An RFP is the formal solicitation the federal government uses to acquire complex services or non-commercial supplies through a negotiated procurement under FAR Part 15. The RFP defines the scope of work, technical requirements, contract type, period of performance, and submission instructions. It carries the contractor's binding statement of intent — what is in the proposal becomes part of the contract on award. Response timelines typically range from 30 to 60 days for simple actions and longer for complex programs.
An RFP is structured under the Uniform Contract Format. Section C contains the Statement of Work, Section L contains the Instructions to Offerors (how to write the proposal), and Section M contains the Evaluation Criteria (how the government scores it). Section L compliance is pass/fail — late, over-page-limit, or wrongly-formatted proposals are eliminated before evaluation. Section M tells the bidder what factors the source selection authority will weigh and at what relative importance. RFPs may be issued as full-and-open competitions, set-asides for specific small business categories, or sole-source actions.
For small contractors, the RFP is the most resource-intensive part of the BD lifecycle. A complex RFP can consume 200 to 600 hours of internal effort, plus subcontractor coordination and pricing analysis. The pursuit decision must come before the RFP drops — by the time the solicitation is public, the capture phase is over and execution begins. Strong capture intelligence reduces the proposal effort by sharpening which RFPs are worth pursuing in the first place.