Clauses · DFARS · Supply chain and sourcing · provision
DFARS 252.225-7000 Buy American—Balance of Payments Program Certificate
Does the regulation require it to flow down?
No
The provision has no subcontract paragraph and never had one — it is addressed to 'the Offeror'. Primes copy it into supplier terms because they cannot certify their own end product's origin without the same declaration from whoever manufactures it; the honest form of that ask is a supplier origin declaration, not a solicitation provision pasted into a PO
A clause can reach your subcontract without a mandate. Once it is in your document, it is a contract term all the same. The missing mandate is a fact about the regulation. It is not a ruling on your order.
Checked against acquisition.gov on 2026-08-05 · edition FEB 2024 (Basic and Alt I) · base v0.9.3 Read the text ↗
What it makes you produce
2 items for your checklist, slowest first.
Something somebody else has to issue you
The same day if the issuer is one of your own suppliers, months if it is an assessor or an underwriter.
Country-of-origin statements from the suppliers of the parts you buy — evidence behind the certificate rather than paper the provision names, and the prime asking for it sets what is enough
DFARS 252.225-7000
Something you fill in and send back
Hours, once you know which one is missing.
The origin certificate, filled in line item by line item, with every foreign end product listed by country
DFARS 252.225-7000(c)
When it is used
A solicitation instrument, not a contract clause. 225.1101(1): use the basic or the alternate of this provision instead of FAR 52.225-2 in any solicitation — including solicitations using FAR part 12 procedures for commercial products and commercial services — that includes the basic or an alternate of the clause at 252.225-7001, Buy American and Balance of Payments Program. Basic pairs with 252.225-7001 Basic or Alt II; Alt I pairs with 252.225-7001 Alt I or Alt III (225.1101(1)(i) and (1)(ii)). No dollar threshold of its own — it inherits whatever put 252.225-7001 in the document. Because it is a provision, its natural home is a request for quote; sitting inside an executed purchase order it has nothing left to operate on.
Read closely
(c)(3) is where other foreign end products are listed, including items made in the United States that do not qualify as domestic. For anything that is not off-the-shelf, a component of unknown origin counts as foreign, so a bill-of-material line that cannot be traced is a foreign line. The certificate asks a 55 percent question while the content threshold actually delivered against sits in 252.225-7001 — two different numbers on the same page.
The 3 templates that name it, with the line
Source: acquisition.gov, DFARS 252.225-7000, 225.1101(1), and 212.301(f)(x)(A) (verified 2026-08-05)
This is research, not legal advice. It states what the regulation says about this clause and cites the paragraph behind it. It does not rule on your order, and it does not rule on whether a prime's markings are correct.