How long do you get to respond to a public bid?

About 24 days. That is the median time a US state or local buyer gave vendors between posting a bid and closing it, across 35,105 solicitations due from August 3 to November 1, 2026.

Half of those bids gave between about 16 and 33 days. Most run two to five weeks, and about one in seven runs shorter.

How short the short end gets

15.4% of bids closed in under 14 days, and 4.3% in under 7. At the other end, only 8% gave 45 days or more.

If your response takes a month of elapsed time, two out of three bids are already off the table: 32.7% gave 30 days or more. Cut your turnaround to three weeks and the share nearly doubles: 62.6% of bids gave 21 days or more.

The window depends on where you sell

Medians differed by about 16 days between states. West Virginia, Colorado and Michigan ran shortest at under 15 days. Georgia and Florida ran longest at 30 to 31.

Treat these as rough. The chart covers the 28 states with at least 150 measured bids, and those states hold about half of the sample. A state's figure reflects the buyers we collect there, so it is not a statewide rule. Local thresholds and the mix of cities and school districts both move it.

Why this is longer than some published figures

BidPrime reported an average of 11.7 days for 2015, covering federal, state and local bids. That is less than half our median. The two numbers measure different things: theirs is an average from a decade ago that includes federal bids, and ours is a recent state and local median. We also collect most sources weekly, so we under-count bids that open and close within days. Our figure is likely high for that reason, and we cannot say by how much.

What 24 days looks like in practice

Twenty-four calendar days is about 17 working days. This schedule assumes you see the bid on the day it posts, so take out any days you lose before you find it:

• Days 1 to 2: read the full solicitation and decide with a bid or no-bid scorecard.
• Days 3 to 7: build the compliance list, send your questions, and request subcontractor or supplier quotes.
• Days 8 to 16: draft the response and pricing, following a step-by-step RFP process.
• Days 17 to 21: review against the requirements and check every addendum.
• Days 22 to 24: finish signatures and forms, then submit early. Late or incomplete submissions are the easiest losses to avoid.

What a weekly check costs you

If you search portals once a week, a new bid waits about three days on average before you see it, and six at worst. On a 14-day bid, six days is over 40% of the window.

VelocityBids has this problem too. We collect most sources weekly and Bid Monitoring is a weekly email, so a bid can be well over a week old when it reaches you. For short bids, the best protection is registering directly with the buyers you care about, since their notices come straight from them.

Three habits help. Give one person the job and a fixed day. Say no quickly. Keep insurance certificates, references and standard forms current, so a 10-day bid is still doable.

Limits of this data

These are bids where we hold a posting date from the source more than a day before we first saw them and a window under 120 days, which is 35,105 of 65,899 bids due in the period. Due dates are the latest we recorded, so a deadline extended by addendum counts at its extended date. Federal bids are excluded, along with two portals whose terms limit how we use their data. Full rules are in how we count public bids.