Mandatory requirement

A mandatory requirement is a pass/fail criterion in a solicitation: meet it exactly or the bid is disqualified, whatever the strengths of the rest. Mandatories are marked with their own vocabulary — must, shall — and listed separately from rated criteria.

Read them as contract conditions, not aspirations. If a mandatory asks for five years of comparable experience, four years and enthusiasm fails. If it sets a delivery date, a caveat fails. The professional response is binary verification: for each mandatory, can you point to the specific evidence — the certificate, the project, the number — in your own records? Where the honest answer is no, the decision is not to word-smith around it; it is bid/no-bid. Maximum scores elsewhere cannot buy back a failed gate.

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