MEAT scoring, explained with a worked example
What MEAT means in Irish public tenders — how quality and price weightings work, a worked scoring matrix, and how to read a marking scheme.
What MEAT actually means
MEAT stands for Most Economically Advantageous Tender. It is how nearly every Irish public contract is awarded: the buyer publishes a set of award criteria with weightings, scores each compliant bid against them, and awards to the highest total. It replaced pure lowest-price awards for anything where quality matters — which is most things. The buyer is not asking “who is cheapest?” but “who offers the best mix of quality and price for this specific job?”
That one change is why bid writing is a skill worth having. Under lowest-price, your spreadsheet decides. Under MEAT, your answers decide — and the marking scheme that governs them is published in the RFT before you write a word. Most losing bidders never read it properly. Reading it is the single highest-return habit in tendering, and it is where a good bid-writing process starts.
How quality and price weightings work
The RFT splits the available marks between criteria. A common split is 60% quality and 40% price, though you will see anything from 50/50 to 80/20 depending on how much the buyer cares about how the work is done versus what it costs. Quality is then usually broken into sub-criteria — methodology, team, quality assurance, and so on — each with its own marks. Here is what a typical matrix looks like:
| Criterion | Weighting | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| Methodology & approach | 25% | A specific plan for this contract — not a generic capability statement |
| Team & experience | 20% | Named people, relevant qualifications, comparable past contracts |
| Quality assurance & risk | 10% | How you catch problems before the buyer does |
| Environmental / social | 5% | Concrete measures, not policy boilerplate |
| Price | 40% | Usually scored relative to the lowest compliant bid |
Illustrative matrix. Every RFT publishes its own criteria and weightings — read yours.
Price is usually scored by formula rather than judgement. A common one gives the lowest compliant price full marks, with everyone else scored proportionally — lowest price divided by your price, times the marks available. The RFT states the exact formula, and it is worth working through: it tells you precisely what a price cut is worth in marks, which you can then weigh against what a better answer is worth. Often the answer is that two extra marks on methodology beat a five per cent price cut.
Scored questions vs pass/fail
Not everything in a tender pack earns marks, and confusing the two wastes effort. A pass/fail requirement is a gate: tax clearance (mandatory for Irish public contracts), minimum insurance levels, turnover thresholds, the ESPD declarations. Meet it and you stay in; miss it and you are out, no matter how good your answers are. Writing three beautiful pages about your insurance arrangements earns exactly zero marks — attach the certificate and move on.
A scored question is different: an evaluator will read it, hold it against the marking scheme, and give it a number. Those numbers decide the contract. So the working rule is simple — satisfy the pass/fail items quickly and completely, then spend nearly all your writing time on the scored questions, in proportion to their weightings. A question worth 25% of the total deserves five times the effort of one worth 5%. Our tender response template is built around exactly this split.
A related trap: some RFTs set a minimum score per criterion — score below a stated threshold on any one quality question and your bid falls out, whatever your total. If your tender has one, no answer can be an afterthought. Check for thresholds the first time you read the pack, alongside the gates.
Common mistakes when reading a marking scheme
Four errors come up again and again. First, answering the section heading instead of the question — the marks sit in the question’s own wording and its listed sub-points, and an evaluator can only award marks for what the scheme names. If the question lists five things and you cover four well, the fifth scores zero no matter how strong the rest is. Second, spending effort by interest rather than by weighting: teams write pages on the part of the job they enjoy and a paragraph on the 25% criterion they find dull.
Third, burying the evidence. Evaluators mark quickly, against a schedule; an answer that states the mechanism first and the proof beside it collects marks that the same material scattered across three pages does not. Fourth, ignoring word and page limits — anything past the limit is typically not read at all, so the limit is part of the marking scheme too. None of these mistakes needs talent to fix. They need the discipline of writing with the scheme open beside you — which is precisely the habit weak bidders skip.
A worked scored question — weak vs strong
Say the question is: “Describe your approach to service delivery and quality assurance for this contract (25 marks).” Here is how the same supplier can answer it badly and well.
“We are a well-established company with over 20 years of experience providing high-quality services to a wide range of clients. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of everything we do, and our dedicated team always goes the extra mile. We are fully committed to quality and hold all relevant certifications.”
Why it scores low: it is about the supplier, not the contract. No plan, no names, no numbers, nothing the evaluator can verify or mark. Every sentence could be pasted into any tender — and evaluators know it, because they read the same paragraph in half the bids on their desk.
“A named contract manager will hold a fixed weekly slot with your facilities team. Planned visits follow the schedule at Appendix B; reactive calls are logged in our job system, triaged within two hours, and closed against an agreed response time. Every job ends with a signed completion record. Monthly, we send a one-page report — jobs done, response times against target, issues open — and we review any miss with you before it repeats. On a comparable contract for a public-sector client, this system ran for three years without a missed planned visit.”
Why it scores high: it answers for this contract, names a mechanism for every claim (weekly slot, two-hour triage, signed records, monthly report), and closes with verifiable evidence. An evaluator can put a mark against each element of the marking scheme. Specific and checkable beats warm and general, every time.
Illustrative answers, shortened for space. Real scored answers run longer and follow the question’s own structure.
Use the weightings to decide where effort goes
Before writing anything, put the marking scheme in a table and treat it as your work plan. High-weighted quality criteria get your best material and most drafting passes. Low-weighted ones get a competent answer and no more. The price formula tells you whether sharpening the number is worth more than sharpening the words. And the pass/fail list becomes a checklist you clear on day one — because a missing tax clearance certificate loses a bid faster than any weak answer. This is also the honest input to a bid/no-bid decision: if the criteria reward things you cannot evidence, better to know before you spend the week.
This is exactly how TenderBuilder works. Upload the RFT pack and it extracts the award criteria, weightings and pass/fail gates, then drafts each scored answer to the marking scheme using facts from your own business — nothing invented. With roughly 6,850 tenders published in Ireland each year across €22bn+ of public spending, most of them scored this way, learning to read a MEAT matrix pays back on every single bid. Read more about AI tender writing for Ireland, how scoring plays out in framework mini-competitions and council tenders, or see pricing — Starter is €99/month, or €83/month billed annually.
Upload the RFT. Get a draft written to the buyer’s own weightings.
Frequently asked questions
- What does MEAT stand for in procurement?
- MEAT stands for Most Economically Advantageous Tender. It is the standard basis for awarding public contracts in Ireland and across the EU: instead of picking the cheapest compliant bid, the buyer scores each tender against published criteria — typically a mix of quality and price — and awards to the highest total score.
- Where do I find the award criteria in a tender?
- In the Request for Tenders (RFT) pack, usually in a section headed “Award Criteria” or “Evaluation of Tenders”. It lists each criterion, its weighting, and often sub-criteria with their own marks. Buyers must publish the criteria and weightings before the deadline — they cannot invent them after bids come in.
- What is the difference between a scored question and a pass/fail question?
- A pass/fail question checks eligibility — tax clearance, insurance levels, turnover thresholds, declarations on the ESPD. You either meet it or your bid is out; extra effort earns nothing. A scored question earns marks against the weightings, and the marks decide who wins. Spend your writing time on the scored questions.
- How is price usually scored under MEAT?
- A common approach gives the lowest priced compliant bid full marks for price, with other bids scored relative to it — for example, lowest price divided by your price, times the available marks. The exact formula varies and is set out in the RFT, so always read it: it tells you exactly how much a euro of price movement is worth in marks.
- Can I win a MEAT tender without being the cheapest?
- Yes — that is the point of MEAT. If quality carries 60% and price 40%, a bid that scores strongly on the quality criteria can beat a cheaper bid with weak answers. The weightings tell you how much room you have: the higher the quality weighting, the more the writing decides the outcome.