Bid

A bid is a supplier's formal, binding response to a solicitation. Depending on the document it answers it may be called a tender, a proposal, or a quotation — in every case the bid is the offer the buyer is legally entitled to accept.

Two properties define a bid. It must be responsive — submitted before the deadline, in the required format, meeting every mandatory requirement; failures usually discard it before scoring. And it is binding — in tendering, a submitted bid generally cannot be withdrawn or altered after closing. Buyers count bids as the measure of competition: in Québec's compiled record 67.4% of tenders drew exactly one bid, and a one-bid field behaves very differently from a five-bid one. A supplier's long-run economics are set less by wins than by which bids were worth submitting at all.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-bid,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Bid — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/bid},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}