The FAR overhaul is not coming. It's already your rulebook.

Class deviations mean agencies are bidding under new rules months before those rules are final.

Most contracting teams treat the FAR overhaul like a weather forecast: something on the horizon, worth watching, not yet worth acting on. The plan is to wait for a final rule, read the redline once it lands, then update how bids get written. That plan assumes there's a clean moment where the old rules end and the new ones begin.

There isn't one. Executive Order 14275, signed last year, set off what officials are calling the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, the biggest rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR, the rulebook agencies use to buy things) in more than 40 years. On June 23, 2026, that rewrite entered formal rulemaking with four proposed rules covering 20 FAR parts. Agencies aren't waiting on that process to finish, though: the Department of Defense issued Class Deviation 2026-O0017, Revision 2, on August 5, 2026, a formal order letting its contracting officers set aside the current FAR text and follow the overhaul's rules instead. If you're bidding DoD work touching FAR Part 6, the FAR you studied is already out of date.

Most teams are still waiting for a final rule

The instinct to wait makes sense on paper. The FAR has swelled past 2,000 pages since it was written in 1984, so a rewrite this size sounds like something that should arrive as one clean, final document. Skim the changes once they land, adjust the templates, move on.

That instinct comes from how regulations used to work. It doesn't match how this one is rolling out, and hasn't for months.

Deviations aren't a preview. They're the rule already in force

DoD's August 5 deviation covers FAR Part 6 (competition requirements) and the matching DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, the Pentagon's add-on rules to the FAR) Part 206, telling contracting officers to follow the overhaul's text instead of what's in the official code. Other agencies are issuing their own deviations on their own schedules, tracked publicly by DoD and by firms like Wiley.

That means the FAR governing a specific solicitation depends on which agency posted it and when. Two solicitations opened the same week, from two different agencies, can legally run on two different rulebooks right now, in 2026. Reading "the FAR" as one static document stopped being accurate months ago.

A rulebook built to expire, not just update

The overhaul isn't only rewriting text, it's changing how the rules behave. The FAR is shifting from a prescriptive rulebook, one that spells out exact steps in exact order, to a principle-based one that names the outcome that matters and leaves the method to the contracting officer's judgment. Non-statutory provisions are also expected to expire on a schedule unless the FAR Council (the interagency group that writes FAR rules) actively renews them.

More discretion for contracting officers means more variation between agencies, and even between offices inside the same agency. Generic guidance about "the new FAR" won't tell you how a specific office plans to use that discretion. Only the deviation text will.

Match the deviation to the part, not the part to memory

Before touching a solicitation, check whether the buying agency has issued a deviation covering the FAR parts it touches. Read the requirements against that deviation text, not the FAR part you learned two years ago. The four proposed rules published June 23 already closed for comment on July 23, but the FAR Council is expected to keep issuing rules in phases through the rest of 2026. This is a habit to build, not a one-time read.

This confusion shows up constantly in contractor forums. One new entrant on r/GovernmentContracting, working through HUBZone (a small-business set-aside for underserved geographic areas) status for the first time, put it plainly: "I don't know what I don't know, but I hope someone does." That's not a knowledge gap unique to newcomers. It's what happens when the reference document itself won't hold still.

Moving forward

The overhaul is going to keep arriving in pieces, not as one finished rulebook delivered on a single day. Teams that check for a deviation before every bid will adapt faster than teams waiting for an announcement that a new FAR has officially begun.

There's no start date left to wait for. The agencies already have a head start, and most contractors haven't noticed the gun went off.

PursuIQ helps federal contracting teams find the right opportunities and skip the wrong ones. See how at pursuiq.com.