Primers/Primer 02
RFP, RFQ, RFI, tender — what each one means
| Document | What the buyer wants | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| RFI (Request for Information) | Market research. No contract will be awarded. | Worth answering cheaply: it shapes the eventual requirement and puts you on the buyer's radar. |
| RFQ (Request for Quotation) | Price-driven purchase, usually lower value and faster. | Best effort-to-win ratio for small suppliers. Respond precisely; evaluation is mostly price. |
| RFP (Request for Proposal) | Combined technical + price evaluation against weighted criteria. | Where proposal craft matters. Read the evaluation grid before writing a word. |
| Tender / ITT | Formal competitive solicitation with binding terms. | Strict compliance regimes; disqualification for format errors is common. |
The rule that matters. In an RFP, the evaluation grid is the entire game. If technical capability is weighted 70% and price 30%, a cheaper competitor with a weaker submission cannot beat you — and vice versa. Most losing proposals are written against what the bidder wanted to say, not what the grid scores.
Where each document lives in the value distribution. The federal record's size profile tells you where the volume is: 46.0% of classified awards were under $25,000 and a further 30.4% fell between $25,000 and $100,000 — 76.4% of all awards under $100,000. That is RFQ territory: fast, price-led, and voluminous. Full RFP process earns its cost in the 19.0% of awards between $100,000 and $1 million and the 4.0% between $1 million and $10 million. Matching document type to band is half of effort budgeting; Primer 07 develops it.
Practice this against live opportunities with
Cite this page
The Procurement Institution. (2026). RFP, RFQ, RFI, tender — what each one means — Primer. https://procurementinstitution.org/primers/rfp-vs-rfq-vs-tender
@misc{pi-2026-primers-rfp-vs-rfq-vs-tender,
author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
title = {RFP, RFQ, RFI, tender — what each one means — Primer},
year = {2026},
url = {https://procurementinstitution.org/primers/rfp-vs-rfq-vs-tender},
note = {Release 2026.10}
}