Every small bid team eventually asks the same question: how many RFPs can a small team handle in a year before quality starts to slip? The honest answer is arithmetic, not ambition, and the numbers are less forgiving than most firms expect.
Why how many RFPs a small team can handle matters right now
Loopio’s 2026 RFP Response Trends and Benchmarks Report puts the average organisation at 166 RFPs a year, with each response taking around 33 hours. Multiply those two figures and the average firm is spending in the region of 5,500 hours a year on bids. That is straightforward arithmetic on Loopio’s own averages, and it is a number most firms have never written down.
The same report names bandwidth as the number one challenge facing response teams. Not pricing, not competition, not win themes. Capacity. When a team is already at its limit, the next RFP through the door does not get a weaker answer because someone decided it should. It gets a weaker answer because there were only so many hours in the week.
For a firm where two or three people handle bids alongside their real jobs, that constraint is the strategy. Which deals you chase, how good the answers are, whether anyone senior reviews them before submission: all of it sits downstream of how many hours you actually have.
What a realistic answer looks like
Start with hours rather than ambition. A full-time person has roughly 2,000 working hours in a year. If two people each give half their time to bids, the firm has about 2,000 bid hours to spend. At Loopio’s 33-hour average, that works out to about 60 RFPs a year, a little over one a week, assuming nothing else goes wrong. That is a ceiling, not a target.
The real figure moves with the shape of the work. A short, familiar RFP in a sector you bid in every month might take eight hours. A first-time public-sector bid with a security questionnaire, three reference forms and a separate pricing workbook can run well past sixty. The 33-hour average hides a long tail, and the long tail is where small teams lose their evenings.
It also moves with how much of each response is genuinely new. Most firms find, when they look properly, that a large share of any given response is a question they have already answered somewhere: company history, insurance and accreditations, methodology, QA process, data handling, staffing model. The hard part is rarely writing those sections. The hard part is finding the version that was good enough to win, rather than the one that was quietly marked down two years ago.
One more variable matters more than it should, and that is rework. A response written once and submitted costs what it costs. A response that goes through three rounds because nobody could find the approved security language costs that again. In most small teams, the difference between a manageable year and a brutal one is not the number of RFPs. It is how many of them had to be done twice.
So the practical answer to how many RFPs a small team can handle is your available hours divided by your honest average, minus the bids you should never have entered.
How BrandWagon approaches RFP capacity for small teams
There are two levers worth pulling, and most firms pull neither. The first is bidding on fewer, better-qualified opportunities. Loopio reports that 81% of top-performing teams run a formal go/no-go process, which is a polite way of saying that the best teams say no more often and say it earlier. Every RFP declined on day one hands roughly 33 hours back to the ones you actually want to win.
The second lever is cutting the hours each response consumes, and the fastest route there is to stop rewriting what your firm has already written. Loopio’s 2026 report notes that teams with dedicated RFP tooling submit 10 more bids a year than teams without it. The difference comes from retrieval, not from writing faster.
That narrow problem is what QuoteForge+ RFP is built for. It makes a firm’s past bids searchable section by section and ranks what it finds by which bids won, so the answer that comes back is one that has already survived an evaluator. It does not draft the response and it does not invent language on your behalf. It finds, organises and ranks what your team already wrote, and leaves the judgement with the people who have to sign the submission.
Frequently asked questions
How many RFPs should a two-person team bid on?
Work it out from hours rather than copying a benchmark. Estimate the share of each person’s year that genuinely goes to bids, divide by your own average hours per response, and treat the result as a ceiling. Most two-person teams who do this land well below the 166-per-year average Loopio reports, which is usually the right answer rather than a problem to fix.
Is 33 hours per RFP realistic for a small firm?
It is an average across Loopio’s 2026 respondents, not a target to hit. Small firms often come in under it on repeat bids in a familiar sector, and well over it on first-time or heavily regulated ones. Time your own last ten responses before planning capacity around anyone else’s number.
Does RFP software increase how many bids we can submit?
Loopio’s 2026 report found that teams with RFP tooling submit 10 more bids a year than teams without it. That is a reported difference between groups rather than a guaranteed result for any single firm, and it depends on having a back catalogue of past responses worth reusing in the first place.
Getting started
Before adding headcount or tooling, time your last ten responses honestly and count how many of them you would bid again. If the answer is uncomfortable, see how QuoteForge+ RFP surfaces the past answers that won, or talk to us about where your hours are going.