How to bid on NYC contracts

The bid due date is not your real deadline. Before you can submit anything to a New York City agency, you have to be a vendor the City can actually transact with, and that chain of accounts and disclosures takes days to weeks depending on how fast you can produce paperwork. Contractors find a good solicitation with ten days left, start the enrollment, and miss it.

So the sequence below matters more than any individual step.

Step one: be biddable before you find the bid

The City runs vendors through a chain, and the order is not optional. MOCS states it plainly: create your PIP account first, then set up PASSPort.

1. Establish the entity - EIN/TIN, New York State registration, and for nonprofits, Charities Bureau registration.
2. PIP (Payee Information Portal) - this is how you get paid. Electronic funds transfer, direct deposit, financial transactions.
3. NYC.ID - the City's single sign-on, required to reach PASSPort.
4. PASSPort vendor account - everything else: disclosures, bidding, signing, contract management.
5. Vendor Enrollment (the disclosures) - you are not done until your enrollment reaches Filed status.

That last one is where people stall, and we wrote it up separately: how to register for PASSPort, and what actually delays you. If you provide health or human services, there is an additional HHS Prequalification Application on top.

Step two: find the work - in more than one place

There is no single list, and the one most people know about is the incomplete one.

• The City Record Online (CROL) carries City business opportunities valued at or above $100,000. That threshold is the important part: if you only watch CROL, you are not seeing smaller work, and smaller work is often where a newer vendor gets a first City contract and a past-performance record.
• Procurement Navigator at nyc.gov/businessopportunities lets anyone browse public opportunities with no PASSPort account required. Useful for scouting before your enrollment is finished.
• Browse Public RFx inside PASSPort, once you are logged in. "RFx" is the City's umbrella term for solicitations - bids, proposals and the rest.

Step three: read it, then watch it

A City solicitation is not static. Agencies issue addenda - documents detailing changes to the solicitation - and PASSPort notifies participating vendors when an addendum is issued. Two consequences:

• Being a participating vendor on the RFx is what turns the notifications on. Downloading the documents and working offline means you can miss a change to the scope, the deadline or the submission format.
• Requirements can change after you have priced the job. Re-read before you submit, not just when you start.

Step four: submit early, and treat that as a rule

MOCS's own recommendation is to submit responses at least 48 hours before the due date. This is not excessive caution. Electronic submission can fail on file size, format, an expired session, or a disclosure that has quietly fallen out of date - and a late bid is not a bid. Build the 48 hours into your schedule and treat the agency's due date as if it were two days earlier.

Step five: winning is not getting paid

After award there are award tasks to complete, and then the contract must be registered. Invoicing begins once the contract is registered and the work has been performed - not at handshake, and not at notice of award.

For a small firm this is the cash flow question that decides whether a City contract is a good idea. Know how long registration typically takes for that agency and that contract type before you commit crews to it.

Check this against the primary sources

• MOCS - Contracting Roadmap - the five steps, in the City's own order
• MOCS - Find Contract Opportunities - CROL, Procurement Navigator, Browse Public RFx, addenda
• The City Record Online
• MOCS - Procurement Policy Board Rules - the rules governing how the City buys, including the procurement methods and their thresholds

Thresholds and procedures change. Confirm the current requirements in your specific solicitation, which is always the authority over any guide including this one. BusyBids is not affiliated with the City of New York.

See current opportunities

The fastest way to understand a City solicitation is to open a few: current New York bids, or by trade - general contracting, electrical, plumbing, HVAC. If you are new to public work, our guides on bid and performance bonds and NYC prevailing wage cover the two costs most often underpriced.