On July 1, 2026, the threshold for the Truthful Cost or Pricing Data Act (TINA) moved to $10 million. In practical terms, that means fewer contracts will require certified cost and pricing data than before.
Read quickly, that sounds like good news for aerospace and defense (A&D) and manufacturing contractors. Read carefully, it isn't quite that simple. The threshold changes which contracts require certified cost and pricing data — not the expectations for the contracts that still do.
Fewer Contracts, Not Less Scrutiny
The threshold change narrows which contracts require certified data. It doesn't narrow how carefully those contracts get examined once they clear that bar. If anything, the opposite is true. The contracts that still require certified cost and pricing data are, by definition, the larger ones, and larger contracts tend to bring more complexity with them: more line items, more subcontractors, more Bill of Materials (BOM) data pulled from more sources within the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
So the pool of contracts under TINA gets smaller, while the average complexity of what's left in that pool goes up. For many contractors, that also means the material estimation and proposal pricing workflow supporting those bids becomes even more important. For the estimating teams working on those programs, that's a different kind of pressure than before, not lighter, just more concentrated.
Why Manual Estimation Feels This Shift First
A material estimation process built around exporting BOM data, reconciling it in a spreadsheet, and re-entering it into a proposal can hold up reasonably well on a smaller program. The number of line items is manageable, the reconciliation is tedious but doable, and the odds of catching a discrepancy before submission are decent.
That same process doesn't necessarily scale the same way on a $15 million program that it did on a $6 million one. Reconciliation effort tends to grow with BOM complexity, not at the same rate as contract value. More components, more design changes, more supplier updates each mean another pass through the same manual steps, and each pass is another chance for something to shift between the ERP and the proposal without anyone noticing until later.
This isn't a comment on the estimators doing that work. It's a comment on what the process asks of them as complexity increases, and where that process was never designed to flex.
What "Harder to Manage" Looks Like in Practice
The moment this becomes concrete is usually an audit question, not a proposal deadline. If the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) asks about a specific material line item from a submission several months earlier, the answer requires finding the right export, matching it to the right version of the spreadsheet, and confirming nothing changed during reconciliation. On a larger, more complex program, there are simply more places for that trail to get harder to reconstruct.
That is the practical shape of "getting harder to manage." Not that the work is impossible, but that certified cost data now carries more weight per contract, on programs where the underlying material data has more places to lose its connection to the source.
Where a Connected Workflow Fits In
This is exactly the workflow gap many A&D contractors are trying to close. That’s why Deltek built a material estimating capability directly into BOE Pro, part of Deltek ProPricer- the tool many A&D and manufacturing teams already use to build proposal cost estimates. Rather than exporting BOM data from an ERP like Deltek Costpoint or SAP and reconciling it by hand, the material estimating capability connects to that ERP directly, so the material data behind a proposal reflects the source system without a manual step in between.
The point isn't that this makes complexity disappear. It's that it removes the specific place where complexity used to turn into version risk, the export-and-reconcile step that gets harder to manage precisely as programs get larger. The result is a more governed, traceable workflow from ERP to proposal, especially as proposal complexity continues to increase.
If you want to see how that workflow moves from ERP to proposal in more detail, the on-demand recording of our recent webinar walks through it.
Webinar
Connect Material Estimation and Proposal Pricing
Improve traceability across estimating and pricing workflows while reducing manual effort and supporting compliance objectives.
