If you sell gloves, surgical instruments, exam tables, wheelchairs, or wound-care products, the federal government is one of the largest single buyers in your category. The Department of Veterans Affairs alone runs the country's biggest integrated health system. The catch is that medical products have their own contracting machinery, separate from the rest of government, and most new vendors miss it because they assume "federal sales = GSA." For a lot of medical supply firms, the bigger door is the VA's.
Here's the real path: pick the right codes, get on the right schedule, use the set-aside that matches your ownership, and start as a subcontractor while the slower approvals process.
Start with your NAICS codes and size standardEvery federal opportunity is tagged with a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code, and that code decides whether you count as a small business for that bid. Two codes cover most medical supply work:
- 339112 — Surgical and Medical Instrument Manufacturing. If you make the product, this is usually yours. The size standard here is employee-based (the VA has run 339112 procurements at a 1,000-employee small-business ceiling), so most independent manufacturers qualify as small.
- 423450 — Medical, Dental, and Hospital Equipment and Supplies Merchant Wholesalers. If you distribute or resell, this is the common code. Its size standard is receipts-based (average annual revenue), not headcount.
Size standards get revised, so confirm the current number for your code in the SBA Size Standards Tool or directly at 13 CFR 121.201 before you certify anything. The standard is per-code: you can be "small" under 339112 and "other than small" under a different code on the same day. List every code that genuinely describes what you sell in your SAM.gov registration, because contracting officers search by NAICS when they plan set-asides.
Where the medical buying actually happensThe single most important thing to understand: medical products do not go through the standard GSA Schedule. GSA delegated authority to the VA to run procurement for medical equipment, supplies, services, and pharmaceuticals. That program is the VA Federal Supply Schedule (FSS), and the schedule you want is 65 II A — Medical Equipment & Supplies.
A VA FSS contract is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) vehicle. You get pre-approved at firm-fixed pricing built on a "most favored customer" basis (you offer the government pricing in line with your best commercial customers), and then any VA medical center, and many other federal buyers, can place orders against your schedule without re-running a full competition. That pre-approval is the moat. Once you're on 65 II A, you're inside the buying channel instead of chasing one-off solicitations.
Offers go to the VA's National Acquisition Center, not GSA. They're submitted by email to FSSOffersandExtensions@va.gov with a structured subject line the solicitation dictates (for example, FSS – Offer – 65 II A – 1 of 4). Use the Proposal Submission Checklist in the solicitation. Proposals missing required documents get returned without review, and that's the most common reason a first attempt stalls.
Outside the schedule, individual contracts and orders still get posted on SAM.gov. Set a saved search filtered to your NAICS codes and check it like email.
The set-asides that apply to youSet-asides are the lever that turns a giant open market into a short list you can actually win. Under FAR Part 19, agencies reserve specific solicitations for small businesses, and within that, for specific ownership categories. The ones that matter for medical supplies:
- SDVOSB / VOSB (veteran-owned). This is the big one for medical products because of where the spending lives. Under the VA's Veterans First program (VAAR 808.4), VA contracting officers must prioritize verified service-disabled veteran-owned firms first, then other veteran-owned firms, before the broader small-business pool. If a contracting officer expects two or more verified veteran-owned firms to bid, the order gets set aside for them. For a verified SDVOSB selling to the VA, that's a structural advantage no other category gets.
- WOSB / EDWOSB for women-owned firms in eligible NAICS codes.
- 8(a) for the SBA's business development program (socially and economically disadvantaged owners), which also allows sole-source awards under a threshold.
- HUBZone if your business and a share of your staff sit in a designated zone.
- Small business total set-asides, open to any qualifying small firm regardless of ownership.
The order matters: at the VA, veteran status is checked first. Everywhere else (HHS, Defense Health Agency, the Indian Health Service, the Bureau of Prisons), the standard small-business and socioeconomic set-asides apply.
Why certification is worth the paperworkA set-aside only helps if you can prove you qualify. SDVOSB and 8(a) and WOSB all require verification, and an unverified claim gets your bid tossed. Verification is also what lets a contracting officer set aside an order specifically for you, which is the whole point. If you haven't started, our certification guides walk through each program's documents and timelines, and CertifyAll captures your business and owner information once and handles the federal filings so you're not re-keying the same forms into four portals.
Get verified before you bid, not after you find an opportunity. The good solicitations close in 15 to 30 days, and there's no time to start certification once the clock is running.
The faster route in: subcontract firstWinning a prime VA FSS contract takes months. Subcontracting starts now. Large prime contractors that hold medical product or hospital-services contracts carry subcontracting plans with required small-business and veteran-owned targets, and they're actively looking for firms like yours to hit those numbers. You sell through their established contract while you build the past-performance record that makes your own schedule offer credible.
Use our subcontract finder to see which primes hold relevant medical contracts and have subcontracting obligations to fill. A clean capability statement closes the loop: primes and VA buyers both want a one-page summary of your NAICS codes, certifications, core products, and any past performance, formatted the way government readers expect.
Concrete example of the layered approach: a verified SDVOSB distributor under NAICS 423450 lands a subcontract supplying exam-room consumables to a prime running a VA medical-center services contract. Twelve months of clean delivery becomes the past performance on its own 65 II A offer, and now it holds a schedule the entire VA system can order against directly.
A reasonable first stepYou don't need all of this lined up before you start. Pick your two NAICS codes, confirm the current size standard, and make sure your SAM.gov registration is active and accurate. Then look at who's already winning the medical work you want to do, and whether any of them owe a subcontracting target you could help fill. Open the subcontract finder, filter to your codes, and see what's actually buying right now. That's a real opportunity you can pursue this month, while the longer schedule process runs in the background.
