The IPQ Field Guide

RFPs for architects

An RFP asks six firms to do a week of unpaid work so that one of them can get paid. That is the deal, and nobody is hiding it. The part worth knowing is that the shortlist usually starts forming before the document ever goes out.

Arseniy VolosevichFounder, IPQmedia·Updated Aug 5, 2026·13 min read

Which is why the firms that treat RFPs as a volume problem end up busy and broke. They chase everything, write beautifully, and lose to the firm whose principal had coffee with the facilities director in March. The good news is that the coffee is learnable. So is knowing which pursuits to skip, which turns out to be the bigger lever.

If you run a residential practice, most of this page is background reading. Homeowners do not issue RFPs, and the version of this you will meet is a very different animal covered further down. If you do commercial, institutional or public work, this is the machinery your pipeline runs on, so it is worth understanding what the rules actually say.

Where architecture RFPs actually get posted

Start with a small embarrassment for the whole profession. We pulled the US search results for "how do architects find RFPs" on 5 August 2026, and the number one result is a thread on r/Architects of architects asking each other. Not a professional body, not a state portal. A forum post. That is the state of the art in a profession that has been bidding public work since 1972.

The sources below are all real and all live, and we checked each one on 5 August 2026. Three of them cost nothing. The paid aggregator is worth it only if your practice is genuinely built around public work, and the last row is free and almost nobody bothers.

That last row is the one worth your Tuesday morning. Aggregators sell convenience, and the thing about convenience is that four hundred other firms bought the same list. The solicitations sitting on a single district's purchasing page, posted by a clerk with no interest in distribution, are the ones with a thinner field.

You cannot win a public project by charging less

This is the structural fact that most firms know vaguely and few use deliberately. The federal Brooks Act of 1972, now sitting in Title 40, Chapter 11 of the US Code, requires federal agencies to select architects and engineers on qualifications, and to settle the fee afterward.

The mechanics are spelled out in FAR Subpart 36.6. Evaluation boards score firms on professional qualifications and specialized experience, hold discussions with at least three of the most highly qualified firms, and rank them in order of preference. Only then does a contracting officer open negotiations, starting with the most preferred firm. Price enters the room after the ranking is done.

Most states have passed their own version of this, usually called a mini-Brooks act, and a lot of cities and counties follow the same pattern for locally funded work. Check your own state before you assume, because the details vary and some categories of project sit outside it.

Sit with what that means for a marketing budget. On a qualifications-based selection, the entire decision rests on who the committee believes is most capable of doing this specific building. Familiarity is doing quiet work in that room. So is a portfolio someone can actually find, which is the unglamorous case for a website that works like a filter rather than a gallery.

The math nobody runs before saying yes

Deltek's 47th annual Clarity study, built on 896 architecture and engineering firms reporting 2025 numbers, is the closest thing this industry has to a scoreboard. Firms submitted 32% more proposals than the year before. Total proposal value grew 12%. So the profession did roughly a third more chasing for an eighth more opportunity.

The result was predictable. The median capture rate fell 3.8 percentage points to 44.4%, the lowest reading since 2019 and the sharpest single-year drop in the nine-year trend. Architecture firms were an odd bright spot on win rate, gaining five points to 45% while the industry median slipped to 49%.

Then look at the spread, because the spread is the whole story. The top quarter of firms captured 61.3% of what they pursued. The bottom quarter captured 30.2%. Same market, same year, same stack of solicitations. One group is roughly twice as good at picking.

That last row is not architecture-specific, and we are flagging it rather than quietly passing it off as ours. Loopio surveys proposal teams across every industry. Still, 33 hours and nine people is a recognizable number to anyone who has watched a submission come together, and it is the figure to hold against a 45% win rate. Ten pursuits is most of a work-month, and you lose more than half of them.

The go, no-go conversation you are probably skipping

Eighty percent of firms in the Clarity study say they use a go, no-go process. Only 32% apply it to strategic opportunities alone, and the share of firms with a formal business development process actually dipped to 46%. So most firms own the tool and use it as a formality on the way to yes.

A real one is short and slightly rude. Had we spoken to this owner before the solicitation appeared, and if not, why not. Does the scope read like it was written around one specific portfolio, because sometimes it was.

Do we have three references in this exact building type, or two adjacent ones and a good story. Is the deadline short enough that the field is thin. If the answers are no, no, a story, and no, you are the price of somebody else's competitive process.

Saying no is unpleasant when the pipeline looks empty, which is exactly why the pipeline has to come from somewhere other than the solicitations themselves. Firms with their own demand can afford to pick. That is the practical argument for building a lead system you own instead of living off whatever gets posted this month.

If you do residential, your RFP is a different animal

Homeowners do not issue RFPs. What they do is call three firms, ask each for a proposal and a fee, and compare documents they are not equipped to compare. It has the shape of a competitive process and none of the rules. Nobody is legally stopping that homeowner from picking on price, and plenty of them do.

The counter is the same in both worlds, which is being the known quantity before the comparison starts. A residential buyer who has watched your work for six weeks arrives with a preference already formed. That is the entire job of the demand engine described in marketing for residential architects, and it is why the proposal is a formality for firms who do it and a coin flip for firms who do not.

Public agencies at least have to write down their reasons. Take the small mercy.

What actually moves a win rate

The Hinge Research Institute surveyed more than 2,000 buyers and sellers of professional services and found the most influential factor in choosing one firm over another was a good reputation, named by over 20% of buyers, with existing relationships a close second. Sellers in the same study thought the answer was expertise and specialization. Buyers were talking about trust, and firms were answering a question nobody asked.

So the leverage sits upstream of the document. Being recognized by a selection committee before they open your submission is a marketing outcome, and it is buildable.

Paid social is the fastest way we know to get there for a commercial or institutional practice, because you can put a finished project in front of developers, facilities directors and business owners in your region for months before a solicitation exists.

Different creative from a residential campaign, same engine, and the long retargeting window suits a sales cycle measured in quarters. The play is laid out in marketing for commercial architects and the mechanics in Meta ads for architects.

Here is our own side of the ledger, and it is the only part of this page where the numbers are ours. Across 18 US architecture firm ad accounts we run, from 15 September 2025 to 5 August 2026, $104,374 in ad spend produced 1,985 leads.

Counting each account once so no big spender moves the middle, the median cost per lead was $58.12, with the middle half falling between $34.93 and $70.08. A median of 28.1% of those leads became a booked consultation, at a median of $196.69 in ad spend per consultation that got on the calendar.

Put that next to a pursuit. We are not going to price your staff hours for you, since we do not know your rates and firms differ wildly. You can do it in your head.

What we can say is that a conversation with an owner who came looking for you cost us a median of about $197 to create, and it did not require anyone to work a weekend. That is what typically happens on our accounts over the last eleven months, not a law of nature, and the range above is wide for a reason.

We do not publish cost per signed project, because that closes in your office and we cannot see it. The full per-firm quartile breakdown, including how the cost drifts as an account ages, is in the architecture firm marketing benchmark report.

RFP, RFQ, SOQ, and what each one is really asking

The vocabulary gets used loosely, including by the agencies issuing the documents, which is not helpful when the difference decides how much unpaid work you are about to do.

A two-step process, an RFQ that shortlists into an RFP, is the friendlier version and worth preferring where you get a choice. It also rewards keeping your qualifications package current instead of rebuilding it at 11pm, which is the least glamorous competitive advantage available to an architecture firm and one of the most reliable.

Where press and partners fit

Two channels do unusual work here. Published projects and awards are borrowed credibility that a selection committee can verify without calling anyone, which is the practical case made in PR and press for architects. And the developers, design-builders and consultants already working with the owner tend to hear about a project long before procurement does, which is the point of partnerships for architects rather than hoping referrals arrive on schedule.

Neither replaces a pipeline. Both raise the odds on pursuits you have already decided to enter, and they compound, which puts them in the same family as organic search and the rest of the system mapped in architecture marketing.

A few honest answers

How do architects find RFPs?

Federal work goes on SAM.gov. City and county work goes on aggregators, and DemandStar reports over 1,400 agencies posting directly to its network. Several AIA chapters run public RFP and RFQ boards, including California and Florida.

The least-crowded source is the procurement page on an individual district, university or hospital system's own website, because almost nobody checks those. Set a recurring calendar block, since the useful ones close fast.

What is the difference between an RFP and an RFQ?

An RFQ or statement of qualifications asks who you are: relevant projects, team, references. An RFP asks who you are plus how you would approach this specific job, and frequently a fee. Agencies often run them in sequence, using the RFQ to shortlist and the RFP to decide. The RFQ is substantially cheaper to answer, which is why a two-step process is worth preferring when you have the choice.

Do architects get paid for responding to an RFP?

Almost never. A response is a business development cost, which is why go, no-go discipline matters more than proposal polish. Some design competitions pay a modest honorarium to shortlisted firms, and it rarely covers the work. Treat every submission as an investment you are choosing to make, and track what it returns the same way you would track any other channel.

What is a good win rate for an architecture firm?

Deltek's 2026 study puts the median architecture firm win rate at 45% and the median industry capture rate at 44.4%. The top quarter of firms captured 61.3% of pursuits and the bottom quarter 30.2%. If you are under about 30%, the problem is usually pursuit selection rather than proposal quality, and the fix is entering fewer and better-matched opportunities.

Can you win a public architecture project by charging less?

Generally no. The federal Brooks Act and FAR Subpart 36.6 require selection on qualifications, with fee negotiated afterward with the most preferred firm, and most states have adopted their own version for state-funded work. Rules vary at the local level and by project category, so check yours. Where qualifications-based selection applies, a low number does not buy you a ranking, and it does set the ceiling for the negotiation you are about to have.

Where these numbers come from

Proposal, win rate and capture rate figures are from the 47th annual Deltek Clarity Architecture and Engineering study, released May 2026, covering 896 firms reporting on 2025. The 33-hour response figure is from Loopio's seventh annual RFP benchmarks report of more than 1,500 teams and is all-industry, not architecture-specific.

Selection rules are quoted from the US Code and the Federal Acquisition Regulation directly. Buyer preference data is from the Hinge Research Institute's survey of more than 2,000 buyers and sellers of professional services. The search result for "how do architects find RFPs" was pulled on 5 August 2026.

Cost per lead and cost per booked consultation are our own aggregate ad account data, one observation per account so that no single large spender moves a median, over 15 September 2025 to 5 August 2026. Client names are never published. Broader market costs, including what the same buyer costs on search, sit in architecture marketing statistics and costs.

Enter fewer, win more

The firms capturing 61% of their pursuits are not writing twice as well as the firms capturing 30%. They are entering rooms where they were already known, and skipping the ones where they were not. Everything upstream of the document decides the document.

If you would rather have owners arriving with your name already in mind than refresh a procurement portal on Tuesdays, that is the machine we build and run. We get paid when a qualified consultation actually shows up.