The number of pursuits your firm can support is set by senior engineer hours, not by how many proposal staff you employ. Take the subject matter expert hours you have available across a year, divide by the SME hours each pursuit consumes, and you get a realistic ceiling. Most firms have never run that calculation.
Why Firm-Size Benchmarks Answer the Wrong Question
The common way to answer "how many proposals should we be chasing" is to look up what firms your size typically do. Those benchmarks exist, and they are genuinely useful for sanity-checking a plan. We keep a firm-size volume table in our go/no-go decision framework.
But a benchmark tells you what comparable firms attempt. It does not tell you what your firm can staff. Two 50-person civil firms with identical headcount can have completely different pursuit ceilings, because one has eleven people who can credibly speak to technical approach and the other has four. The useful question is not what firms like yours do. It is what the people you actually have can sustain.
The Constraint Is Senior Engineer Hours, Not Proposal Staff
When firms feel proposal pressure, the instinct is to look at the proposal team. That is usually the wrong place to look.
A 2026 cross-industry proposal benchmark that broke out the AEC segment found the most-cited challenge, named by 64% of respondents, was delays from subject matter experts. About 74% of AEC responses involved eleven or more contributors. The bottleneck is waiting on senior technical people, not waiting on writers.
That matters for capacity planning because the two pools are not interchangeable. A coordinator can produce more documents. A coordinator cannot produce the technical approach narrative, confirm that a project reference is comparable, or decide which engineer should be named as design lead. Those hours come from billable senior staff, and that pool is small, fixed in the short term, and getting harder to expand. The ACEC Research Institute puts the national shortfall at roughly 18,000 engineers per year: about 184,000 left the profession in 2022 against 166,000 new graduates.
So the arithmetic runs on SME hours.
The Capacity Model
Three inputs. All of them are numbers your firm already knows or can estimate in an afternoon.
1. Count your real SME pool. Not total headcount. The number of people who can be named as key personnel or speak credibly to technical approach. At a 45-person civil firm this is often eight to ten people, not forty-five.
2. Set a sustainable monthly contribution. How many hours per month can each of those people give to pursuits without missing billable targets. Four hours is a common realistic figure. Six is aggressive. Ask them rather than assuming.
3. Price each pursuit type in SME hours. Not total effort. Only the senior technical hours.
The ranges below are starting estimates, not benchmark data. Use them to run the calculation this week, then replace them with your own after tracking a quarter of real pursuits.
| Pursuit type | Starting estimate, SME hours |
|---|---|
| On-call roster or prequal renewal | 3-5 |
| Standard SOQ, familiar work type | 8-12 |
| Project-specific proposal, new client | 18-25 |
| Major pursuit with interview preparation | 35-45 |
Now multiply. A 45-person firm with nine SMEs contributing four hours per month has 36 SME hours per month, or roughly 432 per year. Against that budget, a plausible year looks like this:
| Pursuit type | Count | SME hours |
|---|---|---|
| On-call and prequal | 6 | 24 |
| Standard SOQ | 14 | 140 |
| Project-specific | 8 | 160 |
| Major pursuit | 2 | 80 |
| Total | 30 | 404 |
Thirty pursuits, 404 SME hours, against a 432-hour budget. That fits, with little room for a surprise.
The uncomfortable part is what happens when you run this against what your firm is actually chasing. Firms routinely find they are pursuing 40 or 50 opportunities on a budget that supports 30. The pursuits still get submitted, because the hours come from somewhere. They come out of billable work, out of quality, or out of people's evenings. A pursuit volume that exceeds the SME budget is not a stretch goal. It is a description of how proposal burnout happens.
Two Ways to Raise the Ceiling
If the number comes back lower than the volume you need, there are exactly two levers.
Add SME hours. Hire, or move senior people off billable work and onto pursuits. Hiring is slow and, given the shortfall above, uncertain. Moving billable people to pursuits has an obvious cost. Firms do both, but neither is fast.
Reduce the SME hours each pursuit consumes. This is the lever most firms have not pulled, because they have never separated the two very different things they ask an SME for. Some of that time is judgment: which approach fits this client, which engineer should lead, what the real risk on this site is. That is irreducible, and it is what you want senior people spending time on. The rest is retrieval and reconstruction: digging up a project reference, updating a resume, restating a scope already written for a similar pursuit last year.
The second category is where the hours are recoverable. When staff and project records are current and structured, the ask changes from "write me your background and pick three relevant projects" to "confirm this is right and tell me which of these three fits." That is the case for building a reusable qualifications library, and it is the problem RFPM.ai works on. The human still decides who and what to feature. The reconstruction work is what goes away.
Cut SME time per pursuit from 14 hours to 10 and the same 432-hour budget supports 43 pursuits instead of 30. No hiring involved.
When Raising the Ceiling Is the Wrong Move
More capacity is not automatically the goal.
If your firm already responds to nearly everything worth responding to, and the win rate is the disappointing number, volume is not your problem and adding it will make things worse. Run the ceiling calculation, then check it against how many incoming RFPs you never answer at all. If that miss rate is near zero, the capacity conversation is finished and the selectivity conversation is the one to have.
The point of the arithmetic is not to maximize pursuit count. It is to stop setting pursuit volume by habit, or by whatever arrives in the inbox, and start setting it against a number you can defend.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many proposals should an AEC firm bid per year?
There is no correct universal number, and it depends on your senior technical staff rather than your headcount or your proposal team. Count the people who can serve as key personnel or write technical approach, multiply by the hours each can give monthly without missing billable targets, then divide by the SME hours your typical pursuit consumes.
What actually limits proposal capacity at an engineering firm?
Senior engineer availability, in most cases. A 2026 AEC proposal benchmark found SME delays were the top challenge for 64% of firms, with 74% of responses requiring eleven or more contributors. Coordinators can produce more documents, but they cannot produce technical judgment, so adding coordination capacity alone does not raise the ceiling.
How many SME hours does a proposal take?
It varies by pursuit type. An on-call or prequalification renewal often needs 3 to 5 senior hours, a standard SOQ for familiar work 8 to 12, a project-specific proposal for a new client 18 to 25, and a major pursuit with interview preparation up to 45. Track your own pursuits for a quarter before trusting any of those figures.
Can we increase pursuit volume without hiring?
Usually, yes, by reducing what each pursuit costs in senior time. Much of what firms ask SMEs for is retrieval and rewriting of material the firm already owns rather than genuine judgment. When records are current and structured, the SME's task shifts from producing content to confirming it, which is a far smaller ask.
What if we are already chasing more than the math supports?
You are already paying for it, in billable hours, in submittal quality, or in staff burnout. The calculation makes visible a cost that was previously absorbed quietly. From there you either raise the ceiling deliberately or cut pursuit volume deliberately, which is a go/no-go discipline question.