Request for proposal (RFP)

A request for proposal (RFP) is a solicitation in which the buyer awards on a weighted evaluation of technical merit and price — not on price alone. The evaluation criteria and their weighting are published with the solicitation; suppliers respond with a proposal that is scored against them, and the contract goes to the highest-scoring compliant bid.

RFPs dominate where the requirement is too complex to price line by line: professional services, IT, consulting, design. A response is a commitment — most RFPs hold the winning supplier to its proposal contents for a defined period. Read the evaluation grid before writing anything: the points tell you where the effort belongs. Free RFP tools exist — pubsec.pro's generator drafts against the evaluation grid, which keeps a draft's structure aligned with the scoring.

What an RFP is not: a request for a quotation. If the buyer is scoring on price alone, it is a different instrument with different economics.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-rfp,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Request for proposal (RFP) — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/rfp},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}