How your tender is scored: understanding MEAT

Almost every meaningful public contract in Ireland is awarded on MEAT. Understand it, and you understand why the cheapest bid so often loses — and where your effort really belongs.

Almost every meaningful public contract in Ireland is awarded on the basis of MEAT — the Most Economically Advantageous Tender. If you understand nothing else about procurement scoring, understand this, because it explains why the cheapest bid so often loses.

MEAT means the contract is awarded on a combination of quality and price, not price alone. The tender documents will state the weighting split — for example 60% quality and 40% price, or 70/30, or whatever the contracting authority has decided is right for that job. Both halves are scored, and the two scores are combined to produce your overall mark. The weightings are published in advance and cannot be changed after bids come in.

Two consequences follow from this, and both are routinely missed.

First: cheapest does not win. If quality is worth 60% of the marks, you can lose the contract to a more expensive competitor who wrote a stronger quality submission. Price gets you the price marks; it does nothing for the 60% sitting in the quality section. Firms that bid low and write a thin quality response are quietly throwing away the majority of the available marks.

Second: the quality section is where tenders are actually decided. Price is relatively fixed — you can only sharpen your number so far, and everyone is bidding on the same scope. Quality is where the real spread appears, because the difference between a generic answer and an evidenced one can be several bands. When people say "we don't know why we lost, our price was keen," they are usually describing a quality submission that scored far below what they assumed.

Price is typically scored by formula — commonly the lowest compliant bid takes full price marks and everyone else is scored relative to it. You cannot out-argue a price formula. But the quality marks are the ones genuinely in your control, and they are usually the larger share. That is where your effort belongs.

The practical takeaway: read the weightings on the first day, before you write a word. They tell you exactly where the marks are — and therefore exactly where your time should go.

This guide is general in nature. Every tender is governed by its own published award criteria — always read and answer against the specific Request for Tender in front of you.