PQQ vs ITT explained

If you’re new to tendering, the acronyms come fast: PQQ, SQ, ITT, RFP. They’re not interchangeable, and confusing them costs contracts. This guide explains exactly what each stage does, how they connect, and what it takes to pass both — in plain English.

The two-stage shape of procurement

Most significant public contracts are awarded in two stages. First, the buyer filters the field: are you a credible, eligible organisation worth considering? That’s the selection stage — the PQQ or SQ. Then, among those who pass, the buyer chooses the best proposal: how will you deliver, and at what price? That’s the award stage — the ITT. Selection is largely about who you are; award is about what you’ll do. Understanding which stage you’re at determines everything about how you respond.

What is a PQQ?

A Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) is the selection-stage assessment. It checks that your business meets the buyer’s minimum requirements before they invest time evaluating your full proposal. A PQQ typically covers your organisation’s identity and structure, grounds for exclusion (convictions, tax compliance, professional misconduct), financial standing, insurance levels, relevant experience (usually three contract examples), and management systems for quality, health & safety and the environment.

Crucially, most of a PQQ is pass/fail. You either meet the turnover threshold or you don’t; you either hold the required insurance or you don’t. There’s rarely partial credit, which is why a single missing document or unmet threshold can fail an otherwise strong organisation. Our PQQ writing service exists largely because these failures are so avoidable.

PQQ vs SQ — what changed

You’ll see “SQ” (Selection Questionnaire) used alongside or instead of “PQQ”. They mean essentially the same thing. The UK introduced a standardised Selection Questionnaire to reduce the wild variation in PQQs between buyers, so suppliers weren’t reinventing answers for every tender. In practice the terms are used interchangeably; the SQ is simply the more standardised, modern form of the PQQ. The three-part structure — your organisation, exclusion grounds, selection criteria — is now broadly consistent across public buyers, which is exactly why a reusable answer pack pays off.

What is an ITT?

An Invitation to Tender (ITT) is the award-stage document. If you’ve passed selection, the buyer invites you to submit your full proposal: how you’ll deliver the contract, your method, your social value, your team, and your price. Unlike the pass/fail PQQ, the ITT is scored — each quality question marked on a scale, the prices scored by formula, and the weighted total deciding the winner. This is where bids are genuinely won or lost, and where professional tender writing earns its keep. (In the private sector, the equivalent is usually called an RFP — Request for Proposal.)

PQQ vs ITT side by side

When both come at once

Under some procedures — particularly the open procedure and many below-threshold tenders — there’s no separate selection stage: the selection questions and the scored tender arrive together in a single document. You complete the SQ-style questions and the full ITT response at the same time. Don’t let the combined format fool you into treating the selection questions casually; they’re still pass/fail, and failing them means your beautifully written quality answers are never even read.

How to pass each stage

To pass selection: treat it as a compliance exercise, because that’s what it is. Read every requirement, gather every document, check every threshold, and make sure your contract examples genuinely match what’s asked. The detail in our PQQ guidance applies here — most failures are administrative, not capability gaps.

To win at award: this is real bid writing — answer planning against the criteria, evidence over adjectives, writing the way evaluators mark. The full method is in our guide to writing a winning bid, and the mechanics of scoring are in how tenders are evaluated. The two stages need different mindsets; bring the right one to each.

Common selection-stage mistakes — and how to dodge them

Because the selection stage feels administrative, it gets rushed — and that’s precisely where avoidable failures cluster. The four we see most often are worth naming so you can pre-empt them on your own submission.

Mismatched contract examples. A selection questionnaire usually asks for two or three examples that demonstrate specific, comparable experience — not just any recent work. Bidders routinely submit their biggest or proudest projects rather than the ones that actually evidence the scope and scale the buyer specified. Read the requirement word by word and choose examples that mirror it, even if they’re not your flashiest. Financial threshold surprises. Turnover ratios and net-asset tests are pass/fail, and they’re checked. If you fall short, there are sometimes legitimate routes — a parent-company guarantee, a consortium arrangement — but only if you identify the problem before submitting, not after. Policy gaps. Buyers expect current, signed, operating policies for health and safety, equality, environmental management and increasingly modern slavery and data protection. Templates with another company’s name in the footer fail real scrutiny. Self-cleaning omissions. Where a discretionary exclusion ground applies, a well-drafted self-cleaning statement — explaining what happened and what changed — can keep you in the running; silence cannot.

Each of these is structural and fixable, which is exactly why our PQQ and SQ writing service pays for itself: the failures it prevents would have cost you the whole opportunity, not just a few marks. And because selection questions repeat across buyers, fixing them once and banking the answers in a reusable pack means every future PQQ starts from strength.