Award criteria (Zuschlagskriterien)
also: award criteria · evaluation criteria · Zuschlagskriterien
Award criteria (German: Zuschlagskriterien) are the yardsticks, announced in advance, by which a contracting authority identifies the most economically advantageous tender among the admissible bids. That tender is determined on the basis of the best price-quality ratio; alongside price, quality, technical merit, the organisation and qualification of the staff assigned to perform the contract, delivery conditions and environmental or social aspects may all count, provided they are linked to the subject matter of the contract. The criteria and their weighting must be stated in the notice or in the procurement documents before bids are received, and may not be changed afterwards.
Award criteria and their weighting almost always live in the procurement documents and only exceptionally in the structured notice. We therefore do not measure them and publish no figure here — an estimated one would be worse than none.
What it means for a bidder
The most common misconception is that the lowest price wins. It wins only where the authority has made price the sole criterion — usual for standardised supplies, rare for services and not permitted for design work. Where a scoring matrix applies, points decide, and the formula used to convert price into points (linear interpolation, median or reference-value methods) sometimes affects the outcome more than the bid does. That formula sits in the procurement documents; reading it before costing the bid is the cheapest improvement available to a bidder.
The second point is the boundary with selection. What a company can generally do belongs to the selection stage; what it specifically offers for this contract belongs to the evaluation. Scoring corporate references twice — once as suitability, once as an award criterion — is not permitted. Scoring the qualifications of the particular team that will perform the contract is.
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