Quality vs Price Explained: Tender Weightings in Practice

Public bodies are under constant pressure to prove they are getting genuine value for money, not just buying the cheapest option. Quality vs price weightings are one of the main tools they use to show that balance. On the buyer’s side, those ratios help justify decisions to stakeholders and auditors. On the bidder’s side, they should shape everything from solution design to the way each answer is structured.

Too often, though, weightings are treated as background information. Teams note the 60/40 or 70/30 split, then write broadly the same style of answers and apply the same approach to pricing as they did last time. The result is that they miss out on achieving the best score. All of this can be avoided. By treating the quality vs price split as a practical guide to how your tender will be judged, you can focus effort where it counts, present a clearer value story and make more deliberate decisions about how competitive you need to be.

Quality vs Price in Public Sector Tenders: What the Weightings Really Mean

Most public tenders set out a quality vs price weighting, often 60/40, 70/30 or similar. This shows how the final score will be split between your written quality responses and your evaluated price, once both are converted onto a common scale. Under the Procurement Act 2023, contracting authorities must award to the most advantageous tender against published award criteria, rather than simply picking the lowest price.

Authorities choose their split to reflect where they expect the main sources of value and risk to sit. Service-heavy, complex or safety critical contracts typically attract higher quality weightings. More standardised goods or tightly specified services may justify a stronger emphasis on price, because there is less scope to differentiate the solution. Government guidance stresses that these decisions, and the underlying award criteria, should be transparent and clearly linked to the outcomes the buyer is seeking.

For you, the weighting is a strategic signal. A quality-heavy tender calls for deeper solution design and highly developed written answers that track the scoring scale closely. A price-heavy tender requires very disciplined commercial modelling, supported by concise quality responses that still demonstrate credible delivery and value for money.

Quality in Public Sector Tenders

In most competitions, “quality” is not a single score. It is built from several questions and sub-criteria that sit under the quality heading, each with its own marks and guidance. Understanding what these components are, and how they are weighted, is the first step in targeting your effort.

Typical areas that contribute to your quality score include:

• Technical method and service delivery: how you will deliver the specification in practice, including resourcing, workflows and tools.
• Implementation and mobilisation: how you will manage transition, start-up risk and continuity of service.
• Risk, safeguarding and business continuity: how you identify, mitigate and monitor operational and compliance risks.
• Social value and ESG: commitments that deliver wider economic, social and environmental outcomes alongside the core service.
• Innovation and continuous improvement: how you will improve performance, efficiency and user experience over the life of the contract.
• Experience and past performance: case studies, references and evidence that you have delivered similar outcomes before.

Quality questions are where you explain how you will achieve the authority’s outcomes and why your approach is more reliable, safer or more effective than alternatives.

How Price Is Scored

Price is rarely just a single figure either. Depending on the contract, evaluators may look at total contract value, a schedule of rates, unit prices, discounts and any indexation or risk allowances. Increasingly, authorities are encouraged to assess whole life costs, not just the upfront fee, so ongoing maintenance, training and disposal may also be in scope, as highlighted in Cabinet Office guidance on assessing competitive tenders.

Most tenders explain a price scoring formula. A common approach is to give full marks to the lowest evaluated price and award other bidders a proportion of those marks based on how far above that level they are. Some authorities use variants such as price bands, capped price ranges or “price per quality point” to reduce the risk of extreme scores and support better value for money.

You will also see rules for handling abnormally low tenders. These protect buyers against unsustainable pricing and help maintain fair competition. For bidders, the key is to understand exactly how your pricing will be translated into marks, then decide how far you are willing to trade margin against additional score in the overall quality vs price balance.

Reading the Scoring Methodology

The most effective bids start before anyone opens a blank document. Once you have confirmed that the opportunity is a good fit, the next step is to read the tender pack with a very specific goal in mind: understand exactly how every mark can be earned. That means going beyond the headline 70/30 or 60/40 split and looking closely at how the quality score is constructed.

You should be clear on:

• The main award criteria and how they break down into sub-criteria.
• The marks and weighting attached to each question.
• Any minimum quality thresholds or pass or fail elements.
• The scoring scale for each question and what an excellent answer must contain.
• How individual evaluator scores will be moderated and combined.

Treat this as your blueprint. It tells you where to invest time, what the evaluators value most, and how detailed your evidence needs to be. When you understand the scoring methodology in this way, you can plan a response that targets the highest impact questions first and builds consistently towards the quality weighting the buyer has set.

Shaping Your Answers to Reflect the Quality vs Price Split

Once you know how the marks are allocated, your written answers should mirror that structure. In a quality-heavy tender, your narrative needs to do more than describe a compliant solution. It should show how your approach reduces risk, improves outcomes and creates tangible value, using the same language as the scoring scale and the evaluation criteria. Each response should lead clearly to the top score descriptor and be supported by concise, relevant evidence.

In a price-heavy tender, you still need strong quality answers, but the emphasis shifts. You are looking to demonstrate how your delivery model, resourcing and processes allow you to offer a competitive price without undermining performance. That means highlighting efficiencies, use of technology, lean processes and clear cost control, all tied back to the requirements.

Many organisations find it helpful to involve specialist writers at this stage. Our structured bid writing services focus content on what will actually be scored, align responses to the weightings and scoring scale, and remove the repetition and generalities that often dilute otherwise strong offers.

Aligning Your Pricing Strategy with the Evaluation Model

Once you understand the price scoring rules, you can work backwards from the formula and decide how competitive you need to be. If the lowest evaluated price will receive full marks and everyone else is scored as a percentage of that, even a small percentage difference in price can result in a noticeable gap in marks. In models that use bands or thresholds, the focus may be on staying inside a preferred range rather than being the absolute cheapest.

Treat pricing as another strategic design task, not a last-minute exercise. Model a few different scenarios to see how changes in margin affect your likely price score, then compare this to how confident you are of achieving top scores on quality. In many competitions, you can afford not to be the lowest-priced bidder if your quality responses are strong enough to close the gap.

You can also learn a lot from previous results. By analysing debrief letters and published score breakdowns, it is often possible to reverse engineer approximate competitor prices from the marks awarded. Our guidance on how to calculate your competitors' pricing shows how to turn this information into a clearer view of the genuine market range, so your pricing strategy is grounded in evidence rather than guesswork.

Pre-Bid Groundwork

The strongest tenders usually reflect work that started long before the documents were released. When you have thought through your solution, clarified your win themes and understood the buyer’s world in advance, it becomes much easier to respond to quality vs price weightings with confidence.

Before committing to any opportunity, it helps to step back and ask a few questions.

• Are you genuinely well placed to deliver the required outcomes better than likely competitors?
• Do you have the case studies, references and evidence to support top quality scores?
• Is there enough flexibility in your cost base to price competitively without undermining delivery?

If the honest answer to any of these is “not yet”, that is a signal to step up your preparation, not simply push harder at the writing stage.

Disciplined pre-bid work can make a significant difference. Activities such as mapping decision-makers and stakeholders, stress-testing your service model, rehearsing responses to common quality themes, and agreeing a pricing strategy in advance all help you move quickly when an opportunity goes live. By the time the invitation to tender arrives, you are then using the quality vs price weighting to fine-tune a well prepared approach, rather than trying to build a competitive solution from scratch under time pressure.

Using MAT and Value for Money to Your Advantage

Quality vs price weightings sit within a wider question: which offer represents the best overall value. Under the Procurement Act 2023, authorities are expected to award to the Most Advantageous Tender, taking account of both quality and price, rather than simply selecting the lowest bid. That shifts the focus to how convincingly you can show that your proposed approach and commercial package together deliver better outcomes than the alternatives.

In practice, this means using your quality responses to tell a clear value-for-money story. Explain how your delivery model reduces risk, improves performance and generates benefits that matter to the buyer, then connect those points to the way you have structured your pricing. Where possible, quantify impacts in terms of avoided costs, efficiency savings, social value or whole life benefits.

When you bring quality, price and outcomes together in this way, you are no longer treating the weighting as a constraint. Instead, you are using it as a framework to present a rounded, evidence-based case for why your bid should finish at the top of the ranking.

Building Internal Capability with Training and Support from Bid Experts

Handling quality vs price weightings well is a skill that can be learned, practised and embedded. Organisations that win consistently tend to have a clear process for assessing opportunities, interpreting evaluation models, designing solutions and translating all of that into concise, compelling answers. They also make sure that commercial leads and technical experts understand how their decisions will play out in the scoring.

External support can accelerate this journey. Bringing in experienced writers on key opportunities helps teams see what “score-focused” content looks like in practice, and how it differs from standard marketing or operational text. Targeted bid mentoring can then build on this by coaching in-house staff through live tenders, giving real-time feedback on how well draft answers track the scoring scale and reflect the quality vs price split.

For longer term capability, structured bid writing courses provide a way to upskill a wider group. Training can cover topics such as interpreting tender documents, planning responses against question weightings, writing for evaluation panels and working effectively with commercial colleagues on pricing. Over time, this combination of hands-on support and formal learning embeds a consistent, confident approach to quality vs price across your bidding activity.

Quality vs Price FAQs

Is quality more important than price in public sector tenders?
Neither is “more important” in isolation. What matters is how the contracting authority has weighted quality vs price and how those scores are combined. In a 70/30 tender, quality will have greater influence on the final mark, but a weak or unrealistic price can still undermine your position.

What is a good quality vs price split?
There is no single “ideal” split. A higher quality weighting is normal where service delivery and outcomes carry significant risk or complexity. A higher price weighting is more common for standardised, tightly specified goods and services. The key is to decide whether you can be competitive given the split and how it aligns with your strengths.

How can we compete if our prices are higher than competitors?
You do not always need to be the cheapest bidder to win. If the tender is quality-heavy and your written responses achieve top scores, a modestly higher price can still result in the highest overall mark. The task is to show how your approach delivers better value for money, supported by robust evidence and a clearly explained commercial model.

Can we challenge or clarify quality vs price weightings?
You cannot usually challenge a weighting simply because it does not suit your business model, but you can ask clarification questions if the rationale, criteria or scoring approach are unclear. Raising sensible questions early can help buyers refine their documentation, which benefits all bidders and reduces the risk of a flawed process.

How can we tell if we lost on quality or price?
Debrief information should give you a breakdown of scores across quality and price. Comparing this with your original interpretation of the documents often highlights where your assumptions were off. It helps to revisit how you approached evaluating tender documents at the outset, so you can adjust how you read future competitions and strengthen both your pricing strategy and written responses.

Putting Everything into Practice on Your Next Tender

Quality vs price weightings describe how every mark in a competition will be earned and give you early clues about the buyer’s priorities and risk appetite. When you take the time to understand the evaluation model, map out where the marks sit and plan your solution around that structure, you move from reacting to the tender to using it as a framework for a deliberate bid strategy.

In practice, this means three things. First, deciding where you can realistically score highest and shaping your narrative, evidence and pricing to maximise those strengths. Second, being honest about gaps and either addressing them early or stepping away from opportunities where you are unlikely to compete. Third, treating each competition as a learning opportunity, using debriefs and score breakdowns to refine your approach for the next bid.

You don't need to do this alone. The specialists at Thornton & Lowe can help you to interpret complex scoring models, balance quality vs price for specific opportunities and translate all of that into focused, compelling tender responses. With our team by your side, you can start to approach each tender in a more considered, strategic and confident way, with a clearer route to winning more contracts.