One hundred eleven pharmacy RFPs.What the packet demands, and what the record already shows.

The pharmacy RFP names its incumbent.Then withholds everything that prices it.

A pharmacy benefit RFP is the most technical procurement a benefits office runs, and the one most often handed to a consultant. The packet is richer than a broker RFP: it names the incumbent four times as often, it defines rebate, it demands audit rights. What it leaves out is what a bidder prices against: the drug spend, the current guarantees, the lives, and whether the plan is leaving an integrated carrier arrangement or an independent one.

The record that fills those gaps is not the Form 5500. Public bodies file none, and for the one private filer in this corpus the pharmacy sits inside a carrier contract that leaves no Schedule C row. The record is the board’s: the ordinance that extended the incumbent and priced it, the consultant’s deck in the committee booklet, the fiscal note, the cancellation notice, the carrier’s published index that names the medical administrator. This study pairs what 111 issuers asked for with what that record already said.

Two populations. Public bodies (109): 19 state employee health plans, 3 state retirement systems, 27 cities, 26 counties, 19 school districts, 5 public universities, 4 purchasing coalitions, transit and special districts. Private employers that file a 5500 (1): a hospital network. Public PBM procurement by private filers is nearly invisible to open search; that absence is itself a finding.

The spend, the current terms,and the carve-in behind the carrier.

Forty-six packets or addenda name the incumbent PBM. Twelve state the annual drug spend. Thirty give covered lives. Four describe the incumbent’s contract type. Twelve disclose any current term.

Where issuers withhold, the board has usually already disclosed. Toledo’s council priced the incumbent’s administrative fee in the ordinance that extended it. Kansas’s commission published the consultant’s three-year net cost for every bidder. Delaware’s committee minutes list every firm that bid and every firm that failed the minimums. Baton Rouge named its incumbent in an addendum two business days before questions closed.

Thirty days, posted in April,and the incumbent usually loses.

The median window from posting to due date is 30 days (quartiles 23 to 40; the shortest was 11). 61 of 73 RFPs issued in 2026 posted between April and September; 35 of 50 stated contract starts are January 1. Pre-proposal meetings are held in 11 of 26 packets that say; Q&A addenda are published in 18 of 40, and that is where incumbents, lives and current terms leak. Twenty-four of 74 RFPs that could be classified were run by an outside consultant: Segal 4, WTW 3, Gallagher 2, Stephens 2, and one each for Marsh McLennan Agency, Mercer, Alliant, Lockton, Oswald with Prism, Remedy Analytics, Action Pharmaceutical Consulting, Turner Wood & Smith and Sherrill Morgan.

Two state RFPs were cancelled outright for failed specifications: Delaware in October 2025 (no bidder met all 25 minimums) and Alaska in August 2026 (“ambiguous or otherwise inadequate specifications”). Louisiana’s was cancelled by statute. North Carolina’s first TPA RFP met the same fate before the PBM award.

How the corpus was built,and what it cannot say.

The packet tells you what the issuer wants. The minutes tell you what they have.Bid from both.

RFPs were collected on October 9, 2026 from procurement portals (Starbridge, Govly, BidNet, Bonfire, state e-procurement sites) and directly from state benefit plans, retirement systems, cities, counties, school districts, universities, consortia and health systems, with awards traced through council and board minutes, intent-to-award notices, ordinances and consultant presentations. Scope: PBM services, pharmacy consulting and audit, retiree Part D EGWP, specialty and GLP-1 carve-outs, and medical administration bids where pharmacy is priced separately. Excluded: broker RFPs with pharmacy as one bullet, retail and hospital pharmacy operations, 340B, workers’ compensation. Two Medicaid or public-program rows are recorded but not generalized. 52 of 111 rows carry the packet or a board record; the rest are portal abstracts.

Public bodies were matched to the Transparency-in-Coverage directory by name; seven of the ten example issuers matched. The private filer was matched to Form 5500 filings by EIN (plan years 2020–2024). PBM names are the current ones: Capital Rx is Judi Rx, Southern Scripts is Liviniti, IngenioRx is CarelonRx.

• The award sample is 21, and 15 where both incumbent and winner are named. The retention figure is directional. Most 2026 awards post between November 2026 and February 2027; the corpus will be re-checked then.
• One private 5500 filer in 111 rows. Hospital systems, universities and Taft-Hartley funds run PBM RFPs through consultants and do not post them; roughly 250 such issuers were checked. The pharmacy record for private employers lives on Schedule C only when the PBM is carved out and paid directly.
• Lives, spend and savings are as the issuer or its consultant stated them, with the year given where the document gives it. Savings claims are projections at award, not results.
• Procurement and filing data describe what was reported. Nothing here is a finding about any PBM’s, carrier’s or consultant’s conduct.