What is a CAGE code in federal contracting?

A CAGE (Commercial and Government Entity) code is a five-character alphanumeric identifier assigned by the Defense Logistics Agency to every company registered to do business with the federal government or NATO. It uniquely identifies an entity across all federal procurement systems.

What is a UEI number and when did it replace DUNS?

The Unique Entity Identifier is a 12-character alphanumeric code assigned through SAM.gov. It replaced the Dun & Bradstreet DUNS number in April 2022 as the official federal contractor identifier. Every entity registered in SAM.gov now has a UEI.

Can I find a DBA insurance carrier using a CAGE code?

Not directly. No federal database links CAGE codes to insurance carriers. However, the CAGE code definitively identifies the employer, which allows you to trace its contract history, awarding agency, and performance locations. Those data points feed into carrier identification through DOL records and case law.

Where can I look up a CAGE code for free?

The DLA CAGE Search tool at cage.dla.mil is the authoritative free source. You can also find CAGE codes in SAM.gov entity registrations. Both are publicly accessible without a paid subscription.

How do UEI numbers help with DBA subcontractor tracing?

USAspending subcontract award records include the sub-awardee's UEI. This lets you confirm the exact legal entity behind an ambiguous subcontractor name. SAM.gov also tracks parent-child UEI relationships, which can reveal that a small sub is a subsidiary of a known prime contractor with established DBA coverage.

Do CAGE codes change when a company is acquired?

CAGE codes are assigned to specific legal entities and generally persist through ownership changes. The acquiring company may have its own CAGE code, but the original code remains tied to historical contract records. This makes CAGE codes valuable for tracing contractors through mergers and acquisitions.

What is the difference between a CAGE code and a UEI number?

CAGE codes are five-character identifiers from the Defense Logistics Agency, originally designed for military procurement. UEI numbers are 12-character identifiers from SAM.gov that cover all federal contracting. Both identify the same entities, but UEI is the newer standard used in USAspending contract data.

How many SAM.gov entity records include CAGE codes?

ClaimTrove indexes over 865,000 SAM.gov entity registrations, the vast majority of which include both a UEI and a CAGE code. Not every registered entity has a CAGE code, particularly civilian entities that never performed defense work, but most defense and overseas contractors do.

Can a company have multiple CAGE codes?

Yes. Large defense contractors often have separate CAGE codes for different divisions, subsidiaries, or operating locations. Each CAGE code corresponds to a separate SAM.gov registration. This is why a single employer name search might return multiple CAGE codes pointing to distinct legal entities within the same corporate family.

CAGE Codes and UEI Numbers: The Federal Identifiers That Unlock DBA Carrier Chains

Why Searching by Name Alone Fails in DBA Investigations

You pull up a DBA claim for an injured worker employed by "Global Solutions International." You search USAspending. You find three companies with nearly identical names, registered in three different states, with three different contract histories. Which one employed your claimant?

This is the daily reality of DBA carrier identification. Employer names are unreliable. Companies merge, rebrand, and register under variations that make text-based searching a gamble. A single defense contractor can appear under a dozen different names across federal databases. We tracked 214 employer alias mappings in ClaimTrove's data, covering companies that operate under multiple registered names, DBA names, and subsidiary labels.

Federal contracting solved this problem decades ago. The Department of Defense assigns every contractor a CAGE code. The General Services Administration assigns every entity a UEI number through SAM.gov. These identifiers are permanent, unique, and consistent across every federal system. They follow a company through name changes, mergers, and address relocations. Yet most DBA attorneys and paralegals have never used them.

The gap is costly. When you search by name, you get fuzzy matches, false positives, and missed connections. When you search by CAGE code or UEI, you get one entity, definitively linked to its contract awards, subcontract relationships, and agency affiliations. That chain is what connects an employer to its DBA insurance carrier.

What Is a CAGE Code and Where Does It Come From?

CAGE stands for Commercial and Government Entity. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) assigns a five-character alphanumeric code to every company that does business with the federal government or NATO. The format is simple: five characters, letters and numbers, no special characters. Examples include 1XPY7 or 3K8R2.

CAGE codes originated in military procurement. The DoD needed a way to track suppliers across weapon systems, logistics contracts, and maintenance agreements without relying on company names. The system now covers every entity registered in SAM.gov, which means it includes defense contractors, construction firms, security companies, and the full range of employers who generate DBA claims.

For DBA investigators, the CAGE code matters because it persists through corporate changes. When DynCorp was acquired by Amentum, the underlying CAGE codes stayed tied to specific contract records. When PAE merged into the Amentum family, its CAGE code still pointed back to its original USAID and DoD contracts. This is critical when you need to trace a contractor's history through consolidation events that reshuffled DBA coverage.

NATO allies also use a variant called NCAGE (NATO CAGE). If your claimant worked for a foreign subcontractor on a U.S. government project, the NCAGE code may be the only reliable link between that entity and the prime contractor who held the DBA insurance obligation.

What Is a UEI Number and How Did It Replace DUNS?

The Unique Entity Identifier replaced the DUNS number in April 2022. Before that transition, Dun & Bradstreet's proprietary DUNS number served as the federal contractor ID. The switch to UEI put the identifier under government control through SAM.gov.

Every entity that registers in SAM.gov receives a 12-character alphanumeric UEI. The format uses uppercase letters and numbers with no special characters. Unlike CAGE codes, which originated in defense procurement, UEI numbers cover the entire federal contracting universe, including civilian agencies like USAID and the State Department.

For DBA investigations, UEI numbers appear in two critical places. First, the SAM.gov entity registration itself, which contains the company's legal name, DBA name, NAICS codes, physical address, and registration status. Second, USAspending contract award records, where the recipient_uei field ties every contract to its awardee. ClaimTrove's database holds 43,298 prime contract awards with UEI data and 865,232 SAM.gov entity registrations, both searchable by these identifiers.

The practical value is disambiguation. When you find a contract award to "Supreme Group" on USAspending, the UEI tells you exactly which Supreme Group entity received the award. You can then pull that entity's full SAM.gov profile, including its CAGE code, NAICS classification, and physical address. That level of certainty matters when you are trying to read USAspending data for a DBA investigation.

How Do CAGE Codes and UEI Numbers Connect Employers to DBA Carriers?

Neither CAGE codes nor UEI numbers directly name an insurance carrier. No federal database publishes a field that says "DBA carrier: ACE American Insurance Company." The connection is indirect but powerful, and it works through a chain of linked records.

Here is the logic. A CAGE code or UEI identifies a specific legal entity. That entity holds contract awards in USAspending, which include the awarding agency, place of performance, contract period, and labor standards flag. The awarding agency and contract period determine whether a mandatory DBA carrier program applied. The employer name, confirmed by CAGE or UEI, feeds into carrier knowledge bases, case law databases, and FOIA records where employer-carrier relationships are documented.

The identifier eliminates the weakest link in this chain: name ambiguity. Consider a company like CH2M HILL. After its acquisition by Jacobs Engineering, contract records appear under both names. A name-only search might miss the CH2M HILL contracts entirely. But the CAGE code assigned to the CH2M HILL entity still connects those older contracts to the right corporate lineage. ClaimTrove tracks these relationships through alias resolution mappings that account for 20+ name variations per employer, but the CAGE code provides a shortcut that bypasses the alias problem entirely.

The chain works in reverse too. If you start with a contract number (PIID) from a claimant's employment records, you can pull the UEI from the award data, then use that UEI to find every other contract that entity held. That broader picture reveals which agencies funded the work, which timeframes are relevant, and which carrier programs might have applied.

Where Can You Look Up CAGE Codes and UEI Numbers?

Three public sources provide these identifiers, each with different strengths.

SAM.gov Entity Search. The primary registry. Search by company name to find the UEI, CAGE code, registration status, and physical address. The limitation: SAM.gov's search is notoriously finicky. Partial name matches often fail. Expired registrations may not appear in default results. And companies with multiple divisions may have separate SAM registrations, each with its own UEI and CAGE code.

USAspending.gov. Every contract award record includes the recipient UEI. Search by contractor name or browse by agency. The data goes back to FY2008 for most agencies. This is where you confirm that a specific entity actually performed work overseas, which establishes DBA jurisdiction.

DLA CAGE Search (cage.dla.mil). The authoritative CAGE code database. Search by code, company name, or address. This is the only source that shows NCAGE codes for foreign entities and historical CAGE assignments. Useful when tracing subcontractors in the prime-to-sub chain who may be foreign companies operating on U.S. government projects.

The challenge is that none of these sources talk to each other natively. You search SAM.gov for the UEI, cross-reference it on USAspending for contracts, check DLA for the CAGE code, and then pivot to DOL records for carrier information. Each step requires manual navigation and a different search interface. This is exactly the kind of multi-source cross-referencing that consumes hours in a typical DBA investigation.

What Makes These Identifiers Especially Valuable for Subcontractor Tracing?

Subcontractors are the hardest entities to trace in DBA investigations. They often lack direct contract records in USAspending. Their names change more frequently than prime contractors. And the DBA insurance obligation can flow from the prime to the sub in ways that are not visible from public records alone.

CAGE codes help because subcontract awards in USAspending include the sub-awardee's identifier data. ClaimTrove's database holds 4,315 subcontract award records linking subs to their prime contractors. When a sub-awardee's name is ambiguous, the CAGE code provides the definitive match. You can confirm that the "ABC Services LLC" in a subcontract record is the same entity registered in SAM.gov with a specific address and NAICS code, not one of the other five companies with similar names.

UEI numbers also reveal corporate family relationships. SAM.gov tracks parent-child entity structures. A subcontractor's UEI links to its parent company's UEI, which may be the prime contractor. This parent-child link is how you discover that a small subcontractor operating in Afghanistan is actually a subsidiary of a major defense firm with known DBA coverage. That connection can save weeks of investigation time.

The five-step carrier investigation workflow becomes dramatically faster when you anchor each step to a verified identifier rather than a name string. Instead of running fuzzy name searches across every database, you run exact-match queries on a CAGE code or UEI and get deterministic results.

How ClaimTrove Uses CAGE Codes and UEI Data at Scale

Manual lookups across SAM.gov, USAspending, and DLA CAGE are feasible for a single employer. They break down when you need to trace a contractor through mergers, across subcontract tiers, or across multiple fiscal years. That is where automated cross-referencing becomes essential.

ClaimTrove's investigation engine indexes 865,232 SAM.gov entity registrations with both UEI and CAGE code fields. When you run an investigation, the engine resolves your employer name against this registry, confirms the entity's identity, and then fans out across 18 federal data sources using the verified identifier chain. Contract awards, subcontract relationships, agency affiliations, and carrier records all get linked through the same entity, not through fragile name matching.

The difference is measurable. Name-based searches against 865,000+ SAM records produce dozens of partial matches that require manual review. Identifier-based searches produce one match. That precision cascades through every downstream lookup, from contract discovery to carrier identification.

If you are spending hours manually cross-referencing CAGE codes and UEI numbers across federal databases for your DBA cases, ClaimTrove automates that entire chain. Run an investigation and see how quickly the employer-to-carrier connection resolves when every federal identifier is already indexed and cross-referenced.

Try ClaimTrove free and run your first DBA carrier investigation in minutes, not hours.