The Third Quote Nobody Reads: A Sensible Threshold for UK Tendering

There's a moment in almost every small project where someone says, "We'll get three quotes." Nobody argues. It sounds prudent, it sounds fair, and it sounds like something a careful business would do. Then three weeks pass, the job hasn't started, and the three quotes aren't remotely comparable because each supplier scoped a different piece of work.

I've watched this play out often enough now that I've stopped treating three quotes as a default. It's a tool. Like any tool, it's brilliant in the right place and mildly destructive everywhere else.

What "three quotes" actually costs you

The obvious cost is time. Two to four weeks is typical for a modest piece of work — a small fit-out, a website rebuild, a piece of consultancy, a mid-sized recruitment campaign. That's fine if the calendar is empty. It rarely is.

The hidden cost is scope. Ask three firms to price "a new website" and you'll get three different projects back. One has included copywriting, one hasn't. One assumed a single content migration, another quoted for four. Now you're not comparing prices, you're comparing interpretations — and the cheapest number usually belongs to whoever understood the least.

Then there's the behavioural cost, which is the one that quietly does the damage. When a client has three quotes in front of them, the gravitational pull is toward the lowest figure. Not because they're mean, but because justifying the middle option requires a written argument and nobody has time to write it. So the decision gets made on price, and then the scope gaps surface in week three.

The scoring sheet that hides the real question

Plenty of organisations have a scoring matrix — price, quality, relevant experience, sustainability. It looks rigorous. In practice, weightings get set before anyone knows what the risk actually is, and a 40/30/20/10 split becomes a machine for producing a defensible answer rather than a good one.

The question you actually need to answer is simpler: what's the consequence if this supplier gets it wrong?

If the answer is "we lose a week and redo it," you don't need a full tender. If the answer is "the system goes down and we lose trading days," then yes, run it properly — and run it with far more care than three emails.

A threshold I've found workable

For private-sector work, a rough rule of thumb:

• Under roughly £10,000, low risk: one supplier, chosen on track record, with a written scope and a fixed price. Competition here is mostly administrative theatre.
• £10,000 to about £50,000: two quotes. Not three. Two is enough to test the market and enough to spot an outlier, without tripling your reading time.
• Above £50,000, or anything with real operational, regulatory or reputational risk: full competitive process, properly resourced, with the same brief sent to everyone and a real scoring conversation.

Public sector buyers have their own rulebook and thresholds, and none of this overrides it. This is about the private and third-sector client who has imported a public-sector habit without the public-sector obligation behind it.

Why two beats three

Two quotes gives you a reference point. It tells you whether your instinct on price is roughly right and whether the market is tight or soft. That's the job.

The third quote rarely adds new information — it usually adds a third variation on scope, which slows the decision and nudges everyone back toward the lowest number. Cutting to two saves a week, halves the comparison work, and keeps the conversation on capability rather than arithmetic.

And there's a bonus: with two, it's much easier to write down why you chose the one you chose. That record matters more than the number of quotes, especially if the project goes sideways in six months and someone asks how the supplier was picked.

Where competition genuinely pays

I'm not arguing against tendering. I'm arguing for spending the effort where the risk lives.

Competition earns its keep when: the work is complex or hard to define; you have no prior relationship to benchmark against; the contract is long or the spend is material; there are genuine regulatory or safety consequences; or you suspect the incumbent has gone comfortable. In those cases, three or more bids, a clear brief, an agreed evaluation method and a written rationale are not bureaucracy — they're the cheapest insurance you'll buy all year.

There's also a case for the opposite move: deliberately not tendering in order to keep a good supplier. Continuity has a value that never appears on a comparison sheet — they know where the bodies are buried, they've absorbed the context, and they won't spend the first fortnight learning your business.

The thing to write down instead

Before you send out any request, write one paragraph: what the work is, what "good" looks like, the budget range, the deadline, and how you'll decide. If you can't write that paragraph, three quotes won't help — you'll just get three confident answers to a question you haven't asked.

And if you're about to ask for a third quote out of habit rather than need, ask yourself honestly what it will change. If the answer is "nothing much," you've just saved yourself a fortnight.