. Do not hand over your own Login.gov credentials so an outsider can "just log in as you." SAM.gov signs users in through Login.gov, each person should have their own account, and the role system exists so you never have to share one. As a side note, GSA's guide also states there is no charge to register or maintain an entity registration in SAM.gov, so be wary of anyone implying the government charges a fee for it. A consultant may charge for their time; SAM.gov itself does not.
Set up a backup administrator today
GSA's advice here is blunt. Once you have an Entity Administrator, you should assign the same role to at least one other person in your organization. Otherwise, the guide says, you will have to submit another letter to replace your Entity Administrator if they leave, which can delay renewing your registration.
Here is a hypothetical to show how this plays out. A four-person HVAC company registered in SAM.gov two years ago. The co-owner who did the registration is the only Administrator. She is planning to retire next year. If she adds her business partner as a second Administrator now, the handoff is a non-event: he signs in, the record is there, and he can renew on schedule. If she leaves without doing that, the company has to go through the formal letter process described below before anyone can manage roles again.
The mechanics of adding someone are straightforward. The person you are adding first needs their own SAM.gov user account, which they create by signing in through Login.gov. Then a current Administrator assigns the role from the workspace, choosing the role, the Entity Registration domain, and your entity. The new user accepts the invitation and the role shows up on their account. If you want them to file service contract reports too, repeat the assignment in the Entity Reporting domain.
A sensible small-business setup, and this is our suggestion rather than an official rule, is two Administrators who are owners or officers, Data Entry for the bookkeeper or proposal coordinator who actually keeps points of contact and banking details current, and Data Entry for any outside consultant. Review the list once a year when you renew. Remove anyone who has left. A former employee who still holds a role on your registration is a loose end you do not need.
What changes, and what to check, when you update
Roles are not the only thing worth checking when people change. GSA's quick start guide describes the update path: from the Entity Workspace you pick the entity, open the Actions menu, and choose "Update." You can update points of contact only, or update and renew the entire registration. The full update walks you back through Core Data, Assertions, Representations and Certifications, and Points of Contact, and lets you remove optional points of contact that are no longer relevant. It also notes that once you submit an update, you cannot make further changes until the submitted registration is processed, so finish your edits before you hit submit.
If your company qualifies as a small business, the same guide reminds you to update your information in SBA's Dynamic Small Business Search or apply for a small business certification through the SBA supplemental page. When the person who left was also the contact listed there, fix that at the same time. Agencies look for small businesses by size status and NAICS code, and a profile that points to someone who no longer works for you is a missed call waiting to happen.
If nobody can get in: the administrator letter
If you have no working Administrator, GSA's quick start guide says you can appoint a new one by submitting a letter to the Federal Service Desk, and that only SAM.gov users with a position in the entity can receive the role. The Federal Service Desk calls this an Entity Administrator Appointment Letter. Its knowledge article lists the situations it covers: access to the administrator account has been lost, a registration exists but has no administrator, or the administrator has left the organization.
The same article says to check first whether your entity already has an administrator, because if it does, that person can simply assign you the role, which is much faster. If you truly need a letter, the article describes three templates: one for a single entity with a U.S. bank account, one for multiple entities with U.S. bank accounts, and one for a single international entity. The two U.S. templates must be notarized, and someone with signatory authority signs the letter in the notary's presence. The letter goes on your entity's letterhead, or, if you have none, with your legal business name and physical address at the top. The person being appointed must already have a SAM.gov user account under the same email address listed in the letter, or the request cannot be processed. You then scan the letter and submit it through FSD.gov as an incident under the SAM system with the role management issue type.
Two warnings from that article are worth repeating. Processing times vary, reviews happen in the order received, and these letters cannot be expedited. And if something on the letter has to be corrected, you need to submit a new letter with a new notary signature and seal. Put another way, the cheapest fix is the backup administrator you set up before you needed one.
A short checklist in paragraph form
If you only do one thing after reading this, sign in to SAM.gov, open your entity, and look at who holds roles on it. Make sure at least two insiders are Administrators, that outside help is limited to Data Entry, and that nobody who has left still holds a role. Then check your expiration date and note it on a calendar a couple of months ahead, since renewals and updates go through validation that can take up to ten business days. With access sorted, you can spend your time on the part that pays, which is finding work. Our guide to finding set-aside contracts on SAM.gov and the live set-aside listings are good places to start, and if you are lining up partners, read how to vet a teaming partner in SAM.gov.
This is a plain-language overview, not legal advice. For hands-on help with a registration problem, the Federal Service Desk at FSD.gov handles SAM.gov issues, and your local APEX Accelerator offers free counseling.
Helpful reading. For more on this topic, see government contracting for small business books (Affiliate link) and small business office management books (Affiliate link). As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The Set-Aside Desk is published by SetAside Signal, an independent publication, not a government agency. This article isn't legal advice; rules change, so confirm details with the official sources: SBA (sba.gov), SAM.gov and the FAR at acquisition.gov. Published Nov 9, 2026.