Veteran-owned business certification

The only ownership category the state still certifies

A veteran-owned firm in Texas occupies a position no other supplier holds. Every other basis on which the Comptroller of Public Accounts once issued a certificate was taken out of the eligibility rules, and the certificates already granted on those bases were revoked. What survived is military service with a disability rating. 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 replacement program is named Veteran Heroes United in Business, shortened by the agency itself to VetHUB, and the Comptroller's own program page describes it as one that focuses on certification of service-disabled veterans (SDV). 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.

That inversion runs against the grain of almost every guide a veteran will find, because those guides are written for firms being told their route out of Austin closed. Veterans who already held a certificate on service-disabled grounds on 2 December 2025 were not caught up in the revocations either: the Comptroller says those businesses continue to be listed in the VetHUB directory. How the rules reached that point is traced in the full account of how the program was rewritten.

Two governments, and the transfer that still catches applicants

Two veteran certifications are in play, one per government. The state one is VetHUB, issued by the Comptroller through the Statewide Procurement Division. The federal one is the Veteran Small Business Certification program, VetCert, run by the U.S. Small Business Administration, carrying two statuses: the veteran-owned small business, VOSB, and the service-disabled veteran-owned small business, SDVOSB. Neither government reads the other's determination. How the two sit against the routes that turn on something other than military service is set out in the comparison of every route still open to a Texas supplier.

The federal certification also moved house, which is why a firm working from an older checklist can arrive at the wrong agency. The SBA states it directly: the program implements changes from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (NDAA 2021) which transferred the certification function from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to SBA as of January 1, 2023. Self-certification went with it. The agency records that the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024 required all veteran firms to be certified through VetCert before 22 December 2024, the same date the self-certification grace period for subcontracting and goaling purposes ran to. Firms that applied before it closed keep their eligibility until VetCert reaches a determination.

What counts as qualifying service

Here the two tests part company. Texas sets a floor at a service-connected disability rating of 20 percent, and a veteran rated beneath it is outside VetHUB whatever else the business can prove. The Comptroller publishes the figure twice. The certification process page describes an eligible owner as a Service-Disabled Veteran with a service-related disability of 20% or greater, and the frequently asked questions require at least a 20 percent service disability as identified by the federal military department. The emergency rule text filed in December 2025 carried the figure in the language of the code, defining qualifying owners as veterans under 38 U.S.C. section 101(2) who have suffered at least a 20% service-connected disability.

The federal test asks a prior question and never reaches a percentage. VOSB status turns on veteran status alone: the SBA requires a firm to Have no less than 51% of the business owned and controlled by one or more veterans, and no rating enters into it. SDVOSB status adds a disability, described on the same page as the owning veteran or veterans being rated as service-disabled by the VA. What that page does not do is attach a number to the phrase. No SBA page consulted for this article states a minimum rating for SDVOSB, so this page states none, and the eligibility rules themselves sit at Title 13 Part 128 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

The consequence is worth putting directly, because here the subject is a document you already hold rather than a rule somebody else administers. Your VA rating decision is one piece of paper, and two governments read it against two different rulebooks. One number can clear one bar and miss the other, and neither office explains the other's answer.

Ownership, control, and the conditions Texas adds

Both governments set the same percentage and then test it differently. Texas requires that at least 51 percent of the business be owned, managed, and operated by owner(s) who meet the qualified requirement as a service-disabled-veteran (SDV), and the certification process page turns that into an evidentiary duty, telling an applicant owner to provide proof of 51 percent ownership and control of the day to day operation. The emergency rule text put the same threshold in terms of stock, requiring that at least 51 percent of all classes of shares or other equitable securities be held by qualifying owners. The SBA does the equivalent work in two verbs, owned and controlled, for VOSB and SDVOSB alike. On both sides control is a finding separate from ownership, and a share register alone satisfies neither.

Past that shared threshold, the Texas application carries two conditions with no counterpart in the federal test. The first is geographic. A VetHUB applicant must be primarily based in Texas and must prove that its principal place of business is in the state. A veteran-owned business that relocates has a Texas eligibility question to answer and a federal record indifferent to the move.

The second is financial and it is easy to read past. The Comptroller's certification process page requires the qualifying owner to be an economically disadvantaged person, and nothing of the sort appears on the SBA's veteran programs page, which attaches no personal financial test to VetCert at all. A veteran whose finances would not support an economic-disadvantage finding can hold federal certification and still meet that question in Austin.

Size sits under both, and one of the two rules could not be read

Neither certification is open to a business that has outgrown its size standard. Texas requires a for-profit entity that has not exceeded the size standard prescribed by 34 TAC section 20.294, a section the Texas Register titles graduation procedures. The SBA assigns a standard to every NAICS code and measures against one of two things: average annual receipts across the latest five complete fiscal years, or the average number of people employed for each pay period across the latest 24 calendar months.

Whether those are the same test is a question this page leaves open. The codified Texas rule could not be read during this research: the Texas Register carried the preamble to the adopted rules and said the text would not be republished, and the state's code site had moved address. Only a third-party copy of section 20.294 was reachable, it predates the 2026 rules, and it ties the Texas standard to the federal table. That copy may well be right and it is not a source. How the federal line is drawn, and how quietly a growing business crosses it, is worked through in the piece on whether a firm still counts as small.

What the Texas certificate is actually for

A certificate only one government recognizes is best understood from that government's side. The Comptroller still publishes the machinery around it: a subcontracting plan form, good faith effort forms, a subcontracting opportunity notification, a progress assessment report and a state agency progress report template. That paperwork is what a prime contractor on a state contract works through to find, document and report certified subcontractors, and the directory of certified businesses is where that search starts. The certificate places a veteran-owned firm inside a process the prime is already obliged to run.

Free on one side, unpriced on the other

VetHUB costs nothing. The Comptroller states that certification is free of charge, and it lasts for up to four years, provided the business continues to meet the eligibility requirements. That proviso does real work: four years is an outer limit and not a guarantee, and what carries through it is eligibility. The agency asks applicants to allow up to 90 days for a review.

On the federal side this page stops short twice. No SBA page consulted states a fee for VetCert in either direction, so the federal route is neither called free here nor given a number. None states how long a VetCert certification runs, either. A term is commonly repeated in third-party guidance, the governing text is in Part 128, and the federal code service redirected away from that part during this research, so the figure stays out. Both questions belong to the SBA.

The two applications also begin in different systems. A VetHUB application runs through the state's Centralized Master Bidders List registration and then the certification portal the Comptroller links from its VetHUB pages. Federal applications are filed at certifications.sba.gov, the address the SBA's own pages point to. An older veterans-specific portal address still circulates in third-party guidance and did not resolve when it was checked for this article.

What neither certificate does

Neither one makes a firm a government contractor. VetHUB enters a business in no federal system at all, and a firm pursuing federal work still needs an entity registration in the System for Award Management, renewed every 365 days, before it can be awarded anything as a prime. VetCert registers nobody with Texas: the state's own vendor registration and the $70 annual Centralized Master Bidders List fee are a separate errand, and the order they come in is laid out in the registration steps that come before any bid to a Texas agency.

Neither one produces revenue either. An agency holding a VetHUB certificate still has to want what the business sells, at a price it will pay, from a supplier it believes can deliver on the solicitation's schedule. And neither one substitutes for the other, the assumption this page exists to dislodge: a Texas certificate carries no weight with a federal contracting officer, and a federal one carries none with the Comptroller. Firms selling into both markets hold both and track two separate clocks.

Only for now, and the case behind that qualification

Calling VetHUB the last certificate Texas issues describes the present and not a settled feature of Texas procurement. The rules that produced that outcome were challenged in a verified original petition dated 2 March 2026 in the district court of Travis County, brought against the Acting Comptroller and his office together with the heads of the Texas Department of Transportation, Health and Human Services, and the Texas Facilities Commission. The pleading is titled an application for declaratory and injunctive relief and sets out sixteen counts, eleven against the Comptroller and the office and five against the other agency heads, running from the statutory text and purpose of the governing act, through a series of pleaded failures of rulemaking procedure, to claims of ultra vires conduct.

What that means for a veteran-owned reader is a matter of direction, not prediction. The relief the plaintiffs ask for runs against the rules under which veteran ownership became the sole remaining basis on which Texas certifies anyone. Granted, it would end the exclusivity this page reports without VetHUB itself necessarily going anywhere; refused, it would leave that exclusivity standing. Which of those follows is not something this publication will guess at. The order already signed in the case, its reported reach, the Comptroller's stated rationale and the sourcing behind each of them are handled in the flagship account of the rule change and the challenge to it.

Checking this before acting on it

The figures on this page were read from each administering body's own pages on 13 August 2026, and every one of those pages is listed below. Two things move faster than an article can: the Texas rules were rewritten twice inside nine months, and a trial date in the case above sits ahead of this publication date. A veteran-owned firm deciding anything on the strength of this page should read the Comptroller's VetHUB pages and the SBA's veteran programs page first. Certifying is the third of five gates, and the four around it are set out at the sequence certification sits inside.