A bond tender, or tender offer for bonds, is a public invitation by an issuer to the holders of one or more of its bonds to sell them back for cash during a set period. The offer document states the price, or the method of setting it, the maximum amount the issuer will buy and the deadline. The price may be fixed, set as a spread over a benchmark yield, or determined through a Dutch auction tender in which holders name the price at which they will sell.
For holders it is a voluntary corporate action. Those who wish to accept instruct their custodian before the election deadline, and the tendered bonds are blocked until settlement; the workflow is described under tender offer processing. If more bonds are tendered than the issuer wants, acceptances are scaled back. A tender is one form of bond repurchase.