You have submitted twelve tenders this year. You have won four. Is that good?

Most business owners cannot answer that with any confidence. They have a rough feeling. They remember the wins clearly and the losses less so. A feeling is not a number, and a number is what you need to run a bidding business properly.

Win rate is that number. It is the single most useful figure in tendering, and most people either ignore it or work it out wrong.

Here is what it is, how to calculate it, and what to do once you have it.

What win rate actually measures

Win rate is the percentage of tenders you win out of the tenders you complete. It tells you how often your effort converts into work.

That is the whole idea. Simple to say, easy to get wrong in the detail.

The word "win" is clear enough. The word that trips people up is the denominator: the figure you divide by. Get that wrong and your win rate becomes a vanity number that flatters you, or a horror number that scares you off good work. More on that shortly.

The formula

Win rate is worked out like this:

Win rate = (tenders won ÷ tenders submitted) × 100

Say you submitted 20 tenders in a year and won 5.

  • 5 ÷ 20 = 0.25.
  • 0.25 × 100 = 25%.

Your win rate is 25%. One in four submissions turned into work.

The maths is primary school stuff. The value sits in what you count, how honestly you count it, and what you compare it against.

Count by number, and count by value

There are two win rates worth tracking, and they answer different questions.

Win rate by number counts submissions. Twenty bids, five wins, 25%. This tells you how often you win.

Win rate by value counts dollars. Add up the contract value of everything you bid for. Add up the value of what you won. Divide the second by the first.

Say you bid on work worth $4 million in total and won contracts worth $1.5 million. Your win rate by value is 37.5%, even though your win rate by number sat at 25%.

Those two figures tell a story together. A high value rate and a lower number rate means you win the big ones and lose the small ones. The reverse means you are picking up scraps and missing the contracts that would move your year. Track both. One without the other hides half the picture.

The denominator decision that changes everything

This is where most win rate calculations fall apart.

What counts as a tender you "went for"? You have three honest options, and you have to pick one and stick to it.

Submitted. Only tenders you actually lodged. This is the cleanest, and the one I recommend. It measures the quality of the bids you chose to write.

Invited. Every tender you were invited to or were eligible for, whether you bid or not. This includes the ones you walked away from. It measures your selection as much as your writing.

Pursued. Everything you seriously worked on, including bids you started and abandoned. Messy, and rarely worth the effort.

Pick "submitted" unless you have a strong reason not to. Then never quietly change it. A win rate that jumped from 20% to 45% off the back of a changed denominator is a lie you are telling yourself.

What is a "good" win rate?

Every owner wants a benchmark. The honest answer is that it depends on what you bid for and how you select.

A business that bids for everything that moves will run a low win rate, sometimes under 15%. A business that bids only for well-matched work it is set up to win can sit far higher. Neither number is "right" on its own. A 15% rate on high volume can build a bigger business than a 60% rate on three bids a year.

Be careful with the benchmarks you read online. A "50% win rate" quoted in an article usually leaves out the denominator, the sector, and the selection discipline behind it. Without those three things, the number means nothing. Your own trend over time is worth more than anyone else's headline figure.

I am not going to tell you what your win rate should be. I do not know your sector, your selection, or your capacity. What I will tell you is that measuring it consistently matters more than hitting someone else's target.

The 98.5% problem: when a win rate is snake oil

You will see the claims. One firm advertises a nine from nine win run. Another puts "98.5% success rate" across the top of its website. Both sound like proof. Both are, at best, a misrepresentation of how tendering works.

Start with the nine from nine. Nine is not a sample. It is a window. Any bid writer with a few years behind them can find a run of nine wins somewhere in their history and quote it. What sits either side of that window? You are not told. Nine wins in a row says nothing about the hundred bids around them. Ask what the denominator was over three years and watch the number fall back to earth.

Now the 98.5%. Stop and do the maths. Competitive tendering means several bidders chase one contract, and only one wins. For a firm to win 98.5% of genuinely competitive open tenders, almost every rival would have to lose almost every time. That is not how an open market behaves. A number that high is not a win rate. It is a redefinition.

Here is how the redefinition usually works, and this is where the different meanings of win rate start to matter:

  • "Success" is not the same as "won". Change the word and the number soars. "Success" might mean a compliant bid lodged on time. It might mean a happy client. It might mean shortlisted. None of those is a contract awarded, and all of them are easy to hit 98.5% of the time.
  • The denominator is self-selected. Bid only for work you were always going to get, and your rate climbs by design. Sole-supplier renewals, incumbency, panel top-ups: count those as wins and the figure inflates without a single competitive victory behind it.
  • Quotes and registrations get folded in. Every panel registration and two-line quote is counted as a bid. Lodge a thousand of those, win almost all, and 98.5% appears out of nothing.

None of that is a lie you can point at cleanly. That is the trouble with it. The number is technically defended and completely misleading. It trades on you assuming "win rate" means "we win the competitive tenders we write". The people quoting it are counting something else, and they are counting on you not asking what.

A genuine win rate on competitive, open, written tenders lives in a believable range. What that range is depends on selection and sector, as covered above. What it is not is 98.5%. When you see a number that good, the right question is not "how do they do it". It is "what are they counting".

Keep a simple bid register

You cannot calculate a win rate you did not record. A win rate built from memory is a guess.

Keep one line per tender in a spreadsheet. Date, buyer, contract value, submitted yes or no, outcome, and a note on why. Six columns. That is enough to produce both win rates, spot patterns, and settle any argument about how the year really went.

The register does a second job. Over time it shows you which types of work you win and which you keep losing. That pattern is worth more than the headline percentage.

Win rate is not the only number worth watching

Win rate answers one question: how often do you win. Two other numbers sit alongside it.

Shortlist rate is how often you make the shortlist or reach the final stage. A low win rate paired with a high shortlist rate means you get close and lose at the end. That points at your pricing or your interview, not your written bid.

Effort per win is how many hours of bidding it takes to land one contract. A 25% win rate that costs you 200 hours a win is a different business to a 25% rate that costs you 40. The percentage is the same. The economics are not.

Watch all three together and you stop guessing about where your bidding is strong and where it leaks.

The mistakes that make the number useless

A few errors turn win rate into noise.

Changing the denominator without saying so. Covered above. The most common and the most misleading.

Counting quotes as tenders. A two-line price request is not a tender. Mixing quick quotes into your tender win rate muddies both figures.

Ignoring "no decision" outcomes. Tenders that were cancelled, withdrawn, or never awarded are not losses. Strip them out. They tell you nothing about your bidding.

Measuring too small a sample. Three bids and one win is not a 33% win rate in any real sense. It is one win and two losses. You need a run of submissions before the percentage says anything. Treat small samples with suspicion.

Only looking backwards once a year. A win rate you check every twelve months is a report card. A win rate you check every quarter is a steering wheel.

What actually moves it

Here is the part that matters. Win rate is not luck. It is the output of decisions you control.

The first lever is selection. Most win rates are low for one reason: businesses bid for work they were never well placed to do. Every bad-fit bid you decline lifts your rate and frees your time for the ones worth writing. A disciplined bid or no-bid decision is the cheapest win rate improvement there is.

The second lever is evidence. Buyers score what you can prove, not what you claim. "We are experienced and reliable" scores nothing. A transition plan, a Gantt chart, a case study with numbers, a named referee: these score. Swap assertion for evidence across a submission and the same business scores far better on paper.

The third lever is answering the actual question. A surprising share of lost bids simply did not address what the buyer asked. Read the criteria. Answer them in order. Give the evaluator an easy job.

None of these guarantees a result. No one can promise you a win, and anyone who does is selling something. What these do is put your submissions in the strongest position you can control. Over a run of bids, that is what a win rate reflects.

What you control, and what you don't

This is the honest heart of it, and it is why the guarantees are worthless.

A win rate is the output of decisions you control on your side of the table. You control which tenders you bid for. You control the fit between the work and your business. You control whether you answer the criteria, and whether you bring evidence or assertion. Do those well, and consistently, and your rate reflects it over time.

You do not control the other side of the table. You do not control the buyer's budget, the scoring panel, an incumbent's home advantage, a probity ruling, a cancelled tender, or a rival pricing the work below cost to buy the contract. Those decisions belong to the buy-side. No amount of good writing overrides them.

That is the exact reason a guaranteed percentage is snake oil. To promise you a 98.5% success rate, a firm would have to control the buyer's decision. No one controls the buyer's decision. A good bid puts you in the strongest position on the variables you own, then lets the evidence do the work. Anyone selling certainty is selling you something that does not exist.

The short version

Win rate is the percentage of tenders you win out of the ones you submit. Won divided by submitted, times 100.

Track it two ways: by number and by value. Pick one denominator and never move it quietly. Strip out quotes and cancelled tenders. Give it a decent sample before you trust the percentage.

Then work the three levers you control: bid for better-fit work, replace claims with evidence, and answer the question the buyer actually asked. You control your side of the table. You do not control the buyer's, and no one who does this honestly will pretend otherwise.

When a competitor waves a nine from nine run or a 98.5% success rate at you, do not be rattled. Ask what they are counting. The answer is almost always a small sample, a self-selected denominator, or a quiet swap of "won" for "success".

Do that for a year and the number will tell you the truth about your bidding. That is the whole point of measuring it.