How Government Proposals Are Actually Scored
Most owners assume government scoring is either a price auction or a black box with a friend of somebody inside it. It is neither. The rubric is printed in the bid documents, the government is legally required to put it there, and the reason so few small businesses use it is that it sits in a section almost nobody reads all the way through.
In a federal solicitation written in the uniform contract format, that section is Section M, Evaluation Factors for Award. Section L tells you how to submit. Section M tells you how you will be judged. State and city RFPs call it something else — Evaluation Criteria, Basis of Award, Selection Process — but it is the same document doing the same job.
Here is the rule that makes this true. FAR 15.304(d): “All factors and significant subfactors that will affect contract award and their relative importance shall be stated clearly in the solicitation.” Not summarized. Not hinted at. Stated clearly, with their relative importance. If you have read a solicitation and still don't know what matters most, you stopped reading too early.
What they must tell you, and what they get to keep
The disclosure rule has a limit that is worth understanding, because it is where a lot of bad advice comes from.
You are entitled to the factors, the significant subfactors and their relative importance — including whether the non-price factors combined are more important than, approximately equal to, or less important than price. You are not entitled to the arithmetic. FAR 15.305(a) says evaluations may be conducted using “any rating method or combination of methods, including color or adjectival ratings, numerical weights, and ordinal rankings.” The agency picks. It often does not publish which.
So when a proposal consultant offers to tell you the point values, be skeptical. There may not be point values. What there certainly is, in every competitive federal procurement above the simplified acquisition threshold, is a written record: FAR 15.305(a) requires that “the relative strengths, deficiencies, significant weaknesses, and risks supporting proposal evaluation shall be documented in the contract file.” Somebody types sentences about your proposal into a form. Those sentences, not a number, are what the source selection authority reads.
Two ways of deciding, and they want opposite things from you
Before you write a word, find out which of two processes you are in. It changes everything about where the effort goes.
Lowest price technically acceptable is a pass-or-fail screen followed by a price sort. FAR 15.101-2 is blunt about it: “Tradeoffs are not permitted.” Nothing you write above the minimum earns you anything. Exceeding the requirement is wasted ink, and sometimes worse than wasted, because a fancier approach invites a question about whether you understood the scope. Under LPTA your entire job is to be unambiguously acceptable and cheaper than the other acceptable people.
It is also getting rarer. Before a civilian agency may use LPTA it has to satisfy a list of conditions in 15.101-2(c) — it must be able to describe its minimum requirements comprehensively and clearly, expect minimal value from anything above them, need minimal subjective judgment from evaluators, and be confident that reading beyond the minimum would surface no additional value. The contracting officer documents that justification in the file. That is a deliberately high bar, and it was put there because LPTA was being used on work where quality obviously mattered.
Best value tradeoff is the other road, and it is the one most small businesses actually meet. It permits the government to pay more for a better proposal, as long as it documents why the benefit was worth the money. Under tradeoff, being merely acceptable is a losing position, and price alone will not rescue you. That distinction is the single most useful thing on this page.
The factors that are almost always in the mix
Solicitations vary, and the solicitation always wins over any general list. But two factors are close to guaranteed because the FAR puts them there.
Price or cost. FAR 15.304(c)(1)(i): price or cost to the government shall be evaluated in every source selection. There are narrow statutory exceptions for some DoD, NASA and Coast Guard buys, and they will not apply to you.
Past performance. FAR 15.304(c)(3)(i): past performance shall be evaluated in all source selections for negotiated competitive acquisitions expected to exceed the simplified acquisition threshold, which currently sits at $350,000. Below that line, the requirement falls away — and below the $15,000 micro-purchase threshold an agency often needs nothing more than a quote. That is one of several reasons smaller buys are the sane place to start. If you are reading this with no record to submit, the rules are more generous than you think, and we went through them in what actually counts as past performance.
Around those two you will typically find technical approach, management approach and key personnel, and sometimes a small business participation or subcontracting factor. Technical approach usually carries the most weight of any single non-price factor. The proportions are in Section M. Read them, then allocate your writing time in roughly the same proportions — which almost nobody does, because people write most about whatever they find easiest to describe.
Why a perfectly compliant proposal scores in the middle
This is the part that costs small businesses the most contracts, and it is visible in the actual rating definitions.
The Department of Defense source selection procedures define five technical ratings. Outstanding is an exceptional approach and understanding of the requirements containing multiple strengths. Good is a thorough approach and understanding containing at least one strength. Acceptable is an adequate approach and understanding with no strengths at all. Marginal fails to demonstrate an adequate approach. Unacceptable contains one or more deficiencies and cannot be awarded. Price and cost get no adjectival rating; they are evaluated on their own terms.
Sit with the definition of Acceptable. It is not a compliment. It is the rating for a proposal that did everything it was asked and nothing more. A document that walks through the statement of work restating each requirement as a promise — “we will provide monthly reporting,” “our staff are fully qualified” — is the purest possible Acceptable. In a tradeoff evaluation, Acceptable is the floor the winner is measured against.
A strength is something specific that lowers the government's risk, described concretely enough that an evaluator can write a sentence about it in the file. A named person with the exact certification the work needs, already on staff. A transition plan with dates on it because you have done three of these before. Coverage during the two weeks in December when the agency knows it normally cannot reach anybody. None of those are asked for by name in Section M. All of them are recognizable when they appear, and each one is a sentence an evaluator can justify to the source selection authority.
The opposite is quieter and more common. A subfactor you never explicitly addressed does not get graded on the strength of the material around it — it becomes a weakness, or a deficiency, on its own. Strong proposals lose points for things the writer simply never got to, usually because they were working from an outline of their own instead of an outline built from Section M.
Write from the scoresheet, not from the sales deck
The practical method is unglamorous and it works. Build your outline directly from Section M's factors and subfactors, in the government's order, using the government's words as headings. When an evaluator with forty proposals and a scoring form opens yours, the answer to subfactor 2.3 should be under a heading that says subfactor 2.3.
Then go back through and ask of every paragraph: which factor does this earn a point under? Anything that earns nothing is company history, and company history is what most first drafts are made of. Cutting it is not a stylistic preference. It is removing pages that are being graded and scoring zero. The same discipline is what keeps a bid from being thrown out before scoring even begins — the mechanics of that are in why government bids get rejected as non-responsive.
Where we come in
Reading a solicitation backwards from Section M and building a compliance matrix out of it is the first thing we do on every engagement, and it is most of why our proposals read differently from the ones owners write at eleven at night.
That work is inside our proposal and RFP writing, which runs on contingency — nothing up front, 10% of awarded contract value, nothing owed if the bid does not win. Opportunity research, the compliance matrix, technical and past performance writing, and submission are all covered by that fee.
If you have already written the draft yourself, don't hire us to rewrite it. Have it reviewed against the evaluation criteria instead — $497 for a single volume, $997 for multi-volume, flat fee, no commission, because we did not write it. You get the compliance defects, the subfactors you left unanswered, and an honest read on whether anything in there would register as a strength. Most owners who send us a draft find the second of those lists longer than the first.
And if you are not yet sure you are eligible to bid at all, the free bid readiness check takes five questions and ends in a call either way.
This is probably not a fit if…
You are looking for the inside track. There isn't one to sell you. Evaluation factors are disclosed, evaluations are documented, and the remedy for an improper one is a protest, not a relationship. Anybody promising to tell you what the evaluators “really” want is either guessing or describing Section M back to you at a markup.
The bid is pure LPTA and you are not the low-cost provider. Under a real LPTA screen, a better proposal cannot beat a cheaper acceptable one. If your price is not competitive, the honest advice is to skip it and spend the week on a tradeoff solicitation where your strengths can actually be paid for.
The deadline is in four days and nothing is drafted. A proposal built from Section M takes time we do not have at that point, and a rushed one will score Acceptable at best. We would rather aim you at the next opportunity, which is most of the argument for bid and opportunity monitoring at $297 a month — free alongside a proposal engagement — so the next one arrives with six weeks on the clock instead of four days.
If none of those apply, book a free 30-minute call and bring the solicitation. We will read Section M with you and tell you plainly where your proposal would land.