On June 23, 2026, the FAR Council published its first set of proposed rules implementing the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul (RFO) in the Federal Register. Four notices of proposed rulemaking landed the same day, together rewriting 20 FAR parts — and they carry a 30-day comment window that closes July 23, 2026. If your agency or your business has a stake in how the FAR reads, this is the moment the rewrite stops being a class deviation you could read at your leisure and becomes formal rulemaking you can shape on the record.
For the past year, the RFO ran as model class deviations — text agencies voluntarily adopted while the legacy FAR stayed on the books. This is the next phase: notice-and-comment rulemaking that codifies and builds on those deviations. The Council has said it intends to issue 12 proposed rules in total that will eventually revise the entire FAR, so the June 23 batch is the opening move, not the whole game.
The four proposed rules were issued jointly by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration, and NASA as four separate notices — FAR Cases 2026-001, 2026-002, 2026-005, and 2026-007 — under Executive Order 14275, "Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement." Comments are due to the Regulatory Secretariat on or before July 23, 2026. The four rules cover the following parts:
Across the four notices, the affected parts are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 18, 24, 26, 29, 33, 37, 39, 40, 41, 49, 52, and 53. Confirm the current text against the Federal Register notices and acquisition.gov/far-overhaul before relying on any specific.
The proposed text isn't a line edit of today's FAR — it carries forward the structural moves the RFO has signaled from the start. Four themes run through the June 23 batch:
The through-line is the same one the overhaul started with: strip the FAR back to its statutory core, say it in plain language, and trust the contracting officer's judgment instead of a threshold table. That is a real shift in default posture — from "the rule tells you what to do" to "the rule tells you what you must do, and you decide the rest."
The most important operational fact for a contracting shop right now is that two regimes are live at the same time. The legacy FAR remains in force where it hasn't been deviated, and the RFO deviation text applies where an agency has adopted it. The proposed rules don't change that overnight — they're proposals, not final rules, and the legacy-versus-RFO split persists agency by agency and part by part until each final rule publishes.
That has a direct consequence for clause selection. As we wrote in Legacy FAR vs. the FAR Overhaul, two contracting officers can buy the identical service this quarter and owe a different set of provisions and clauses — not because one is wrong, but because they're working under different versions of the FAR. With Parts 1, 2, 4, 33, and 52 now in proposed rulemaking, the prescriptions that drive your matrix are a moving target, and a clause like FAR 52.212-5 — the commercial terms-and-conditions clause that already carries dozens of statutory fill-ins — sits right in the path of the commercial-first consolidation. Pin the regime, work from the live prescription, and document why.
For broader discretion, the practical caution is the mirror image of the headline: more judgment means more to defend. A threshold that used to make the call for you now becomes a determination you write down. Protest and audit risk doesn't disappear with a lighter rule — it moves toward whether your process was calibrated to the acquisition and whether the file shows your reasoning.
This is a public comment window, and in notice-and-comment rulemaking, specific comments on the record can shape the final text. If a provision helps or hurts the way your office actually buys, the record is open until July 23, 2026. To comment:
Whether or not you submit a comment, the rulemaking changes what your acquisition shop should be tracking this summer:
That's why we built ArcClause — a free FAR provision and clause matrix builder that is aware of both regimes, legacy FAR and the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, and resolves which one applies from the agency and timing you give it. Selection runs on a deterministic rules engine, so the AI never picks a clause; every row comes back with the prescription cited behind it, and you can export a Basis of Selection that shows your reasoning. You can browse the underlying provisions and clauses in the clause index, and when you need to anchor a number, the free GSA labor-rate lookup in ArcPrice helps you support an IGCE with traceable, fully burdened rates. ArcPrice supports your estimate; it is not a government system of record and makes no determination on your behalf.
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The overhaul will eventually settle into a single, simpler FAR — that's the point of it. But for the months it takes every agency to adopt every part, and while these proposed rules work toward final, the FAR is two documents at once. The teams that treat clause selection and pricing as determinations they can defend — and that put their views on the record before July 23 — are the ones whose solicitations, and whose comments, will hold up.
A-Frame Solutions builds decision-support tools for federal acquisition professionals. This article is for general information and is not legal advice. The Revolutionary FAR Overhaul is proposed rulemaking that may change before it is final; always verify against the current FAR, the official Federal Register notices, and your agency's guidance before relying on any specific.
ArcClause returns the provisions and clauses your solicitation needs — legacy FAR and FAR Overhaul aware, with the prescription cited behind every row and a Basis of Selection you can export. No login.