How long do you actually get to bid on a public tender?
Published 8 August 2026 · updated 31 August 2026 · 5 min read
All figures cover notices published since 1 January 2026, measured on 31 August 2026. They are not a snapshot of what happens to be open today: counting only live notices quietly removes every short deadline, because those have already closed.
Short answer: in the EU the median is 32 days from publication to deadline. In the US it is 11 days. That gap is not administrative noise — it is the law. EU buyers work to a statutory minimum of 30 to 35 days; US federal buyers acquiring commercial products and services are not held to the 30-day floor that applies to everything else, and mostly use two weeks. If you plan your bid capacity on European timelines and then go after US federal work, you will miss almost everything.
We measured this across the 30,324 notices published since 1 January 2026 that we hold: 16,806 from TED (EU), 13,140 from SAM.gov (US) and 378 from UK Find a Tender. Every one of them carries both a publication date and a submission deadline, so the window is counted, not estimated. We count the cohort by publication date rather than the notices open on the day of measurement, because the second method drops every short window as soon as it closes and therefore reports a longer and longer figure the longer you leave it.
The three markets, side by side
| Source | Notices | Median window | 7 days or less | 14 days or less | 30 days or less |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TED (EU) | 16,806 | 32 days | 5% | 14% | 42% |
| Find a Tender (UK) | 378 | 31 days | 5% | 10% | 42% |
| SAM.gov (US) | 13,140 | 11 days | 26% | 66% | 93% |
The UK row rests on 378 notices. That is enough for a median, but thin for the percentage columns — 10% there is thirty-eight notices, and a single quiet month moves it by several points. Read the UK percentages as an indication, not a measurement.
For the notices themselves rather than the statistics about them, see the open tender cross-sections — counts by country and category, each with the date it was measured.
Read the fourth column again. Two thirds of US federal notices — 66% — give you fourteen days or less, and one in four gives you a week or less. In the EU the equivalent figures are 14% and 5%.
One check worth stating, because it is the reason to trust the US number. Measured the other way — only notices open on the day of measurement — the EU median is also 32 days and the UK also around thirty. The two methods agree wherever the deadlines are long. They part company only on SAM.gov, where the snapshot method reports about thirty days because every two-week notice has already closed by the time you look. A method that distorted the data would have moved all three numbers.
We use the median rather than the average on purpose. A handful of framework agreements run for years and would drag any average upwards until it described nothing real.
Why the EU number is 32 and not 45
Because 32 is roughly the floor.
Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 27 sets the minimum time limit for receipt of tenders in an open procedure at 35 days from the date the contract notice was sent, and Article 27(4) lets the buyer cut five days off that where tenders may be submitted electronically — so 30 days. Electronic submission is now standard, so 30 days is the working minimum for most buyers.
Our figure counts from the day the notice appears on TED, which is a day or two after dispatch, so our 32 is measuring the same thing from slightly later. 72% of EU notices we track fall within 35 days. The distribution is not spread across a range of buyer preferences. It is piled up against the legal minimum.
That is the finding an SME needs: the typical European buyer gives you exactly what the directive obliges them to give you, and not a day more. The month is not generosity. It is compliance.
Why the US number is 11
FAR 5.203(c) requires at least a 30-day response time for receipt of bids or proposals on most actions above the simplified acquisition threshold. Acquisitions of commercial products and commercial services sit outside that floor: under 5.203(a)(1) and (b) the contracting officer sets a response time that gives offerors a reasonable opportunity to respond, judged on complexity, commerciality, availability and urgency. FAR 12.603 then lets them fold the synopsis and the solicitation into a single combined document, which removes the separate 15-day pre-solicitation notice as well.
Most of what a normal SME can supply to the US federal government — equipment, software, maintenance, professional services — is a commercial item. So the 30-day floor does not apply, and buyers use the discretion they have. Eleven days is the result.
The same continent, very different buyers
That median hides a real spread, and the spread matters more than the EU-versus-UK gap. The table below counts countries publishing on TED, which is not the same set as the EU — TED also carries EEA and EFTA publishers such as Switzerland and Norway. Countries with at least 100 notices in the cohort, longest window first:
| Country | Notices | Median window | Share at 14 days or less |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 239 | 49 days | 5% |
| France | 1,877 | 41 days | 3% |
| Switzerland | 165 | 41 days | 2% |
| Italy | 813 | 40 days | 4% |
| Greece | 220 | 39 days | 3% |
| Spain | 1,303 | 33 days | 6% |
| Romania | 586 | 33 days | 11% |
| Lithuania | 344 | 33 days | 26% |
| Czechia | 749 | 32 days | 13% |
| Germany | 3,729 | 31 days | 11% |
| Poland | 2,892 | 28 days | 31% |
| Croatia | 298 | 26 days | 28% |
Twenty-six countries clear the hundred-notice floor; the twelve above are the ends of the range and the four largest markets. Poland and Croatia sit a fortnight below the Netherlands, and roughly three in ten of their notices give you two weeks or less.
A Dutch buyer gives you more than twice as long as a Croatian one. And Poland — the second largest source of live EU notices we track, after Germany — puts 28% of its notices inside a fortnight, which is closer to US practice than to Dutch practice.
If you are a services firm deciding which national markets to cover, this table is a capacity question before it is a strategy question. Poland will generate more opportunities than the Netherlands and give you far less time to act on each one.
What this means in practice
The number that matters is not the median. It is the window that remains after you find out the notice exists.
Of the 30,324 notices in the cohort, 4,248 closed within seven days of publication and 11,077 within fourteen. At any given moment, roughly 40% of the live market is already out of reach for anyone who has not started. If you check portals weekly, you are systematically sampling the wrong half of it.
- Decide your minimum viable window before you look. If a compliant bid takes your team three weeks, US federal work is structurally closed to you and no alerting tool changes that.
- Prepare the reusable pack once. Financial statements, insurance certificates, references, ESPD or equivalent, signed declarations. This is what turns an 11-day notice from impossible into tight.
- Register before you need to. US federal bidding requires an active SAM.gov registration with representations and certifications completed. That process on its own routinely takes longer than 11 days.
- Watch daily in short-window markets, weekly is fine elsewhere. Poland, Croatia and the whole of SAM.gov reward daily monitoring. The Netherlands and France do not.
- Check the notice itself for extensions. Deadlines move. Ours reflect the current published deadline, but always confirm on the source portal before you commit.
An honest word about who this does not help
If your problem is that you cannot assemble a compliant bid in three weeks, faster discovery will not fix it. You do not have a search problem, you have a document problem, and the fix is building the reusable pack — not subscribing to anything, ours included.
Equally, if you are chasing US federal contracts without an active SAM.gov registration, the 11-day median means you will watch every relevant notice close before you are eligible to respond. Sort the registration first. Everything else is premature.
What we do not know
We measure the calendar window between the published date and the stated submission deadline. We do not measure:
- Dispatch dates. The directive counts from dispatch of the notice; we count from publication on TED. Our EU windows are therefore one to two days shorter than the legal count.
- Extensions and corrigenda. A deadline that has been pushed back appears here at its current value, with no record that it moved.
- Difficulty. A 30-day notice for a complex works contract is far tighter than an 11-day notice for off-the-shelf supply. Days are not effort.
- Contract value on US notices. SAM.gov does not publish an estimated value in the notice feed, so we hold none for any of the 13,140 US records. On TED we have a value for 7,293 of 16,806. Anyone quoting you a “typical US federal contract size” from notice data is inventing it.
One further caveat, in our own numbers’ disfavour: this is a snapshot of notices that are still open. Short-window notices close quickly and leave the sample, long-window ones linger in it. So if these medians are wrong, they are wrong in the direction of being too generous. The real windows are, if anything, shorter than what you see above.
This guide is one part of a bigger picture. For how tender response time compares with the other four routes — grants, guarantees, subsidised debt and equity — see business funding in the EU, US and UK.
See which of these you could actually bid for
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Start the 14-day trialSources: Directive 2014/24/EU Article 27 (time limits, open procedure); FAR 5.203 (publicizing and response time) and FAR 12.603 (streamlined solicitation for commercial products and services). Notice counts and response windows were measured on 31 August 2026 over every notice published since 1 January 2026 in the Scalebiz database, from TED, SAM.gov and UK Find a Tender — not over the notices open on that date. The two legal provisions quoted here were checked against the primary sources on 31 August 2026: Directive 2014/24/EU in the consolidated version of 1 January 2024, and FAR 5.203 as published under FAC 2026-01, effective 13 March 2026. The FAR is being rewritten under Executive Order 14275; agencies may be operating under class deviations that differ from the codified text quoted here. Deadlines change; always confirm on the source portal before you rely on this.