MEAT and abnormally low tenders — how EU award criteria actually work, and what bidders keep getting wrong

It is 14:30 on a Wednesday. Marta is reading the award notice for a road rehabilitation contract — TED notice 2026/S 118-293471.

Her firm submitted the second-lowest price. The winning bid was 31 percent higher. It won by eleven points on the total score.

She pulls up the evaluation table from the standstill letter. Quality criteria: 60 percent. Price: 40. Her quality score was 54 out of 100. The winner’s was 78.

Nobody told her the quality section outweighed the price. It was in the contract notice. She read it. She just did not model the arithmetic before deciding how to price.

This is the most common way to lose a MEAT evaluation. Not on price. On the assumption that price is what matters.

What MEAT actually requires

Article 67 of Directive 2014/24/EU governs award for all above-threshold public contracts. The standard is Most Economically Advantageous Tender — MEAT. Contracting authorities must identify the winner on the basis of price alone, lifecycle cost under Article 68, or the best price-quality ratio (BPQR) — assessed across qualitative, environmental, and social criteria linked to the subject matter.

BPQR is where most construction contracts now sit. Pure price-only awards remain permitted but Member States may restrict them; for complex works, they are increasingly rare.

BPQR is not a vague instruction to value quality. Article 67(2) specifies what quality criteria are permissible:

(a) Quality attributes linked to the subject matter: technical merit, aesthetic and functional characteristics, accessibility, social and environmental characteristics.

(b) Organisation, qualifications, and experience of staff assigned to the contract — but only where the quality of the assigned staff can have a significant impact on the level of performance. This is the legal basis for evaluation of site management teams, project directors, and key technical leads in construction tenders.

(c) After-sales service, technical assistance, and delivery conditions — including the delivery period or completion timetable.

Every one of these criteria must be linked to the subject matter of the specific contract. A criterion that is linked to the general reputation of the company — rather than to the delivery of this contract — is not permissible.

What gets published, and when

Article 67(5) requires the contracting authority to specify the relative weighting of each award criterion in the contract notice or procurement documents. Not later. Not in the evaluation report.

Weightings not published before submission cannot lawfully be applied. A sub-criterion that appears for the first time at evaluation stage is a challengeable breach. So is a weighting that differs materially from the published range.

For above-threshold works contracts — above €5,404,000 from January 2026 — the award criteria section of the TED notice is among the most important documents you will read before deciding whether to bid.

It tells you how many points quality is worth, which sub-criteria are defined, whether a minimum quality threshold eliminates bids before price is opened, and what formula converts prices into scores.

Read it before writing anything.

The arithmetic bidders skip

A works contract. Quality: 60 percent. Price: 40 percent.

Bidder A prices at €4.8 million. Bidder B prices at €5.3 million — ten percent higher. On price alone, Bidder A leads by roughly four total score points.

If Bidder B’s quality score is 75 and Bidder A’s is 60, that gap weighted at 60 percent is nine total score points. Bidder B wins by five, despite pricing ten percent higher.

This is the basic mechanics of any BPQR evaluation. A significant number of bidding teams do not run it before setting their price. Generic quality responses score around 55–65 out of 100. Strong, criteria-specific responses score 75–85. The gap between them, multiplied by the quality weighting, outweighs almost any price advantage.

What Article 69 says about low prices

Suppose you price aggressively — substantially below every competitor and below the authority’s own estimate. Then the authority sends you a letter.

That letter is required by law.

Article 69(1) of Directive 2014/24/EU states that contracting authorities shall require economic operators to explain the price or costs proposed where tenders appear to be abnormally low. The word is “shall.” Where the trigger is met, the clarification procedure is mandatory.

The European Court of Justice confirmed this in case C-669/20 (Veridos, 2022). A contracting authority cannot avoid the obligation. It must identify suspect tenders, request the details it considers appropriate, assess the response, and then decide on admission or rejection.

Article 69(3) sets the rejection standard: the authority may only reject where the evidence does not satisfactorily account for the low price. The burden is on the tenderer. The authority cannot skip straight to rejection without the dialogue.

What counts as a satisfactory explanation

Article 69(2) lists the grounds on which a low tender may be justified:

• the economics of the manufacturing process or the method of construction;
• the technical solutions chosen or any exceptionally favourable conditions available to the tenderer;
• the originality of the work, supplies, or services proposed;
• compliance with obligations in employment, environmental, and social law;
• the possibility of state aid received by the tenderer.

The list is non-exhaustive. What matters is evidence. A letter stating that your firm is highly efficient is not an explanation. Auditable cost breakdowns — labour rates tied to collective agreements, plant ownership costs, documented supply-chain pricing — are.

The authority assesses the information. If the explanation is satisfactory, the tender stays in. If not, it is rejected, with reasons.

One further point: if you are a competitor watching an abnormally low bid accepted without any visible clarification process, you can challenge the award. The failure to initiate the Article 69 procedure is subject to judicial review.

What bidders keep getting wrong

Three recurring errors.

First: treating price as the primary lever in a quality-weighted evaluation. Model the scoring arithmetic before you price. If quality carries 60 percent and your score will be average, no price compensates.

Second: writing quality responses to fill pages rather than to score against criteria. A criteria-structured response of 800 words outscores a 3,000-word narrative that does not map to what the authority is marking.

Third: pricing below sustainable cost. Article 69 exists partly because unrealistically low bids — followed by contract variations, disputes, and overruns — damage the contracting authority and the public interest. The clarification procedure is not a formality.

The notice is the bid architecture

The TED notice for an above-threshold works contract is not just a source of dates and scope. It is the architecture of your bid.

The award criteria section tells you where the points are. The weighting tells you where to spend writing effort. The scoring methodology tells you what a maximum-mark response looks like. And the subject-matter description tells you that your quality responses must be contract-specific — which, under Article 67, they always must be.

Reading it late — after the technical proposal is already drafted — means rebuilding around criteria you did not write for.

Marta will do it differently next time. The notice is open in a scoring matrix before the methodology is touched. Quality carries 60 percent. That determines the allocation. Price comes after quality is settled, not before.

On a platform like Steinlog, the scoring matrix sits alongside the draft — criteria weighted, targets set, every section mapped to a mark before writing begins. Whether you use a spreadsheet or a structured workspace, the principle is the same.

Model the evaluation before you design the bid. The rules are in Article 67 and Article 69. The work is in applying them before D-35.