The tendering process in construction is how a client finds a contractor for a project: inviting bids, comparing them against set criteria, and awarding a contract to the strongest one. In the UK that can mean a council-run public contract advertised on Find a Tender, or a developer quietly asking three subcontractors for a price.
This guide covers the stages of a typical UK tender, the methods used to run one, and where public sector procurement rules differ from how private clients tender. It also looks at where tenders usually go wrong and where software can take some of the admin out of running one.
What Is the Tendering Process in Construction?
Tendering is the process of requesting and receiving bids for a defined scope of work, then selecting a contractor against criteria the client set out in advance, usually some mix of price, experience and technical approach.
The same basic idea applies whether a council is tendering a new school or a housebuilder is tendering a groundworks package to three local subcontractors. What changes is the formality. Public contracts above certain values have to follow statutory procurement rules, while private tenders can be run as quickly or as informally as the client wants.
Why Tendering Matters
Running a proper tender puts contractors on a level footing, because everyone prices the same scope from the same information, which makes the bids genuinely comparable. It gives the client a documented reason for choosing one contractor over another, which matters if a competitor, a client’s board or an auditor later asks why. And because the tender documents set out the scope in detail, there’s less room for disagreement later about what was actually included in the price.
Stages of the Tendering Process in Construction
Every UK tender, public or private, moves through some version of the same seven stages, from pre-qualification through to the signed contract. Public contracts follow all of them formally, with published notices and fixed timescales. Private tenders often blur a couple of stages together, but the underlying steps are the same.
| Stage | What happens |
| 1. Pre-qualification | The client checks that a contractor is financially stable and has the experience, insurance and health and safety record for the job, usually through a PQQ or Selection Questionnaire. |
| 2. Invitation to tender (ITT) | Contractors who pass pre-qualification, or who respond to an open advertisement, receive the tender documents: drawings, specification, pricing document and contract terms. Many teams build this pack from a bid template so nothing gets left out. |
| 3. Clarifications | Bidders query anything unclear in the scope or drawings, and the client answers every bidder in writing so no one bids with better information than the rest. |
| 4. Bid preparation and submission | Contractors price the work, gather quotes from their own subcontractors and suppliers, and submit the finished bid by the deadline set in the ITT. |
| 5. Evaluation | The client scores each bid against the criteria published in the tender documents, usually a mix of price and quality. |
| 6. Contract award | The client selects a winning bid, issues a letter of intent or award notice, and on public contracts observes a standstill period before signing. |
| 7. Contract execution and mobilisation | Both sides sign the contract, the programme is confirmed, and the contractor mobilises people and materials to start on site. |
Retention, where the contract includes it, is usually agreed at the award stage rather than negotiated afterwards. It’s worth reading up on how retention works before you sign, since it affects cash flow long after the tender itself is forgotten.
Open, Selective and Negotiated Tendering
The stages above stay roughly the same across projects, but how a client gets to a shortlist of bidders varies. These are the three methods UK contractors come across most often.
Open Tendering
Open tendering invites any contractor to submit a bid, usually through a public advertisement. It gives the widest possible field and often the most competitive pricing, but the client has to evaluate a large number of bids, some from contractors who turn out not to be suitable for the job once the detail is in.
Selective Tendering
Selective tendering starts with a pre-qualification stage and only invites contractors who pass it. It takes longer to set up but produces a shorter, more consistent list of bids, which is why most medium and large UK construction tenders default to it.
Negotiated Tendering
Negotiated tendering skips competition and agrees a price directly with one contractor. It suits specialised work, projects where a trusted contractor is already on site, or situations where speed matters more than testing the wider market.
Two-Stage and Framework Tendering
Two-stage tendering splits the process in two. Contractors bid on preliminary information in stage one, then develop a detailed price with the client during a pre-construction phase before stage two is finalised. It suits complex or fast-moving projects where the design isn’t finished when tendering needs to start.
Framework tendering works differently again. A group of contractors is pre-qualified once, often for several years, and individual projects are then awarded through a shorter call-off process rather than a full tender each time. A fair few UK public sector bodies buy this way, which is why a repeat public client can sometimes move faster than a one-off private tender.
Public Versus Private Tendering in the UK
Public sector tendering in the UK runs on procurement law, not just custom. Contracts started on or after 24 February 2025 fall under the Procurement Act 2023, which replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for new procurements (gov.uk, “The Procurement Act 2023: A short guide for suppliers”, accessed 7 October 2026). Contracts and frameworks that started before that date keep running under the old rules until they end.
The Act sets thresholds that decide which portal a contract has to be advertised on. For the period 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027, a works contract is covered once its value reaches £5,193,000 including VAT, and a contract for goods or services with a central government body is covered from £135,018, with a higher threshold of £207,720 for sub-central bodies such as local councils (gov.uk, “Guidance: Thresholds”, PPN 023: 2026 Threshold Amounts, accessed 7 October 2026). These figures move every two years in line with an international trade agreement, so check the current amount before relying on it for a live bid.
Contracts above those thresholds go on Find a Tender, which took over from the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily on 1 January 2021 (gov.uk, “Find a Tender”, accessed 7 October 2026). Smaller public contracts, over £12,000 including VAT with central government or £30,000 with other public bodies, are usually listed on Contracts Finder instead, and plenty of councils use it even when they aren’t required to (gov.uk, “Contracts Finder”, accessed 7 October 2026). Public tenders sometimes also ask for a bid bond to guarantee the bidder will honour its price if selected, which is far less common on private work.
Private tendering doesn’t carry any of this. A developer or main contractor can run an open tender, go straight to a shortlist, or simply ask the three subcontractors they already trust for a price. There’s no statutory threshold, no mandatory advertising and no standstill period before signing. Selective and negotiated tendering are common on private work for that reason: the client often already knows who they want to ask, and testing the whole market adds time without adding much value.
Common Challenges in the Tendering Process
Tendering promotes fair competition, but it isn’t without friction. Tender documents take real effort to get right, and a missing detail in the specification often turns into a variation claim later. Bids can also come in unrealistically low, where a contractor underprices the work to win it and then tries to recover the margin through claims during construction. The evaluation step itself can drag on too, especially on public contracts with multiple scoring criteria and a mandatory standstill period at the end.
Pricing errors are a more mundane but just as damaging problem, and they’re easy to miss in a spreadsheet under deadline pressure.
"The spreadsheet process was prone to errors. If you didn't drag a formula down to include every row, you could suddenly drop £20,000 out of your price without realizing it."
Read more
A small mistake in a formula can change a bid by a meaningful amount without anyone noticing until the contract is already signed, which is one reason some contractors move tender pricing out of spreadsheets and into dedicated bidding software.
Running the Subcontractor Procurement Stage
Winning the main tender is only half the job. A main contractor that wins a project then has to run its own, smaller tendering process to buy in the subcontractors and suppliers it needs, and that stage brings its own admin, often repeated across dozens of packages on a single job.
Running subcontractor and vendor bids well matters for the same reason the main tender does: it’s where the real cost of the job gets fixed. Subcontractor bidding software can turn a process that used to run on emails and spreadsheets into something a quantity surveyor gets through in a fraction of the time.
"The ordering process now only takes about 10 minutes per purchase order, whereas it used to take us roughly 30 minutes before.
And this is not even counting in the time saved on reconciling."
Best Practices for a Stronger Tender
A few habits separate tenders that go smoothly from ones that don’t. Write the scope and evaluation criteria clearly enough that two different people pricing the job would land on a similar answer. Answer every bidder’s question in writing and share it with the whole list, not just the contractor who asked, so no one bids with better information than the rest. Score bids against the criteria you published rather than against whichever one happens to be cheapest on the day. Keep bidders updated if evaluation runs longer than planned, because a contractor left in silence for weeks will often assume they’ve lost and move their attention elsewhere.
How Software Supports the Tendering Process
Most of what makes tendering slow is admin: keeping track of which bids are in, lining them up against each other, and chasing the paperwork a contract needs before work can start. Tender management software handles that side of it, so a quantity surveyor’s time goes into judging the bids rather than filing them.
Planyard brings tender comparison, subcontractor bids, contracts and the budget they all affect into one place, so nothing gets re-entered three separate times between winning a tender and starting on site.
FAQs About the Tendering Process in Construction
What are the 7 stages of the tendering process in construction?
Most UK guides split tendering into seven stages: pre-qualification, invitation to tender, clarifications, bid preparation and submission, evaluation, contract award and contract execution. Smaller private projects often run these together into four or five visible steps, but the same work still has to happen somewhere in the process.
What is the difference between open, selective and negotiated tendering?
Open tendering invites any contractor to bid and is common on public contracts above the advertising thresholds. Selective tendering narrows the field to a shortlist that has already passed pre-qualification. Negotiated tendering skips competition and agrees a price directly with one contractor, usually because the work is specialised or there is an existing relationship.
How long does a tendering process take?
There is no fixed figure. A straightforward private job might go from invitation to signed contract in a few weeks, while a public contract above the Find a Tender threshold usually runs longer because of the mandatory advertising period, the time bidders need to price complex work, and the standstill period before the contract can be signed. The timetable set out in the client’s own tender documents is the only reliable answer for a specific project.
Do private construction projects have to follow public procurement rules?
No. The Procurement Act 2023 and its thresholds apply to public bodies and utilities, not to private developers or main contractors running their own subcontractor tenders. Private clients can set whatever process they want, though many still borrow the structure of public tendering because it is a well understood way to compare bids fairly.
What is a PQQ or Selection Questionnaire?
A PQQ, now usually called a Selection Questionnaire, is the form a contractor completes at the pre-qualification stage. It covers financial standing, insurance, health and safety record and relevant experience, and it decides who gets invited to tender rather than who wins the contract.
What is the purpose of tendering in construction?
Tendering gives a client a fair way to compare contractors on price, experience and approach before committing to a contract. It also creates a paper trail: the tender documents, the submitted bid and the signed contract all describe the same scope of work, which is useful if a disagreement comes up later.
Conclusion
The tendering process in construction is, at bottom, a way of turning a defined scope of work into a fair, documented comparison between contractors, whether that happens through a formal seven-stage public procurement or a quick negotiated price between people who already know each other. Getting the early stages right saves far more time at award than it costs to set up properly, because a clear scope and a method suited to the project size mean fewer surprises once bids land. The paperwork and the rules change between public and private work, but the underlying job of comparing like with like stays the same.