Submission deadline (Angebotsfrist)
also: submission deadline · tender deadline · Angebotsfrist
The submission deadline is the moment by which bids must have reached the contracting authority; what counts is arrival on the procurement platform, not dispatch. A bid that arrives late must be excluded — regardless of the reason and regardless of how short the delay is. Procurement law prescribes minimum time limits per procedure type, which the authority may extend and may shorten only under narrow conditions.
29% of all submission deadlines in our corpus fall on a Monday — by a wide margin the most common weekday. Measured across 93,519 open procedures, that means the last full working day before the deadline is usually a Friday.
What it means for a bidder
Above the thresholds the minimum in an open procedure is 35 days from dispatch of the notice, or 30 days where bids are submitted electronically; 15 days are possible after a prior information notice and likewise in a duly substantiated case of urgency. Below the thresholds no fixed figures apply — the period must be adequate, measured against the scope and complexity of the work. The submission deadline should not be confused with the deadline for requests to participate in two-stage procedures, nor with the deadline for bidder questions, which regularly falls considerably earlier.
The practical advice follows from the automatic exclusion: the last hour before the deadline is the most dangerous of the whole procedure. Signature failures, upload size limits and time zones are the classic causes of late bids, and the authority is not allowed to cure them. Upload a day early and you can still correct something; upload an hour early and you can only hope.
Look it up in the corpus
Related terms
DEFINITION · a description of the law with a citation, not legal advice · FIGURE · from nightly-built aggregates of our own corpus · all terms: friedrich-clement.com/en/glossar