How long do you actually get to answer a UK public tender?

Everyone in bid work has a story about the tender that landed on a Friday with ten days on the clock. We wanted to know how typical that really is, so we took every open tender notice published on the UK government's Contracts Finder between 2 January and 27 July 2026 — 1,591 opportunities from 443 public buyers — and measured the gap between publication and deadline. The median is 21 days. But the median hides the problem: 30.9% of tenders give you under a fortnight, and the tightest tenth give you under six.

The median is three weeks. The spread is the story.

Across the 1,527 notices that carried a firm deadline, the middle of the pack gives you 21 days between publication and submission. That sounds workable. The trouble is how wide the distribution is: a quarter of tenders give you 11 days or fewer, while the most generous quarter give you 29 or more.

Only 1.2% run longer than two months. So the planning question isn't "how long is a tender window" — it's what you do about the 30.9% that land inside a fortnight, because those are the ones that decide whether you bid at all.

Nearly a third give you less than two weeks

Stack the windows up cumulatively and the squeeze is obvious. 14.3% of tenders close within a week of going live. 30.9% close within two. Almost half — 48.1% — are done inside three weeks.

For a small bid team, that is the whole argument for having reusable answers ready before the notice appears. A fortnight is enough time to write a strong response to a question you have answered before, and nowhere near enough to write one from scratch while three other bids are live.

Deadline o'clock is midday, not end of day

38.7% of all deadlines fall at exactly 12:00. Add the rest of the morning and 59.9% of tenders close before 1pm — which quietly removes the last working day most teams assume they have.

If your plan is "finish it on the day", you have half a day, not a day. The portal queue on the final morning is the single most common way a finished bid still misses.

More than half close on a Friday or a Monday

30.6% of deadlines land on a Friday and 23.4% on a Monday — 54.0% between them. Thursday, by contrast, takes just 12.8%.

Both ends of that pattern eat weekends. A Friday deadline means the final push happens on the last working day of the week; a Monday one means the work quietly moves to Saturday and Sunday. Neither is an accident of the calendar — it's how buyers schedule evaluation panels.

Who is actually publishing all this

Local councils publish 40.0% of everything on Contracts Finder — far more than any other kind of buyer. Universities and colleges account for 13.4%, and the NHS for 4.0%.

By what's being bought, 52.9% are services, 30.6% works and 16.5% goods. If you sell services to the public sector, local government is the market, and it is fragmented: 443 separate buyers published in seven months, each with their own portal and their own question set.

The pipeline never really stops

11 new tenders went live on Contracts Finder every working day across the period, and volume rose through the year rather than tailing off over summer.

Half of them are small: the median published value is £150,000 and 37.7% are under £100,000, though 19.4% are over £1m. That mix is why qualification matters as much as writing. At eleven a day, the constraint is not finding opportunities — it is deciding fast which ones are worth your fortnight.

What the numbers say you should do

None of this is an argument for working faster. It's an argument for having more of the answer already written before the notice lands, and for deciding earlier which bids you are genuinely going to finish.

Method, and how to cite this

We collected every notice at tender stage published on Contracts Finder between 2 January and 27 July 2026 through its open OCDS API — 1,998 notices, deduplicated to 1,591 distinct opportunities by contract identifier, keeping the earliest notice where a tender was amended. Response windows are the difference between the notice's publication timestamp and its stated deadline, for the 1,527 that carried one; windows over a year were excluded as data errors.

Contracts Finder covers UK public sector opportunity notices including below-threshold contracts. It does not cover every above-threshold notice on Find a Tender, nor private sector RFPs, so treat these as figures for UK public procurement specifically. The underlying data is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence. You're welcome to quote any of these figures with a link back to this page.