Which FAR governs your contract right now

Administering a federal contract rests on a quiet assumption: that everyone involved is working from the same rulebook. Your contract specialist cites a clause, you look it up, and the words are the same on both screens. That assumption held for a long time. It does not hold today.

Since 2025 the Federal Acquisition Regulation has been undergoing the first comprehensive rewrite in its history, and the rewrite reached contractors before it reached the regulation. For most of the rulebook, the operative text is not the FAR itself. It is a deviation issued by the agency that awarded your contract. If you are administering an award without knowing which one applies to you, you are administering it from a document that may not govern.

How the rules got ahead of the regulation

Executive Order 14275, Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement, was signed on 15 April 2025. It directed a rewrite of the FAR to return it to its statutory roots, put it in plain language, and remove requirements not grounded in statute or in an executive order.

Rewriting a regulation takes rulemaking, and rulemaking takes time the order did not allow. So the FAR Council split the work. In its own words, it ran a first phase in fiscal year 2025 “by issuing model class deviations to replace each part in the FAR until such time as formal rulemaking occurred.” Agencies adopt that model text, in the Council's description, until the FAR is formally revised through rulemaking. The second phase is the rulemaking itself, and the Council has said it will take twelve proposed rules to cover the FAR in its entirety.

Four of those twelve arrived on 23 June 2026. The comment period on all four closed on 23 July 2026. Between them they cover twenty parts of the regulation, and they leave most of the rest where phase one put it.

Read that table for what is missing rather than for what is there. Part 42, contract administration and audit services, is not in it. Neither is Part 43, contract modifications. The two parts that govern almost everything you do after award are still operating on deviation text, and they will keep operating that way until their own proposed rules are published, commented on, and finalized.

What a class deviation actually is

The mechanism is not new, and it is not irregular. The FAR has always allowed an agency to depart from its text. A deviation, under FAR 1.401, includes issuing a policy or clause inconsistent with the FAR, omitting a required clause, or using modified language the FAR does not authorize. A class deviation, under FAR 1.404, is one that affects more than one contract action, and it is authorized by an agency head or a designee no lower than the head of a contracting activity.

What is new is the scale. A class deviation was once an exception covering a narrow situation. It is now the ordinary vehicle for most of the acquisition rulebook, applied part by part, agency by agency. The Department of Defense, for example, has issued its own series of overhaul deviations against the DFARS, including one for Part 242 on contract administration, numbered 2026-O0050, and one for Part 219 on small business programs, numbered 2026-O0037. Civilian agencies have issued their own.

Nothing about this is improper. The consequence is simply that the phrase “the FAR requires” has lost the precision it used to carry. It now needs a follow-up question: whose version, issued when.

Why this lands hardest on a small contractor

A firm with an in-house contracts department absorbs this quietly. Somebody there is paid to track deviations, and the cost of tracking them is spread across a large portfolio. A firm with three contracts and no contracts department absorbs it differently, because the tracking still has to happen and there is nobody assigned to it.

The exposure shows up in ordinary work. A modification arrives and you reach for what you know about change order authority, but the governing text has been replaced. The Department of Energy, to take one published example, adopted the model deviation for Part 43 and with it replaced the change clauses at 52.243-1 through 52.243-7. A dispute over scope turns on language that was rewritten in plain English, and plain English is not always the same rule. You look up a clause, find the published FAR version, and act on words your contract does not contain.

There is a second effect that is easy to miss. A good deal of the practical guidance that once sat inside the regulation now lives outside it, in companion material and buying guides published alongside the overhaul. That material is useful and it is worth reading. It is not a contract clause, and it does not become one by being published on a government website. An argument that begins with “the guide says” carries less weight than it sounds like it does, and knowing that difference matters when a position is being pressed on you.

What to do about it, concretely

None of this requires a subscription service or a compliance department. It requires treating the governing text as a controlled document instead of as common knowledge.

• Administer from the contract, not from the internet. Section I and the clauses incorporated by reference are the list that governs your award. A clause number you looked up in the published FAR is a reference, not an authority.
• Ask, in writing, which deviations apply. A short note to the contracting officer asking which class deviations govern the contract is a reasonable administrative question. Put the answer in the file. If you never ask, you will find out during a disagreement.
• Freeze the text at award. Save a dated copy of the governing deviation text alongside the contract. Deviations get revised, and the version in force when you signed is the one that priced your work.
• Check the date on anything you are handed. A clause pulled from a training deck, an old proposal, or another agency's contract may be a different version of the same number. Match it against your own Section I before you act on it.
• Watch modification authority most closely. Change orders and equitable adjustments are where a misread of the governing text turns directly into unpaid work. Confirm the authority cited on the face of a modification against the text that governs your contract.
• Flow down what your prime actually contains. If you subcontract, the clauses you pass down should come from your own contract, not from a template built against the published FAR. A mismatch here is your problem twice, once with the government and once with your subcontractor.

The steady part

It is worth keeping this in proportion. The statutes did not change. The Competition in Contracting Act, the Contract Disputes Act, the Prompt Payment Act and the Small Business Act all still say what they said. Your obligations to deliver, to invoice accurately, to notify the government of problems in time and to document what happened are unchanged, and so is the fact that a well-run contract file is the best defense available to a contractor.

What changed is the reliability of a shortcut. For years it was safe to answer a question by looking up a FAR clause. During a transition of this size, that shortcut can be wrong without looking wrong, which is the most expensive kind of wrong there is.