NM Laboratory Partnership with Small Business Tax Credit

NM Laboratory Partnership with Small Business Tax Credit

Provides New Mexico small businesses free technical support from Sandia and Los Alamos to advance product and engineering development.

Eligibility · United States · US-NM

The New Mexico Laboratory Partnership with Small Business Tax Credit (NMSA 1978 §§7-9E-1 through 7-9E-11) is an unusual public-private program that delivers free technical and engineering assistance from two of the nation's premier federal research laboratories — Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) — to qualifying New Mexico small businesses. The credit is claimed by the national laboratories against their gross receipts tax obligations, effectively reimbursing them for the cost of assistance provided; the small business does not directly claim the credit but receives in-kind R&D services funded through this mechanism. From the small business perspective, the program functions as a grant of free technical assistance. The annual statewide pool has historically been approximately $2.4 million. The program is administered through TRD with delivery through Sandia and LANL's NM Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) programme.

Eligibility is restricted to for-profit small businesses in New Mexico that qualify for the NMSBA programme operated by either Sandia or LANL. The value of assistance available to each business is capped at approximately $20,000 per year for urban-area businesses and $40,000 per year for rural-area businesses. Assistance can span a wide range of engineering, scientific, and technical domains covered by the laboratories' expertise, including manufacturing processes, energy systems, materials characterization, software development, and environmental testing. Nonprofits, universities, and individual researchers are not eligible; only for-profit NM-based small businesses may apply.

Small businesses engage the program by applying directly through SNL's or LANL's NMSBA programme office — not through TRD. Once accepted, the laboratory assigns technical staff to the project and tracks the value of assistance provided. The laboratory then claims the corresponding tax credit through TRD's Business Credit Manager (BusinessCredit.Mgr@tax.nm.gov). For a small business, the winning strategy is to identify a specific technical challenge that aligns with one of the laboratories' core competencies and present a well-scoped project request with a defined deliverable, as the laboratories evaluate assistance requests based on technical fit and available personnel capacity.