What 6.4 million tender notices say about how long you actually get to bid

Fifteen days, median

Across the corpus the median gap between publication and submission deadline is 15 days. Not the mean, which is dragged upward by framework agreements that sit open for months — the median, the one that describes a typical Tuesday.

Fifteen days has to cover discovery, a bid/no-bid decision, document retrieval, pricing, partner sign-off and submission. If discovery alone takes a week because someone checks portals manually on Fridays, more than half of that window is already gone.

Why late discovery is the expensive part

The cost of finding a tender late is not linear. Days one to five are worth far more than days ten to fifteen, because the early days are when you can still decide not to bid cheaply. A tender found on day twelve is either declined without analysis or bid badly.

This is the argument for alerting on a match rather than on a schedule: a notice published on a Monday should not wait for a Friday digest.

Where the exceptions are

Two patterns break the median. Framework agreements and dynamic purchasing systems stay open for months and inflate every average you compute. At the other end, some portals publish with deadlines under a week, usually for renewals and small-value direct awards.

There is also a measurement trap worth naming: a portal that keeps listing the same still-open tenders writes nothing new. Judged by when rows were last written, such a source looks dead. One national portal returned all 13,084 of its notices on a single day, every one already known.

Frequently asked questions