Minority-owned business certification

The route Texas used to offer is closed

If a county vendor page, a city supplier guide or a purchasing officer sent you here to get certified by the State of Texas as a minority-owned business, stop looking for that application. The program you were sent to find was called Historically Underutilized Business certification, HUB for short, and it no longer exists in that form. Texas no longer certifies Historically Underutilized Businesses. The Comptroller of Public Accounts replaced that program with VetHUB by emergency rule effective 2 December 2025, and permanent rules took effect on 12 May 2026. The Comptroller of Public Accounts also removed the categories built on race, ethnicity and sex from the eligibility rules. Certification through the state is now open to service-disabled veterans and to nobody else. Firms that already held a certificate on any other basis did not keep it until it lapsed. In the agency's own words, the office revoked all businesses previously certified based on race, ethnicity or sex, unless they proved ownership and control by SDVs. The change was challenged in Travis County district court. No source consulted reports any development after the permanent rules took effect, so the status of the case could not be confirmed as of 13 August 2026.

A second change is why so many referring pages are still wrong. Ten regional organizations had previously certified businesses on the state's behalf under memoranda of agreement, among them the Dallas Fort Worth Minority Supplier Development Council. Those agreements were terminated on 60 days' notice and the Comptroller announced their expiration on 26 February 2026, since when all certification has been handled directly by the agency. A resource page written before that date can be accurate about the organizations and wrong about what they can do for you. The sequence, the current eligibility test and the court challenge that followed are set out in the account of what the Comptroller put in its place. Everything below this paragraph is about what is still open.

Neither surviving route is a Texas body

This is the observation that saves the most time, and it is the one most guidance buries. The two certifications a minority-owned firm can hold today come from different worlds. One is private: the National Minority Supplier Development Council is a nonprofit network of 23 regional councils, and corporations recognize its certificate because they have decided to, not because any law tells them to. The other is federal: the 8(a) Business Development program is administered by the U.S. Small Business Administration under Title 13 Part 124 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and it points at federal contracts. Neither one enters a business in any state or federal vendor system, and neither is a substitute for the registrations that actually make a firm biddable. Which of the two fits, set against the routes that turn on something other than minority ownership, is laid out on the table that puts the four surviving routes in one grid.

What the council tests, in its own words

The council publishes its definition plainly and it repays reading in the original:An MBE is a for-profit business that is at least 51% owned, controlled, and operated by one or more U.S. citizens who are members of a recognized minority group. The recognized groups are Asian-Indian, Asian-Pacific, Black, Hispanic and Native American, as defined by the council's certification standards. Three of those words carry more weight than the percentage does. Owned, controlled and operated are assessed separately, and the council says what it is looking for behind them:Ownership by minority individuals must be real, substantial, and continuing, and must reflect actual authority over the business's strategic direction, day-to-day operations, and decision-making. A firm whose qualifying owner holds 51 percent of the paper and none of the decisions fails on control. The arithmetic was never the hard part.

The review itself is a documentation exercise. The national office describes a rigorous standards-based process covering ownership, control and operational criteria, with the completed file assessed by trained certification specialists working to uniform national standards. Fees are set by the regional council instead of nationally, and the national office describes a range running from $270 for a business with revenue under $1 million to $1,700 for one above $50 million, with the exact figure fixed by business size during the process. Certification is valid for one year. A short renewal application should be submitted within 90 days of the expiration date so the certification carries on without a break. That is a shorter leash than most applicants expect on a credential that took months to earn.

In north Texas the regional body is the Dallas Fort Worth Minority Supplier Development Council, which reports 1,071 certified minority-owned businesses, 89 of them headquartered outside its region. Applications and renewals for the national certificate are no longer filed with that council and go through the national office instead, and recertification can be started up to 90 days before a certificate expires. The council separately certifies small business enterprises for the North Texas area through its own application, on standards of its own. Two things a Dallas or Fort Worth applicant will want are not on the pages consulted here: the council publishes neither its fee schedule nor the list of counties it treats as its region, so both questions have to go to the council directly.

What a corporate buyer does with the status

A council certificate is an artifact built for one audience. Large corporations run supplier diversity programs, and those programs need a way to tell a qualifying supplier from a supplier who says it qualifies. Outsourcing that judgment to a certifying body is the answer most of them reached, which is why a buyer's portal asks for a certificate number and not for a shareholder register. The certificate is the ticket that gets a firm into the population a diversity program is measured against. What the program then does with that population, and what it is actually measuring, is a separate subject taken up in the guide to how these programs work from the buyer's side. The two are worth reading together, because a supplier who understands only the application has learned the smaller half.

The federal route, and the clock bolted to it

The 8(a) Business Development program asks the ownership question and then keeps going. Eligibility requires a business at least 51% owned and controlled by U.S. citizens who are socially and economically disadvantaged, and the economic half is quantified: personal net worth of $850 thousand or less, adjusted gross income of $400 thousand or less, and total assets of $6.5 million or less. A profitable firm can be disqualified by its owner's balance sheet. Applicants who read the test as a question about the business alone are the ones it catches.

Then there is the clock, and it is the feature of this program most often discovered too late. Certification lasts a maximum of nine years, with the first four treated as a development stage and the last five as a transitional stage, and a firm may not participate a second time. Entering before the business can absorb federal work, or after it has already built the federal relationships the program exists to help it build, spends something that cannot be spent twice. Applications are filed at certifications.sba.gov, the same portal the agency uses for its other certifications.

One requirement in the eligibility sentence goes unexplained on the SBA page consulted here. The page states that owners must be socially and economically disadvantaged, then defers to Title 13 Part 124 for what social disadvantage means. It sets out no test, names no groups and describes no narrative requirement. That area has moved recently and nothing on this page will be filled in from memory. An applicant needs the regulation itself, or a direct answer from the SBA, before assuming anything about how the standard is applied today.

Size sits underneath the federal route the way it sits underneath every set-aside. The agency's own definition is unambiguous:Size standards define the largest size a business can be to participate in government contracting programs and compete for contracts reserved or set aside for small businesses. A standard is assigned to each NAICS code and measured either by average annual receipts over the latest five complete fiscal years or by average employment over the latest 24 calendar months. Firms grow across that line without noticing, and the mechanics are worked through in the piece on whether your firm still clears the size test.

What neither certificate does

Neither one wins work. A certificate is a status in a directory, and no buyer has ever been obliged to order anything from a directory. Neither one registers a business with a government. Federal bidding still requires an entity registration in the System for Award Management, and selling to Texas agencies still requires the state's own vendor registration, a separate sequence walked through in the order of operations for selling to state agencies. And neither is recognized everywhere. A corporate buyer decides for itself which certifying bodies it accepts, and a public buyer follows whatever its own rules name. Holding a certificate the buyer in front of you does not accept costs a year of fees and buys nothing at all.

Three things this page could not establish

Absences are worth printing. No SBA page consulted here states a fee for 8(a) certification in either direction, so this page does not call it free and does not estimate. The Dallas Fort Worth council's own fee schedule is not published on the pages consulted, so the $270 to $1,700 span above is the national office's description of its network and not a quote for a Dallas applicant. And no Texas agency page publishes a count of the businesses whose certification ended when the rules changed. Figures circulate in news coverage and in advocacy material, none of them checkable against the agency's own directory, so none of them appears here.

Where the next question goes

For a firm choosing between the two, the honest test is who you are trying to sell to. Corporate supply chains read the council's certificate. Federal contracting officers read the SBA's. A firm chasing both markets will end up holding both, and the real question is sequencing: which one pays for itself first, given the customers already in reach. What either certificate is worth after it arrives depends entirely on what the supplier does next, and that is the subject of the piece on turning a listing into revenue.

Every figure here was read from the administering body's own page on 13 August 2026 and each source is listed below. Certification rules move, and the Texas ones were rewritten twice between December 2025 and May 2026, so check the source before acting on anything on this page. A reader who is earlier in the process than certification will find the step before this one, and the two that come after it, laid out on the map that puts the five gates in order.