Ten day tenders are legal. That does not make them a good idea
The planned procurement notice is one of the quieter parts of the Procurement Act 2023, and it is easy to read it as an administrative box. It is not. Published in the right window, it unlocks a tendering period as short as ten days. Published carelessly, or leaned on after the requirement has changed, it creates a timing decision an authority may struggle to defend. The interesting thing about the guidance is how permissive it is: qualifying status gives you an option, and almost every hard question is about whether you should take it.
The mechanism is simple, the timing is not
The rule itself takes one sentence. Publish a planned procurement notice at least 40 days and no longer than one year before the tender notice, and it becomes a qualifying planned procurement notice. Having done that, the authority may reduce the tendering period to a minimum of ten days.
What makes this hard in practice is that the decision has to be taken long before the pressure that would justify it arrives. Nobody knows in month one that the tender in month eight will be squeezed by a funding deadline. So the teams that benefit are the ones that publish planned procurement notices as a matter of routine on significant requirements, not the ones that go looking for the option when the diary is already broken.
The other half of the timing trap is the upper bound. A notice published fourteen months out does not qualify. Early is good, but early has a limit, and the limit is a year.
What most organisations get wrong
The first mistake is publishing a hollow notice. Regulation 16 asks for much of the information that would appear in the tender notice, to the extent it is known. That qualifier is a reasonable allowance for genuine uncertainty, not a licence to publish a title and a category code. A notice with nothing in it tells the market nothing, which defeats the stated purpose of giving as much advance information as possible.
The second is drift. Requirements move between an early notice and a tender, and the guidance draws the line with a deliberately blunt example: a notice about photocopiers followed by a procurement for computers. That is not a refinement, it is a different procurement, and the original notice cannot carry it. Most real cases are less obvious, which is exactly why somebody should be asked the question in writing before the tender notice goes out.
The third is treating ten days as the answer rather than the floor. The Act asks contracting authorities to have regard to the covered procurement objectives in section 12, including removing or reducing the barriers small and medium sized enterprises face. A ten day window on a requirement that needs partners, pricing and evidence gathered is a filter that favours whoever already has a bid on the shelf.
What suppliers should do about it
For suppliers the change is a shift in where the useful signal lives. Planned procurement notices go on the central digital platform, and they are published somewhere between 40 days and a year before the tender they describe. That is a real window in which to ask questions, form partnerships and get internal approvals moving.
If your monitoring starts at the tender notice, you are betting that every buyer will give you a comfortable period. Some will not, and they are entitled not to. On a procurement with a ten day period, the work that decides the outcome happened before the tender was advertised.
The practical response is to watch planned procurement notices in your categories with the same seriousness as live tenders, and to treat each one as a dated prompt rather than background noise.
The version of this that works
A workable approach looks like this. Publish planned procurement notices routinely on procurements of any scale, with enough content to be useful. Keep the publication dates somewhere reliable, because the qualifying test is arithmetic on two dates and nothing else. Before the tender notice, check the requirement against the notice and write down the conclusion.
Then choose the tendering period on the merits. Use the reduction where the market is well briefed and the requirement is genuinely understood, and choose longer where it is not. Recorded that way, a short period is a defensible commercial judgement rather than a shortcut, and the notice has done the job it was designed to do.
The takeaways
- A planned procurement notice qualifies only if published at least 40 days and no more than one year before the tender notice.
- Qualifying status lets you reduce the tendering period to a minimum of ten days, but it never obliges you to.
- It cannot be used for dynamic markets, framework awards or direct awards.
- If the requirement changes substantially, the original notice cannot support a reduced period.
- Suppliers should treat planned procurement notices on the central digital platform as their real early warning system.
Want the full breakdown?
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