Oracle wins contract for first-ever governmentwide HR system
The Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday awarded its anticipated contract to modernize and consolidate federal human resources functions to Oracle, capping a process that’s been over a year in the making.
The 10-year award worth nearly $400 million makes Oracle the backbone of the process to bring over 100 HR systems under one single platform that OPM is calling its Core Human Capital Management system. OPM says it believes the project will make significant reductions in the overall cost of HR platforms to taxpayers.
“Historically, federal agencies have relied on fragmented, aging HR systems that are costly to maintain and difficult to scale,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a written statement included in a press release.
He called the award “a foundational investment in the future of federal workforce management.”
The news was first reported by the Federal News Network.
A final award comes over a year after an early effort to award such a contract failed to move forward.
In May 2025, the Office of Personnel Management awarded a sole-source contract to Workday to facilitate the Trump administration’s HR modernization efforts, arguing it was the only vendor that could do the job. But OPM abruptly canceled that award, and later launched open competition for such a contract.
Notably, that competition had an estimated award date of January 2026 while it faced legal challenges.
In testimony before House appropriators in March, Kupor acknowledged that the delay was the result of bid protests — or legal challenges to the award process by companies vying for the contract. At the time, he said that OPM was using the time for prep work.
In a conversation with FedScoop on Thursday, Kupor said the recent resolution of one those protests at the Government Accountability Office enabled the agency to “finally make the award.”
One of those protests, filed by IBM, was ultimately withdrawn, according to public GAO docket records. Another protest by Economic Systems, Inc. resolved June 1 when the watchdog agency denied the challenge.
While the resolution freed the agency to make its award, Kupor noted that “there can always be post-award protests.”
The decision to tap Oracle ultimately came after a monthslong technical review by a team of nearly 50 people from multiple agencies, Kupor said. He was unable to discuss the specifics of that selection process but said that when they looked at the requirements and ability to perform them, Oracle was the best option.
As for next steps, Kupor said OPM will focus on standing up the “canonical instance” of the software within the human capital agency over the next couple of months so that it can begin to receive data from other government entities. After that, the first “wave one” agencies will move over.
Oracle and Workday did not respond to requests for comment on the announcement.
Updated June 11 with additional comments from Kupor and details on bid protests.
