The impact of flexible long tethers over rigid, shorter counterparts towards efficiency of analyte capture was investigated using receptors tethered to polymer self-assembled monolayers on gold substrates. Two scenarios were considered, namely, adsorption of gold nanoparticles (as model analyte) to tethered amine receptors, and, the adsorption of neutravidin to tethered biotin receptors on gold sensor surface. The tethered receptor densities and their interaction with analyte was quantified using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and quartz crystal microbalance sensors (QCM-D). The gold surface of these sensors allows use of simple thiol chemistry to attach the molecular tethers. Thiolated polyethylene glycol (PEG) was chosen as a representative polymer to tether the desired receptors to the gold surface. PEGs with desired head and tail functionality and desired length (or, the number of EG units) are easy to obtain The AuNP densities obtained on the amine tethers was compared with the theoretical limits of maximum density for monolayer coverage. The maximum density of gold nanoparticles that could result from electrostatic adsorption of AuNP onto amine monolayers is defined to be 54.7% by random sequential adsorption (RSA) models. For the AuNPs used in these experiments, this would indicate a coverage of 5359 NPs/µm 2 . The surface coverage of AuNPs were found to be 13%, 23%, 34%, 51%, 128% for 4-ATP, APT-400, APT-600, APT-1k and APT-10k respectively. The AuNP surface coverage on the APTs are higher than what has been typically observed for AuNP assemblies in literature. In case of APT-10k, the surface coverage is equivalent to 200% of what has been predicted by the RSA model, which may potentially result from multi-layer formation. An independent analysis of the AuNP distribution on the tethered amine layers on the QCM sensors was performed using SEM. (Fig.