Consulting Government Tenders in United States

Reading a general consulting notice before deciding whether to bid

Consulting notices that carry no further qualifier are the hardest in public procurement to assess, because the heading covers advisory work, programme delivery support, technical specialism and interim resource, which are four different businesses. The first task with any such notice is to find the deliverable: a report, a decision, a delivered change or a set of people on a rate card. Bidders who skip that step commonly price a study against terms written for a staffing arrangement, or the reverse.

Whatever the flavour, the evaluation structure is consistent. Technical quality is weighted above price more often than in goods procurement; the proposed method and the named individuals carry most of the score; and references are checked against comparable assignments rather than comparable clients. Frameworks and panels dominate access, so a significant share of the real competition happens at call-off stage, after the visible notice, between suppliers who are already admitted.

The terms that repay careful reading are about independence, substitution and what is left behind. Conflict of interest rules frequently bar the adviser from the implementation that follows. Key personnel clauses bind the supplier to the people it scored on. And knowledge transfer obligations -- documented handover, transfer of models and materials, a defined exit -- determine whether the buyer ends up with a capability or a dependency. Public buyers have become markedly stricter on all three, and bids that treat them as boilerplate are the ones that lose on technical score for reasons they never see.

This section describes how this category is bought generally, across the public buyers that publish it. The figures elsewhere on this page are measured for this market alone.

Who buys consulting in United States?

GlobalGov holds 2,220 consulting records from 296 distinct buying organisations in United States. The most frequent publishers are National Park Service (352 records); National Institute Of Justice (212 records); Fish And Wildlife Service (176 records); National Institutes Of Health (149 records); Bureau Of Land Management (94 records); Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (64 records). Between them the 6 largest account for 47% of everything published, so buying here is spread across many separate authorities.

What are consulting contracts worth in United States?

66 of the 2,220 records publish a contract value. The median is $4.4M and the largest single published value is $15.6B. By size, 8 under $100k, 13 between $100k and $1M, 24 between $1M and $10M, 21 above $10M. The remaining 2,154 publish no value at all, so every figure here describes the priced subset only, and values are as stated by the buyer rather than as finally awarded.

How long do bidders get to respond to consulting tenders in United States?

Across the 2,036 United States consulting notices that publish both a publication date and a closing date, the median response window is 32 days. A quarter of them allowed 10 days or fewer and a quarter stayed open for more than 62. 580 of them (28%) closed within a fortnight of being published, so on this market a bidder who reviews notices once a week can lose most of the response window before reading one.

How often are consulting tenders published in United States?

United States publishes about 30 notices a month in this category, 355 in the last twelve months. That is 1590% more than the 21 published in the twelve months before that. Over the last three years there were 459, spread across 221 separate months of activity since 2 March 2006. July is historically the busiest month. The most recent was published 30 September 2026.

How does United States compare with other consulting markets?

Among the 25 countries where GlobalGov holds a comparable consulting market, United States ranks 3rd by number of records. The largest is Australia (24,392 records against 2,220 here). Within United States itself, consulting is the 20th largest of the 85 procurement categories tracked here.

Where do the United States consulting records on this page come from?

These 2,220 records are collected from 5 official sources: Grants.gov (1,893), SAM.gov (291), Simpler.Grants.gov (25), USAspending (8) and 1 smaller source. GlobalGov is an independent aggregator and is not affiliated with any of them; each record links back to the notice on its issuing portal. The set is rebuilt nightly, and the counts on this page were taken on 2026-10-01.

Open Consulting tenders in United States

Showing 7 of the 31 notices open in this category today. Openness uses the same definition as the United States market page: active, not marked awarded, cancelled, closed or expired, and either closing in the future or published within the last 90 days with no stated closing date.

Other procurement categories in United States

Consulting procurement in other markets