Clauses · FAR · Administration and definitions
FAR 52.253-1 Computer Generated Forms
Does the regulation require it to flow down?
No
No mandate — the clause has no subcontracts paragraph and 53.111 addresses the contracting officer. It survives as inherited Section I boilerplate: all three corpus carriers are old executed subcontracts (icrc-hienergy 2005, forceprotection-gdls 2007, lmi-applieddna 2011, the last citing it as "52.253-01") and no 2025–26 template in the corpus carries it. It is also unusual among flow-downs in being a permission granted to the contractor rather than an obligation imposed on one, which is why nobody notices it and nobody deletes it
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 Jan 1991 · base v0.9.3 Read the text ↗
What it makes you produce
One item for your checklist.
Nothing to send, ever
There is no paperwork here. It is a rule you follow while you perform the work.
Nothing beyond the forms other clauses already call for. A version printed from your own system is read as the required form's content, whatever your version says
FAR 52.253-1(c)
When it is used
Prescribed at FAR 53.111: contracting officers insert 52.253-1 in solicitations and contracts "that require the contractor to submit data on Standard or Optional Forms prescribed by this regulation; and, unless prohibited by agency regulations, forms prescribed by agency supplements." No dollar threshold, no contract-type restriction, no commercial carve-out stated. The trigger is a deliverables fact, not a contract fact: does anything in the subcontract make you submit data on an SF or OF (SF 1449, SF 1034/1035 vouchers, SF 1423 inspection system, SF 1444, OF 336, DD forms under a DoD supplement)? If nothing does, the clause has nothing to operate on.
Read closely
The permission is real: Standard and Optional Forms may be generated from your own system as long as the name, content and sequence of the data elements are unchanged and the form number and edition date are carried. The cost of quietly improving one — a dropped certification line, reordered blocks — is that the prescribed form governs and yours does not.
Source: acquisition.gov, FAR 52.253-1 and FAR 53.111 (verified 2026-08-05); RFO part 53 relocation read at govinfo, FR 2026-12559, published 2026-06-23
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.