NCS Pearson Inc.

NCS Pearson Inc., a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based foreign-owned for-profit corporation, delivers large-scale educational assessment platforms, student testing services, and scoring systems to federal education agencies and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a prime contractor on 52 of its 53 recent awards (98%). The company competes entirely in full-and-open procurements with no set-aside footprint, holding single-award IDCs and seats on multi-award indefinite-delivery vehicles where task orders flow across federal education customers.

NCS Pearson's customer concentration is heavily weighted toward two dominant agencies that together account for all of the combined potential value across its award base. The Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences anchors the portfolio with 7 awards valued at $2.52 billion combined potential value, driven by a $23.7 million National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scoring contract running through December 2029 and activity on the $2 billion Procurement of Research Evaluation and Statistics Task Orders (PRESTO) IDIQ. The Department of Defense Education Activity places 13 awards (55% of award count but only 2.7% of potential dollars) valued at $73.9 million combined potential value. The Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Labor, and the National Assessment Governing Board round out the active set. The top customers by count (DODEA, IES, BIE) represent 55% of recent awards, while the top customers by potential value diverge — IES dominates dollars by a vast margin, whereas DODEA drives volume. Significant recompete exposure exists in the DODEA portfolio: the vendor's single-award IDC with DODEA ($13.23 million ceiling, through June 30, 2029) has received three delivery orders totaling $4.83 million to date, leaving roughly 64% of ceiling available for additional task orders.

NCS Pearson's named capability work spans comprehensive student assessment platform development, test administration and scoring, standardized testing for English Language Arts and Mathematics (including College and Career Ready Standards and NAEP), secure online and paper-based testing infrastructure, assessment reporting systems, and technical support. Recent concrete examples include a $17.4 million firm fixed-price definitive contract with the Bureau of Indian Education (awarded August 2025, running through September 2030) for English Language Arts and Mathematics assessment services supporting 38,000 students across 183 BIE schools in 23 states, with compliance requirements for FISMA and NIST security standards; a $23.7 million NAEP scoring services contract with the Institute of Education Sciences (December 2024, through December 2029); and a $2.57 million delivery order with DODEA for the College and Career Ready Standards Summative Assessment System (July 2025, through June 2026). A $21,345.10 firm fixed-price purchase order with the Minneapolis VA Health Care System for mental health and psychological testing services (April 2026) represents the vendor's smallest recent award and its narrowest capability application.

Activity has remained modest in recent years — one award in 2022, two in 2023, four in 2024, three in 2025, and one in 2026 — but combined potential value sits at $2.71 billion, heavily skewed toward the large IES NAEP and PRESTO holdings. The vendor has obligated only $419 million (15% of combined potential value) to date, indicating substantial remaining authorization on long-duration IDIQ and definitive contracts. The award base spans 18 distinct federal agencies and includes work across Educational Support Services (30 awards), Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities (7 awards), and related NAICS categories. Primary NAICS categories and PSC codes point to assessment development, educational support services, and research support work rather than goods procurement.

Service Contract Inventory data covering FY2022–FY2024 shows SCI-reportable invoiced revenue of $41.2 million across 11 records (10 as prime, 1 as named subcontractor). The vendor delivered roughly 85 FTEs in FY2022 ($14.9 million invoiced), 44 FTEs in FY2023 ($13.5 million invoiced), and 116 FTEs in FY2024 ($12.7 million invoiced), indicating variable workforce scaling across federal service contracts captured in SCI. Government-paid hourly rates on prime contracts range from $61.18/hr at the 10th percentile through a median of $160.93/hr to $312.95/hr at the 90th percentile, reflecting a mix of lower-wage assessment support labor and higher-value technical and scientific roles. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, the vendor performs 100% of work with its own labor (zero subcontractor hour share). NCS Pearson acts as a subcontractor in only one award in the source data — a sub-grant recipient under the Department of Education Delaware for science summative assessment content, item, and form development.