Impact of tether length on analyte capture by receptors tethered to QCM and SPR based affinity sensors was investigated. Two different scenarios were investigated, namely, electrostatic binding of gold nanoparticles to amine thiol monolayers and biospecific binding of neutravidin to biotinylated thiol monolayers. In both cases, the tether length and flexibility were found to have a strong impact on the densities and kinetics of adsorption. Adsorption of gold nanoparticles on NH2-(EG)n-SH SAMs was found to systematically increase with an increase in EG repeating units. The trend was found to be similar for NAv adsorption to biotin-(EG)n-SH SAMs with an increase of NAv density with increase in the number of EG repeating units.