The standstill period is the mandatory pause between the moment a contracting authority announces who won and the moment it may actually sign the contract. Its only purpose is to give the losing bidders a window in which the award can still be stopped — because once the contract is signed, the remedies available shrink dramatically.
Where it comes from
The standstill is not in the main procurement directive but in the Remedies Directive — Directive 89/665/EEC, substantially rewritten by Directive 2007/66/EC. The minimum is ten calendar days when the award decision is sent electronically, and longer where it is sent by other means. Member states may set a longer period and some do, so the operative number is always the national one. What EU law fixes is the floor and the principle: a review body must be able to intervene while intervention still means something.
The second clock: your right to reasons
Article 55 of Directive 2014/24/EU requires the authority to inform each candidate and tenderer of the decision as soon as possible. That notice alone is usually thin. The substance comes from the follow-up: on request, the authority must supply the reasons for rejection and, for a tenderer who made an admissible bid, the characteristics and relative advantages of the winning tender, together with the winner’s name. It has fifteen days from the request to answer. Note the order of the numbers — the answer can legally arrive after the standstill has expired, which is precisely why the request has to go out immediately rather than after a week of internal discussion.
What the award notice does not tell you
A standard award notice states who won and often the value. It does not state your score, the winner’s score, or why the difference exists. Those are the only facts from which a challenge can be built, and they arrive only if asked for. In practice a large share of losing bidders never ask: the bid team has moved to the next opportunity, the loss is treated as commercial rather than procedural, and the file closes. The evaluation reasoning is then never examined by anyone outside the panel that wrote it.
What to do in the first forty-eight hours
Read the award notice for the date it was sent, not the date you opened it, because that is when the clock started. Send a written request for the reasons the same day, referencing the national implementation of Article 55, and ask specifically for the scores against each award criterion and the relative advantages of the winning bid. If the answer is late or evasive, that is itself a fact worth recording. None of this commits you to litigating — it simply preserves the option, which silence does not.
IN NUMBERS
The asymmetry is the point worth remembering. The buyer’s obligations are triggered by your request, not by the calendar, and the period in which a challenge is realistic is measured in days rather than weeks. A bidder who treats the award notice as the end of the process has, in effect, waived a right that European law spent a directive creating.
Source: Directive 2014/24/EU Article 55 and Directive 89/665/EEC as amended by Directive 2007/66/EC; national implementations vary and the national period governs, in force. No Otnox platform data is used in this explainer.
