How to pitch for a public architecture commission in Europe

TenderDesk · 12 Oct 2026 · 19 min read

public procurement architecture tenders design contests bid writing award criteria

Public design commissions are won in three pitches: the shortlist, the tender and the interview. Here is how buyers score each one, with 2026 thresholds and country rules.

To win a public architecture commission in Europe you usually pitch three times. First comes a short expression of interest that gets you shortlisted on references and capacity. Then a tender, sometimes with a design, scored against published award criteria. Often there is also an interview where the people who will do the work defend it. Each stage is scored separately against criteria the buyer has already published, so your job is to give evaluators the evidence they ask for, in the order they ask for it.

Key points

Most above-threshold design commissions are let through a restricted procedure, a competitive procedure with negotiation or a design contest. Each one has a shortlist stage before anyone looks at your ideas or your fee.
From 1 January 2026 the EU threshold for design services and design contests is €216,000 for regional and local buyers and €140,000 for central government (excluding VAT).
Selection and award are different tests. Selection asks "can this firm do it?" (turnover, insurance, references). Award asks "which offer is best?" (quality and price, with weightings that must be published).
Price rarely decides on its own. Germany does not allow a pure price competition for planning services, Spain gives quality at least 51% of the points for intellectual services, and Italy caps the price score at 30% for engineering and architecture services from €140,000.
References win shortlists when they match the building type, size and client type of the commission. They lose when they only show how good your portfolio is in general.
At interview, buyers score the named people. The project lead should do most of the talking.
Most lost points come from not answering the question asked: generic text, ignored page limits, missing sub-criteria and fees that look abnormally low.

How public buyers choose an architect

The procedures you will meet

Directive 2014/24/EU gives public buyers a short menu. National laws copy it with their own names.

Restricted procedure (Article 28). Anyone can ask to take part. The buyer shortlists at least five candidates on selection criteria and invites only them to tender. There is no negotiation.
Competitive procedure with negotiation (Article 29). Same shortlist logic, but the minimum is three candidates, and the buyer can negotiate on initial tenders. This is the normal route for architecture in Germany (Verhandlungsverfahren mit Teilnahmewettbewerb) and in the Flemish Open Oproep. It is where interviews and presentations most often appear.
Design contest (Articles 78–82). A jury judges anonymous design proposals. Afterwards the buyer can award the service contract by negotiated procedure without prior publication to the winner, or to one of the winners (Article 32(4)). France makes a restricted concours the default for most new public buildings above the threshold.
Competitive dialogue (Article 30). Rare for buildings; used for complex regeneration schemes.
Open procedure (Article 27). Everyone tenders in full. Common below the threshold; sector guidance discourages it for design work because of the total bidding cost.

The minimum shortlist sizes come from Article 65(2): five for restricted procedures and three for negotiated procedures and dialogue. Buyers must state the minimum, and the maximum if there is one, in the notice. A notice that says "maximum five candidates" tells you roughly what your odds are at stage two.

Thresholds that decide which rules apply (2026)

Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152 set the thresholds for 2026–2027, excluding VAT:

Contract	2024–2025	From 1 January 2026
Services and design contests, central government	€143,000	€140,000
Services and design contests, sub-central buyers	€221,000	€216,000
Works	€5,538,000	€5,404,000

Most architecture fees come from municipalities, regions, housing bodies and hospitals, which are sub-central buyers. So €216,000 is the number to remember. Below it, national rules apply: France's MAPA, Italian direct awards and the Spanish contrato menor thresholds are all lighter, faster and more local.

The UK left the EU regime. Under the Procurement Act 2023, which went live on 24 February 2025, the thresholds from 1 January 2026 are £207,720 for sub-central services and £135,018 for central government. These figures include VAT.

What changes by country

The directive sets the frame, but national rules decide how much your fee counts and whether you will be drawing before you are shortlisted.

Country	Usual route for design services above threshold	What it means for your pitch
France	Restricted concours followed by negotiation with the winner (R2172-2 CCP). Exemptions include rehabilitation, infrastructure and, since 22 February 2026, local-authority needs under €300,000 excl. VAT.	Compliant entrants receive a prime of at least 80% of the estimated study cost. At least a third of the jury must hold the qualification required of entrants. Selection rests on references and the team.
Germany	Verhandlungsverfahren mit Teilnahmewettbewerb (§ 17 VgV), often after a Planungswettbewerb	Planning services are awarded on quality (§ 76 VgV), so a pure price competition is not permitted. After a competition, the Architektenkammer NRW considers a weighting of about 50% for the competition result appropriate in most cases.
Italy	Best price-quality ratio (OEPV) is mandatory at €140,000 and above (art. 108 D.Lgs. 36/2023)	Since the 2024 corrective decree, 65% of the fee calculated from the official parameters is fixed, only 35% can be discounted, and the price score is capped at 30% (art. 41(15-bis)).
Spain	Open or restricted procedure. Concurso de proyectos for complex projects	Quality criteria must carry at least 51% of the points for intellectual services, architecture included (art. 145.4 LCSP). Contest prizes and payments are set in the contest rules.
Netherlands	Non-public (restricted) procedure, recommended by the sector guidance Kompas light	Award on best price-quality ratio (beste prijs-kwaliteitverhouding). A vision or design presentation is common at award stage.
Belgium	In Flanders, the Open Oproep (competitive procedure with negotiation)	Example: shortlisting on a 2,000-character motivation note (40%) and three references (60%). Award on design vision 60%, working method 20%, investment optimisation 20%.
United Kingdom	Competitive flexible procedure or open procedure under the Procurement Act 2023	Award goes to the "most advantageous tender". Losing bidders get an assessment summary, and standstill is at least 8 working days.

Switzerland (SIA 142 competitions and SIA 143 study contracts, published on simap.ch), Portugal (concurso de conceção and public tenders on the national platforms) and Luxembourg follow the same two-step logic: first prove you can do it, then show how you would.

What "pitching" means at each stage

Stage 1: the expression of interest (selection)

This is the PQQ, the candidature, the Teilnahmeantrag or the selectieleidraad response. You are not yet competing on ideas. You are competing to be one of three to seven firms on the shortlist. The buyer checks three things:

Exclusion grounds: no convictions, no tax or social-security arrears, no insolvency. This is pass/fail, declared on the ESPD or its national version (DC1/DC2 in France, DGUE in Italy and Spain, Eigenerklärungen in Germany, the Uniform Europees Aanbestedingsdocument in the Netherlands). See our guide to the ESPD and admin pack.
Minimum requirements: turnover (the directive caps a turnover requirement at twice the contract value, unless justified), professional indemnity insurance, professional registration and a minimum number of comparable projects. Also pass/fail.
Ranking criteria used to cut the field down to the shortlist. Usually these are the quality and relevance of a set number of references, sometimes a short motivation note, sometimes the team's qualifications.

Pitching here means ranking well on point 3. Most firms that clear the minimums lose at this step because their references are good in general but not good for this brief.

Stage 2: the tender, or the design

Shortlisted firms receive the invitation to tender (or the contest rules) with the brief, draft contract, award criteria and weightings. What you submit depends on the procedure:

Negotiated or restricted procedure: a methodology or approach note, team and organisation, programme, and a fee. Sometimes a "vision" or sketch ideas, depending on how much the buyer asks.
Design contest: an anonymous design proposal (boards, a short report, sometimes a model or a cost estimate). The jury ranks it without knowing who you are.

The detailed mechanics of writing this stage are in how to write a winning tender response.

Stage 3: the interview or presentation

Interviews are most common in negotiated procedures. In Germany the Verhandlungsgespräch is often itself scored, and the Flemish Open Oproep builds its award around team presentations to a broad jury. In a design contest the jury may invite candidates to answer questions it has recorded in the minutes, but only to clarify aspects of the projects (Article 82(5) of the directive).

In a negotiated procedure, the interview is where the buyer tests whether the team on paper is the team that will turn up.

How evaluators score you

MEAT and the price-quality weighting

Contracts are awarded to the "most economically advantageous tender" (Article 67), almost always judged on the best price-quality ratio. Two rules matter to you:

Weightings must be published in the procurement documents (Article 67(5)), either as figures or as a range. If you cannot find them, ask a clarification question. Do not guess.
The team itself can be an award criterion. Article 67(2)(b) allows "organisation, qualification and experience of staff assigned to performing the contract" where staff quality affects performance. The Court of Justice confirmed this in Ambisig (C-601/13, 2015). So the people you name at award stage are scored, not just listed.

Some countries limit how much price can count (see the table above). Elsewhere, weightings are set notice by notice. For design services, quality usually carries most of the score, often 60–80%, because the buyer knows the fee is a small share of the lifetime cost of the building. Check each notice; do not assume.

Worked example: how weighting changes the winner

A municipality tenders a design commission for a primary school. Two shortlisted practices score as follows on quality, out of 70 raw points:

Practice A: quality 52/70, fee €180,000
Practice B: quality 45/70, fee €150,000

Price is scored with the common "lowest price ÷ tendered price × maximum points" formula.

At 70% quality / 30% price:

A: quality 52.0 + price (150/180 × 30) 25.0 = 77.0
B: quality 45.0 + price 30.0 = 75.0

A wins despite a fee 20% higher.

At 60% quality / 40% price (the raw quality score is rescaled to 60):

A: quality 44.6 + price (150/180 × 40) 33.3 = 77.9
B: quality 38.6 + price 40.0 = 78.6

B wins.

Two lessons follow. Read the weighting before you set the fee: at 30% price, cutting your fee buys very little. And a seven-point gap in quality is roughly one sub-criterion done properly, which is where your effort pays. The pricing side is covered in how to price a fee proposal.

How to read the award criteria

Treat the award criteria as the table of contents for your submission:

List every criterion and sub-criterion with its weight. Write the points available next to each.
Find the scoring scale. It is often 0–5 or 0–10 with descriptors such as "fully meets", "exceeds with added value", "insufficient". Note what the top band asks for. It is usually "specific to this project", "evidenced" and "with clear benefits for the client".
Allocate pages or characters in proportion to weight. If "approach to user consultation" is worth 15% and "BIM protocol" 5%, the first gets three times the space.
Use the buyer's headings and numbering, in the buyer's order. Evaluators often score with the sheet open beside your document. Make it easy for them to find each answer.
Look for hidden priorities in the brief, the buyer's strategy documents and the funding source. If the brief says "community use outside school hours" three times, treat it as a scoring theme.

Building the submission

The team page

The team page is scored twice: at selection (capability) and at award (staff experience). Make it work for both.

Name the people who will do the work, with their roles for this project: project lead, project architect, lead designer, and the engineering and cost consultants. Buyers increasingly write key-person clauses into the contract, so do not name a director you will not commit.
Show the organisation chart for the project, not your office structure. Show who the client talks to, who leads each discipline, and how decisions flow.
Give each key person three lines of relevant experience: projects they personally led, their stage and the outcome.
Show capacity. State the percentage of time each key person will spend on the project and what else they have on. Evaluators worry that small practices will be stretched.
Show the whole team, partners included. If you rely on an engineer's turnover or references to qualify, they must also appear in the ESPD. See choosing an engineering partner and lead firm, consortium or subcontracting.

References that match the building type

At shortlist stage, references often carry most of the score. In the Flemish example above they carry 60%. What evaluators look for:

Same building type: a school for a school, housing for housing. Adjacent types count less and need a sentence explaining why the experience transfers.
Similar scale and budget. A €2 million pavilion does not prove you can run a €15 million campus. If your best match is smaller, say what about it is comparable: complexity, phasing, occupied site.
Recent. The directive's default look-back for services is three years, though buyers can accept older work and many do for buildings. Check whether the window runs from completion or from the end of your mission.
Your role, stated plainly. Say which stages you delivered, as lead or as sub-consultant. Evaluators check, and some call the referee.
Results: on budget, on programme, an energy performance figure, user satisfaction, awards. One verifiable result beats three adjectives.

If you do not have a matching reference, bid with a partner who does. Past teams, professional chambers and the verified practices directory are the usual places to look. The other option is to bid as a sub-consultant this time, so that next time you will have one. That is a go/no-go question; see go / no-go: which tenders to chase.

The methodology note

This is where most of the quality points sit, and where most practices write their weakest text. A strong note is specific to the brief: if the cover were removed, a reader could still tell which project it was written for. For each theme, say what you understand, what you will do (by stage: RIBA Plan of Work, loi MOP phases, HOAI Leistungsphasen), why it matters to this client, and where you have done it before. The full method, with a worked example, is in how to write a winning tender response.

Keep sketches and design ideas strictly to what the documents allow. Some buyers want a "vision"; others say plainly that design proposals will not be considered. The Flemish selection guide quoted above says exactly that.

In a design contest

The contest is a different pitch. The jury sees boards, not people. Three rules:

Protect anonymity. No logos, recognisable signature graphics or names in file metadata. A breach can mean exclusion.
Answer the programme first, then impress. Juries eliminate schemes that miss key areas, access or budget before they discuss architecture.
Make the cost credible. Many contests include a cost estimate or an independent cost check. A beautiful scheme 30% over budget rarely wins the negotiation that follows.

In France the prime (see the table above) makes a shortlisted concours partly paid work. In Germany the competition result then often carries about half the award weighting.

Interview technique

Before the interview

Find out the format: length (30–60 minutes is common), the split between presentation and questions, who is on the panel and whether the interview is scored. Ask if the notice does not say.
Bring the named team. If the scored criterion is "experience of the project lead", the project lead presents. Turning up with a director the panel has never seen on paper costs trust.
Rehearse against the scoring sheet. Each part of the presentation should map to a criterion. Time it. Cut anything that does not score.
Prepare for the hard questions: budget control, what happens if the project lead leaves, planning risk, and how much work your partner does, and from where.

In the room

Open with the client's problem, not your history. Spend one slide on who you are and the rest on their project.
Show one or two decisions, not twenty images. A short story about how you solved a comparable problem is more convincing than a portfolio flick-through.
Let each discipline lead speak for a minute, so the panel sees a team that has worked together.
Answer the question asked, then stop. If you do not know, say how and when you will find out.

After the interview

Write down every question and your answer: in a negotiated procedure they become commitments in your revised offer. Whatever the outcome, ask for the debrief (see the FAQ below).

What loses points

Generic text. Methodology copied from the last bid scores in the middle band at best.
Ignoring page and character limits. Pages beyond the limit are usually not read. Some buyers treat the breach as a compliance failure.
Missing a sub-criterion. If it is weighted and you do not address it under its own heading, it can score zero.
References that do not match, or whose dates or your role cannot be verified.
A team that changes between stages. Swapping a key person after shortlisting usually needs the buyer's approval and may be refused.
An abnormally low fee. Buyers must ask you to explain a price that looks abnormally low (Article 69) and can reject it if the explanation does not hold.
Admin and upload errors: unsigned forms, a missing partner ESPD, the wrong signature format, a late upload. Cheap to avoid, fatal to miss.

A typical timeline

Step	Legal minimum (directive)	Typical in practice
Notice published to request to participate deadline	30 days (restricted and negotiated; can be shortened to 15 days if urgent)	4–6 weeks
Shortlist decision	No minimum	2–6 weeks
Invitation to tender to submission	30 days. Sub-central buyers may agree a deadline with all candidates; without agreement, at least 10 days	4–8 weeks. 8–12 weeks for a design contest
Interviews and negotiation	No minimum	2–6 weeks after submission
Award decision to contract signature	Standstill: 10 days for electronic notice in the EU (Remedies Directive); 8 working days in the UK	2–4 weeks

Plan on three to six months from notice to signed appointment for a shortlisted procedure, and more for a contest with a negotiation after it. Notices appear on TED for above-threshold contracts and on national portals (BOAMP, Bund.de and DTVP, PLACSP, TenderNed, e-Procurement in Belgium, simap.ch, Find a Tender). The open tender feed gathers design notices from these sources, and the TenderDesk feed scores each one by how much of a real design commission it is.

Checklist

Before you decide to bid

Procedure identified (restricted, negotiated, contest, open) and the maximum shortlist size noted
Contract value checked against the threshold (€216,000 sub-central / €140,000 central, excl. VAT, 2026)
Minimum requirements checked: turnover, insurance, registration, number and age of references
At least two references matching building type, scale and client type, or a partner who has them
Award criteria and weightings found. If missing, a clarification question sent
Bid budget set in hours

Expression of interest

ESPD or national forms completed for every team member relied on
References chosen and written for this brief: type, scale, budget, your role, dates, results
Motivation note (if asked) specific to the site and the client's goals
Character, page and image limits respected

Tender

Response structured with the buyer's headings, in the buyer's order
Space allocated in proportion to the weightings
Every sub-criterion answered under its own heading
Named team with roles, time allocation and project organisation chart
Methodology: understanding, steps, benefit, evidence for each theme
Fee built bottom-up and tested against the price formula
Design content only as far as the documents allow. Anonymity checked in a contest
Read-through against the scoring sheet; uploaded a day early

Interview

Format, length and panel confirmed
Named team attends. Project lead presents most of it
Presentation mapped to criteria and rehearsed against the clock
Answers ready for budget, staffing and partner questions

After

Debrief requested in writing (Article 55(2), within 15 days) or assessment summary reviewed (UK)
Lessons and scores logged for the next bid

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between selection and award criteria?

Selection criteria test the firm: its financial standing, insurance, registration and track record. They decide who gets on the shortlist. Award criteria test the offer: methodology, team, design, fee. They decide who wins. The Court of Justice has held that general experience of the firm belongs to selection. The experience of the specific people assigned to the contract can be an award criterion.

Do I have to produce a design to win a public commission?

Not always. In a design contest, yes: the jury judges anonymous proposals. In restricted and negotiated procedures, many buyers ask only for a methodology, team and fee, sometimes with a short "vision". Some forbid design proposals outright. Read the documents and do only what is asked and scored.

How much does the fee count?

That depends on the notice and the country, but weightings must be published and, for design services, quality usually carries most of the points. Spain requires at least 51% for quality on intellectual services, Italy caps the price score at 30% from €140,000, and Germany does not allow a pure price competition for planning services. Run the buyer's price formula on your fee before you submit.

Are architects paid to take part in design contests?

Often, but it depends on the country and the procedure. In France, every entrant whose submission complies with the contest rules receives a prime of at least 80% of the estimated cost of the studies requested. In Spain, any prizes or payments are set out in the contest rules (bases). Elsewhere it varies, so check the contest rules before you commit design time.

Can a small practice win against large firms?

Yes, if its references match the brief and its team shows enough capacity. Small practices lose most often at the shortlist stage, on turnover or reference minimums. Partnering with an engineer or a larger practice can fill those gaps. The directive allows you to rely on the capacities of other firms, as long as they are declared and committed.

What should I do after losing a tender?

Ask for a debrief in writing. In the EU you are entitled to the characteristics and relative advantages of the winning tender within 15 days of a written request; in the UK you receive an assessment summary. Compare your scores criterion by criterion and fix the weakest section before the next bid.