A freight RFP has six parts: a clean lane file, a pricing structure that forces comparable bids, service and equipment requirements, a carrier questionnaire, a timeline with dates, and the award criteria with their weightings. Everything else is commentary. Get those six right and carriers bid the freight you actually have, instead of pricing around what they cannot tell.
This is the on-page version of the template. If you are running the whole event rather than just building the document, start with how to run an annual freight RFP.
The lane file is the spreadsheet everything else hangs off. Carriers price what is in it and guess at what is missing, and guesses are always priced in their favour. Build it as a spreadsheet with one row per lane and these columns:
Use five digit zips rather than city names. Chicago covers a metro wide enough that a carrier quoting the far side of it is quoting a different lane, and the spread between the two can be hundreds of dollars a load. City names are the single most common reason bids come back non comparable.
Send it as a spreadsheet, not a PDF, and lock the column headers. Every carrier who has to retype your lane file into their own format introduces errors you will be comparing as if they were prices.
Decide the format before you send anything, and give carriers exactly one way to respond. Mixed formats are what turn bid analysis into a week of cleanup.
This is the section that decides whether the rate you award is the rate you pay. Anything a carrier cannot see here becomes an accessorial argument later.
Keep it to what changes an award decision. Every extra question lowers participation.
Carriers plan around your dates, and a bid with no dates gets deprioritised behind one that has them. State all five:
Give the question window explicitly rather than leaving it open ended. A defined Q and A period means clarifications arrive while you can still answer them once, for everybody, instead of trickling in after bids are submitted.
A four week schedule that works for a mid sized truckload network:
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Week 1, Monday | RFP released. Lane file and questionnaire go out to the invited carrier list. |
| Week 1 to Week 2, Friday | Question window open. Answers published to all bidders at once, not one at a time. |
| Week 3, Friday | Bids due. No extensions, or the deadline stops meaning anything. |
| Week 4, Monday to Wednesday | Leveling and scenario modeling against the published weightings. |
| Week 4, Thursday | Award notification to winners and non winners. |
| Week 6, Monday | Rates effective. Two weeks between award and go live for routing guide and system updates. |
Compress this if you must, but do not compress the gap between award and effective date. That is the window where the routing guide gets updated, and skipping it is how awarded rates quietly fail to show up in execution.
Write these down before bids open, and share them. If cost is seventy percent, service history twenty and capacity commitment ten, say so. Two things follow: carriers bid to what you actually value, and your own award decisions stay defensible when someone asks why the cheapest bid did not win.
Once bids are in you can model award scenarios against those weightings rather than arguing them line by line, and use carrier performance data to score the service half of the equation on evidence rather than impression.
The bid package is everything you send a carrier in one go. If any of these arrive separately or late, you get questions instead of prices:
The six parts still apply, but three of them change shape. Pricing runs on freight class or density with a base tariff and discount rather than a simple per mile rate, so the lane file needs class, density and dimensions alongside weight. Accessorials matter more and should be itemized in detail, because liftgate, residential and inside delivery drive a larger share of LTL cost. And volumes are usually stated in shipments rather than loads.
Copy this into your own document and work down it.
These slow the bid and do not change the award.
A clean template does most of the work, but two things still need attention once responses land.
First, level the bids before you compare them. Rates that sit far below the rest of the field are usually not the bargain they look like, and outlier bids distort every optimization you run afterwards. Second, accept that the rates you award will drift. A number set in November is a twelve month old view of the market by the following October, which is why most shippers now pair the annual event with mini bids on the lanes that move.
Six things: a lane file with five digit zips and volumes, a single pricing structure, service and equipment requirements, a short carrier questionnaire, a timeline with all five dates, and award criteria with weightings stated in writing.
One row per lane with origin and destination city, state and five digit zip, volume in loads, equipment type, commodity and average weight, frequency and seasonality, and lane level accessorial expectations. Five digit zips matter more than any other field, because city names make bids non comparable.
Four weeks from release to award is a workable schedule for a mid sized network when the lane file is clean, plus two weeks between award and the rate effective date. Most of the delay in a slow RFP comes from rebuilding the lane file mid event or answering the same question one carrier at a time.
An RFQ asks for a price on defined work. An RFP asks carriers to propose how they would serve the network, with pricing as one component. More on the difference between an RFQ and an RFP.
Running this in a spreadsheet stops scaling around the second round. Freight RFP software keeps the lane file, the bids and the award scenarios in one structure.
SOC 2 Type II