Commerciality: Establishing pricing to the federal government

By Skyler Handl, Corporate Counsel, Public Sector

Selling to public sector customers is different from selling to the commercial market. For example, how much do you know about the government acquisition concept of “commerciality”? To preserve margins in government sales, you need to know how to comply with this concept.

Public sector customers typically require vendors to disclose cost data and then negotiate a profit, or “fee.” This flows through the entire government acquisition supply chain.

Commerciality was introduced as an exception to the general rule of cost disclosure to streamline government acquisition of commercial technology through requirements aligned to commercial market practices. Commercial technology is vetted by the open market, which mitigates risk, and reduces the expense of government acquisitions as development costs are spread across the commercial market. You wouldn’t expect to pay a one-time non-recurring engineering fee for the latest cellphone; it is baked into the price.