In short
- The bid is scored on the CO2-Ambitieniveau you declare at submission. You do not need to hold the certificate at that point.
- Each contracting authority writes its own staffel and picks its own calculation method, so the same level is worth different money at different buyers.
- The declared level becomes a contract condition. What you gain is the increment over the level below, and what you risk is a sanction set above it.
In a Dutch tender the CO2-Prestatieladder is a BPKV award criterion, beste prijs-kwaliteitverhouding, and what gets scored is the CO2-Ambitieniveau you declare at inschrijving. You do not have to hold a certificate when you submit. The buyer converts your declared level into a gunningsvoordeel, an award advantage, using a staffel it wrote itself, and the level then becomes a condition of the contract you have to prove during execution. So the instrument is really three things stacked: a declaration, a conversion, and an obligation.
How does the conversion actually work?
SKAO describes two calculation methods and the tender documents tell you which one is in play.
Gunnen op waarde. A percentage or a fixed amount is notionally deducted from your bid sum, purely for the purpose of ranking bids. This is the fictieve korting, the fictitious discount. Nobody pays you the money and the contract price does not change. Your bid is simply ranked as if it were lower.
Gewogen factor-methode. The level is converted into points, weighted against the other quality criteria in the assessment.
The difference matters when you model a bid. Under gunnen op waarde the advantage scales with your bid sum, so a level is worth more on a large contract than a small one in absolute euros, while the percentage stays flat. Under a points method the advantage is worth whatever the weighting of that criterion is against everything else being scored, and a strong technical submission can crowd it out. Read which one applies before you decide how hard to chase a level.
What is a level actually worth?
Whatever the buyer says, and only that. SKAO does not set the numbers.
| Source of the numbers | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SKAO's worked example in the Handreiking Aanbesteden, on a EUR 1m tender | 5 percent | 10 percent | 15 percent | An illustration, not a rule. SKAO says the buyer fixes the staffel and the method, and the distribution need not be linear |
| Rijkswaterstaat, under Handboek 4.0 from 1 July 2026 | 2 percent | 4 percent | 6 percent | In force for procurements published on TenderNed after that date |
| ProRail, intended from 1 January 2027 | 4 percent | 7 percent | 10 percent | Provisional. ProRail says voorlopig and that a different weighting can apply to some tenders |
The 5, 10 and 15 figures travel further than the others because they appear in SKAO's own document, and they are the ones most often quoted as though they were the scheme's tariff. They are a worked example on a EUR 1m contract. Two of the largest buyers in the market use materially smaller or differently shaped numbers.
The second thing this table shows is the arithmetic that decides your bid strategy. Moving from level 1 to level 2 at Rijkswaterstaat is worth 2 percentage points, not 4. At ProRail it is worth 3, not 7. You gain the increment over the level below you, never the headline number, and the increment is the figure to weigh against the cost of the work.
Do you need the certificate before you bid?
No, and this is the single most useful thing to know about the instrument.
At submission you declare a level. During execution you prove it, either with a CO2-Prestatieladder certificate matching the declared level, or with a projectverklaring, a project declaration covering that specific contract. When proof is due is set by the buyer: Rijkswaterstaat, following SKAO's method, allows proof after the project finishes or one year after award on longer projects, and said publicly that contractors therefore did not need an early audit before its own switch date.
The practical effect is that a firm can bid at a level it does not yet hold and then has a contractual deadline to build the evidence. That is an opportunity and a trap in the same sentence, and which of the two it is depends entirely on whether the accounting work behind the level is realistic on that timetable.
What do you owe after you win?
The declared level becomes a contract condition and delivery gets checked.
Failure triggers a contractual sanction, and SKAO advises buyers to set it higher than the advantage the bidder enjoyed, so that over-promising is never the cheaper option. Rijkswaterstaat publishes its multiplier: 1.5 times the fictitious advantage received. Others do not publish one, and you should not assume a figure from one buyer applies at another.
That asymmetry is the reason to be conservative. The upside of one level higher is an increment of a few percentage points on the ranking of one bid. The downside is a sanction calculated on the advantage across the whole contract, plus the cost of the work you promised and did not do.
Which version is this tender running on?
Check before you map your certificate onto the criterion, because two versions are live and the equivalence rules are one-way.
Buyers can tender with the 3.1 criterion until 14 January 2027, after which they cannot. Where a buyer tendered on 3.1 and you hold a 4.0 certificate, SKAO advises accepting trede 1 as niveau 3 and treden 2 or 3 as niveau 5. Where the criterion is 4.0, a 3.1 certificate is not acceptable proof at all, regardless of how long it stays valid.
Individual buyers publish their own mapping and it is not always SKAO's. ProRail publishes trede 1 as equivalent to niveaus 1, 2 and 3, and treden 2 and 3 as equivalent to niveaus 4 and 5. The difference that costs money is in the middle: a trede 2 certificate is niveau 5 under SKAO's advice and only niveau 4 at ProRail. If you are comparing what your certificate is worth across two procurements, the tender documents decide, not the scheme's advice.
How should you choose the level you declare?
Work the four numbers in order.
The increment. The advantage of the next level up minus the advantage of your current one, applied to the bid sum under gunnen op waarde or to the criterion weighting under a points method.
The hit rate. The increment is only worth anything on bids you would otherwise lose narrowly. On a tender you win comfortably it changes nothing, and on one you lose by a distance it changes nothing either.
The delivery cost. What the level actually requires. Trede 1 asks for scope 1 and 2 mapped, short-term goals and mandatory reporting of non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Trede 2 adds quantified scope 3 and a klimaattransitieplan, a climate transition plan, over five to ten years, and is the step where most firms discover their supply chain data is the constraint rather than their ambition.
The sanction exposure. The advantage multiplied by whatever the contract says, on every contract you declared it in.
What do you need in place to defend the declaration?
An organisational inventory somebody else can follow. The certifying body traces your numbers to source, so the standard is not "the total looks right" but "here is where this figure came from".
The Hedgehog platform lists the CO2-Prestatieladder among its reporting outputs, carries over 20,000 spend-based and activity-based factors that you can supplement with your own supplier-specific data, and reports 5,000+ users on its platform page. The limitation worth knowing before you build a bid strategy on it: a small business reviewer on G2 in August 2026 rated the platform 5 out of 5 and noted there is no forecasting, with Hedgehog having told them it is on the development list. If you want to model what a level costs you over a three year contract before you declare it, that modelling happens outside the tool today.
Where the constraint is scope 3 quantification for trede 2, it is a data collection problem with a long calendar and belongs in scope 3 consulting rather than in the bid team's last fortnight. If you are choosing tooling for the first time, our guide to choosing the right carbon accounting software sets out the questions, and our introduction to the CO2-Prestatieladder for SMEs covers the scheme itself.
Sources: SKAO's Handreiking Aanbesteden 4.0 for the two calculation methods and the 5, 10 and 15 percent worked example; the Overgangsregeling 3.1-4.0 v1.1 of 1 July 2025 for the transition dates and the equivalence mapping; Rijkswaterstaat's news item of 18 March 2026 for its 2, 4 and 6 percent staffel, its 1.5 times sanction and its proof timing; and ProRail's supplier page for its provisional 4, 7 and 10 percent and its own equivalence mapping, all read on 28 August 2026. Hedgehog platform and Hedgehog on G2, read on 27 August 2026. ProRail states that its tender documents on TenderNed, not its website, are decisive for any given procurement. Verified 16 September 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-16.
