How long do you get to answer a US federal solicitation?

We already measured how long UK public tenders give you to respond. The obvious next question is whether US federal buyers are any kinder. They are not. We took every solicitation posted to SAM.gov over two full working weeks — 8,122 opportunities from 872 contracting offices — and measured the gap between posting and deadline. The median is 12 days against 21 in the UK, and 57.2% close inside a fortnight against 30.9%. If US federal work feels more rushed than public sector bidding elsewhere, that is because it is.

The median is 12 days

Across the 7,987 solicitations carrying a firm deadline, the middle of the pack gives you 12 days from posting to submission. A quarter give you 8 days or fewer. The tightest tenth give you under 6.

The shape is different from the UK's, not just the middle. British tenders spread fairly evenly from one week to six; US federal work piles up hard in the one-to-two-week band, which alone holds 39.0% of everything posted.

Nearly six in ten close inside a fortnight

18.3% of US federal solicitations close within a week of going live. 57.2% close within two. By three weeks, 79.7% are gone.

At that pace the bid/no-bid decision has to happen in a day or two, and the writing has to be largely assembly. There is no version of this where a team drafts fresh prose for every section and still submits on time.

The US gives you about half the time the UK does

Measured the same way — publication to deadline, on comparable open opportunity notices — the gap is stark. The US median is 12 days against the UK's 21. Nearly twice as many US solicitations close inside two weeks.

Some of that is structural: a large share of SAM.gov postings are simplified acquisitions and commercial-item buys, which carry shorter statutory minimums than a full EU-style open procedure. But the practical effect on a bid team is the same whatever the cause — you get a fortnight.

There is no single deadline o'clock

UK tenders overwhelmingly close at midday. US federal deadlines are scattered: the most common single time is 16:00, and it accounts for only 23.2% of them. Just 36.6% fall before 1pm, against nearly 60% in the UK.

There is a catch that matters more than the spread: 32.1% of solicitations give a deadline date with no time of day at all, or record it as midnight. Never assume that means end of business — check the solicitation document, because the contracting office's local time zone is the one that counts.

Monday and Friday take half the deadlines

27.7% of deadlines land on a Monday and 23.8% on a Friday. Both patterns quietly convert a weekend into working time — a Monday deadline in particular means the final read-through happens on Sunday night.

Tuesday is the quietest day to have a deadline, at half Monday's share. If you are choosing between two opportunities with equal merit, the one that does not close on a Monday is worth something.

Half of it is reserved for small business

50.2% of the solicitations we looked at carry a set-aside, and 40.8% are total small business set-asides. Service-disabled veteran-owned, women-owned, 8(a) and HUBZone programmes account for most of the rest.

This is the single biggest structural difference from UK procurement, which has no equivalent reservation. If you qualify as a US small business, half the federal market is competition you are shielded from — and the paperwork proving that status is exactly the kind of answer worth keeping current rather than rewriting per bid.

Defense is most of the market

The Department of Defense posted 69.6% of all solicitations in the period, ahead of Veterans Affairs. Across 40 departments and agencies the work is spread over 872 separate contracting offices.

That fragmentation is the real workload. At 812 new solicitations a working day, each from an office with its own habits and formats, the constraint is triage: deciding quickly and correctly which fortnight is worth spending.

What the numbers say you should do

A twelve-day median is not a writing problem, it is a readiness problem. The teams that win consistently in this market have decided what they bid on before the notice appears, and have their capability, past-performance and compliance answers already written and current.

Method, and how to cite this

We used the US General Services Administration's public Contract Opportunities extract from SAM.gov, taken on 27 July 2026 (76,848 notices). We kept notices of type Solicitation and Combined Synopsis/Solicitation — the ones you actually bid on — and deduplicated by solicitation number, keeping the earliest posting where a notice was amended. Response windows are the gap between posting timestamp and stated deadline for the 7,987 that carried both.

One important limitation shaped the design. That extract is a snapshot of currently active notices, not a historical archive: notices disappear once archived, so earlier months are heavily depleted — early June shows around 180 postings a day against roughly 1,100 in late July. Reading a trend from the full file would measure archiving, not procurement. Because notices archive some time after their deadline, a recent posting cohort is intact whatever its response window, so we used two complete working weeks, Monday 13 to Friday 24 July 2026, ending three days before the snapshot. All figures here describe that cohort.

SAM.gov covers US federal contract opportunities; it does not cover state, county or municipal procurement, nor private sector RFPs. The data is US Government public domain. You're welcome to quote any of these figures with a link back to this page.