What Is a PQQ? Pre-Qualification Questionnaires and the Standard SQ, Decoded

A PQQ - pre-qualification questionnaire - is the form a buyer uses to decide which contractors may bid before anyone prices the job. It checks your legal standing, finances, insurance, health and safety and experience. Public buyers now call it a selection questionnaire (SQ) or procurement specific questionnaire (PSQ). Of the 557 UK work-winning gates we track, 178 put one in your way.

That last number is why this post exists. Most explanations of the PQQ in construction are written by bid-writing consultancies, and they answer "how do I fill it in". I run a subcontracting model - win the work, sub the delivery, keep the spread - and I maintain a verified directory of where UK construction work is actually bought. So the questions I care about are different: which buyers put a PQQ in front of you, what the assessor is really checking, and when the rules say the buyer is not allowed to use one at all.

What a PQQ in construction actually does#

A tender asks "how much, and how will you do it". A PQQ asks an earlier question: "should we let you compete at all?"

Buyers use it to cut a long list of interested firms down to a short list worth the cost of evaluating properly. A housing association that advertises a £2m planned works package might get 40 expressions of interest. Nobody wants to read 40 priced tenders with method statements, so they read 40 questionnaires, score them, and invite the top five or six to tender.

That is the part most small contractors miss. Losing at PQQ stage means losing without anyone ever seeing your price. You can be the cheapest, most reliable firm in the region and still never get the tender documents, because your experience section scored 6 out of 20.

PQQ, SQ, PSQ: three names for one gate#

The name changed twice in the public sector. The gate did not.

• PQQ - the original name. Still the word used in the private sector, by Tier 1 supply chains, housebuilders and FM groups, and by most people on site.
• SQ (standard Selection Questionnaire) - replaced the public sector PQQ in September 2016 under Procurement Policy Note 8/16, and was updated by PPN 03/23. It standardised the questions so a contractor did not face a different form from every council. Procurements started under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 before 24 February 2025 still run on it, so you will keep seeing it on longer contracts and frameworks for a while.
• PSQ (procurement specific questionnaire) - the Procurement Act 2023 era. Since the Act went live on 24 February 2025, public buyers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland collect your "core supplier information" once, through your registration on the Central Digital Platform. The buyer then asks only the procurement-specific part: any extra exclusion information and the conditions of participation for that contract. Many buyers publish that as a PSQ. Scotland opted out of the Act and runs its own Single Procurement Document inside Public Contracts Scotland.

And in construction there is a fourth label you will meet on forms: PAS 91, the BSI construction prequalification standard (current edition PAS 91:2013+A1:2017). It is a standard bank of construction PQQ questions in modules - core company information, health and safety, environmental, quality, equal opportunities, BIM - so that answers can be reused across buyers. Several accreditation schemes build their assessments around it, which is why a certificate can sometimes stand in for a whole section of a form.

The practical point: if your Central Digital Platform record is not set up and current, you are already behind on every public PSQ before you have read the first question. Registration on the platform is free.

Who actually puts a PQQ in front of you#

Here is the data nobody selling bid-writing help has. Our directory holds 557 verified UK work-winning gates - the portals, supply chains, frameworks, landlords and networks through which construction work is actually bought - and each carries a researched record of what it demands at signup and at the selection stage. Counting every record that names a PQQ, an SQ, a PSQ or a pre-qualification stage:

At least 178 of the 557 gates use one, as of October 2026. 141 of them call it a PQQ by name.

Where they sit tells you more than the total:

Buyer type	Gates with a PQQ / SQ stage
Social housing - housing associations, G15, large landlords, ALMOs	50 of 69
Councils, shared services and regional public portals	39 of 58
Frameworks and consortia (housing, schools, NHS, public estate)	24 of 40
Universities and NHS buyers	11 of 11
Utilities, rail, airports, defence and infrastructure	13 of 22
Private side - Tier 1 supply chains, housebuilders, insurance and FM networks, commercial landlords, trade marketplaces	14 of 109
Everything else (retrofit funding chain, DLO subcontracting, per-trade routes, accreditation registers)	27

Read it as a map. The PQQ is a public and social housing gate. Nearly three in four social landlord routes and two in three council routes in the directory run one. On the private side it almost disappears: Tier 1 contractors, insurers and housebuilders mostly vet you through their own supply-chain registration or by accepting an accreditation you already hold, not by a scored questionnaire per job.

Two more numbers worth knowing. Of those 178, 115 have an open, free registration - getting onto the portal is not the barrier, the questionnaire behind it is. And 12 records in the directory name PAS 91 explicitly, spread across NHS estates buyers, Tier 1 supply chains and the accreditation registers.

If those buyers are your target, the route in starts with the master council portal registrations and getting onto a council approved contractor list - the PQQ is the form waiting on the other side of most of them.

How an assessor reads your PQQ#

I vet the subcontractors who deliver for me in much the same way a buyer vets a contractor, so I read these forms from the assessor's side. The assessor is not reading for prose. They are working down a marking sheet, usually in two layers.

Layer one: pass/fail. These are gates, not scores. Get one wrong and nothing else is read.

• Exclusion grounds - convictions, insolvency, tax non-payment, serious breaches. Declare honestly; a declared and remedied issue is treated very differently from a hidden one that surfaces later.
• Insurance - employer's liability, public liability, sometimes professional indemnity, at the levels the form states. "We will obtain it if successful" is accepted on some forms and fails others. Read the wording.
• Financial standing - accounts, sometimes a credit check, sometimes a turnover test against the contract value. Under the old 2015 Regulations a buyer could not normally demand annual turnover of more than twice the contract value; most still use something close to that rule of thumb.
• Health and safety - either answered in full or satisfied by a current SSIP certificate, depending on the form.

Layer two: scored. This is where shortlists are actually decided.

• Relevant experience - usually three contract examples, each with value, client, dates, scope and a referee. Assessors mark relevance to this contract: similar value, similar client type, similar work. Three £8k bathroom refits will not score well against a £400k planned kitchens programme, however good they were.
• Technical and professional ability - your people, supervision, quality management, supply chain, how you control subcontractors.
• Policy questions - environmental, equality, modern slavery, social value - often low-weighted, sometimes pass/fail on whether the policy exists at all.

The assessor's real question across all of it is simple: if we award to this firm, what goes wrong, and would we be able to defend picking them? Every answer you write should make that question easier to answer in your favour.

A PQQ does not reward the best contractor. It rewards the contractor who made it easiest for a stranger to tick the box.

For the subcontracting model specifically, there is one more thing assessors watch for: how you control the people who deliver. A firm that wins and subs out the work has to show a supply chain process - vetting, competence checks, insurance verification, supervision. Answer that well and the model is a strength on the form. Fudge it and it reads as a risk. The broader move from trade to managing contractor is covered in how to go from subcontractor to main contractor.

When the buyer is not allowed to use one#

This is the part the consultancies rarely mention, because it reduces the market for their help.

Under section 85 of the Procurement Act 2023, when a contracting authority invites tenders for a regulated below-threshold contract, it may not restrict who can tender by assessing suitability - legal and financial capacity, or technical ability. In plain English: for most smaller public contracts there is no separate shortlisting questionnaire. Everyone who meets the advertised basics can bid, and the buyer assesses suitability alongside the tender at award stage instead.

For works, there is a carve-out that matters to anyone in construction. The ban only applies to works contracts below £207,720, or below £135,018 for central government buyers (the values in force from 1 January 2026). Between those figures and the full works threshold, a buyer is allowed to run a selection stage.

So the honest reading for a small contractor is:

• Under about £207k on a public works job: you should not be shortlisted out by a questionnaire. If you are asked suitability questions, they are being assessed at award, not used to stop you bidding.
• Above it: expect a PSQ or SQ, and expect it to be scored.
• Frameworks and dynamic markets: the questionnaire is usually at the joining stage, once, and then call-offs follow. Getting through it once can open years of work.

When you do not need to worry about a PQQ#

Skip the bid-writing course for now if any of these describe your work:

• Your work comes from homeowners, marketplaces or word of mouth. Only 2 of the 26 trade marketplaces and consumer platforms in the directory use any form of pre-qualification questionnaire. They check ID, insurance and reviews.
• You sub to Tier 1s or insurers. Only 2 of the 23 Tier 1 supply-chain routes and 1 of the 23 insurance repair and FM networks in the directory run one. They vet you through supply-chain registration or an accreditation.
• Your public jobs are small works. Below the section 85 figures above, you should not face a shortlisting questionnaire on a regulated contract.
• You have no named buyer yet. A perfect PQQ answer bank with no buyer to send it to is wasted effort. Pick the lane first.

The one case where preparing early is the right move: you have chosen social housing, council or framework work. Then you will meet this form at nearly every door, and the work you put into your answers compounds every time you reuse them.

How to get ready without a consultant#

The evidence a PQQ asks for is the evidence of a business that is genuinely run properly. There is no shortcut that survives a site audit, and there does not need to be:

1. Register on the Central Digital Platform and keep your core supplier information current. Every public PSQ draws on it.
2. Build an answer bank. Write your best three contract examples once, with values, dates, clients and referees who have agreed to take a call, and refresh them every quarter.
3. Clear the pass/fail layer first. Insurance at the right levels, accounts available, an SSIP certificate if your target buyers accept one in place of the health and safety section. Which scheme to buy, if any, is in CHAS vs Constructionline vs SMAS vs SafeContractor, and the scheme the most buyers name is broken down in what is CHAS accreditation.
4. Read the scoring before you write a word. Every public questionnaire publishes how it is marked. Write to the marking sheet, not to impress.

The full list of what to have in the folder before you start - the actual paperwork - is a separate job, and our sister platform keeps it: the PlanaJob PQQ checklist for UK contractors (same team, different site). This post is about what the form is and who uses it; that one is about filling the folder.

Where this sits in the bigger picture#

The PQQ is one gate in a long corridor of them, and the model only works if you know which gate stands between you and which buyer. That is the whole argument in what construction arbitrage is: work-finding is a directory problem, not a marketing problem. How the 557 gates break down by buyer type is in where to find construction contracts in the UK, and where public opportunities are now advertised under the Act is in Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder.

If a form throws other terms at you - SSIP, framework, dynamic market, PPON, social value - the plain-English glossary of construction procurement terms explains each one in a paragraph, with how many gates ask for it.

A note on the numbers: the counts in this post are computed from our own requirements dataset covering all 557 UK gates, not taken from anyone's marketing. They are floors - a gate whose questionnaire we could not see behind a login is not counted - and they move as buyers change their processes, so they are dated and recomputed when we refresh. The legal points are a plain-English summary of the Procurement Act 2023 as in force on the date below, not legal advice; the buyer's own documents govern any specific procurement.

Last checked: 15 October 2026.