Portugal Public Procurement, January to August 2026: €14.7bn, 13.5% Single Bid

Public bodies in Portugal signed 171,806 contracts worth €14.7bn from January to August 2026, and 13.5% of the public tenders with a reported bidder list received a single bid. Both figures come from edition no. 2 of the Barómetro da Contratação Pública, which reads the whole Portal BASE contract register, published as open data by IMPIC (file read on 5 October 2026). The Barómetro is written in Portuguese. This guide takes the eight findings a supplier can act on, in the order a bid decision is made.

How big is Portuguese public procurement, and where is it spent?

€14.7bn was contracted from January to August 2026, in 171,806 contracts. April was the heaviest month at €2.6bn and August the lightest at €1.1bn, but August is not a downturn: contracts reach Portal BASE late, so the latest months are revised upwards in each edition. By place of execution, which the register gives for 89.8% of contracts, the district of Lisbon leads with €3.6bn and Porto follows with €2.0bn, and the register shows the rest district by district. Size your own segment and region inside the total, and treat the latest month as provisional.

How often does a Portuguese public tender get only one bid?

13.5% of public tenders with a reported bidder list received a single bid, about one in seven: 2,116 of the 15,567 tenders measured. Only open public tenders count. In a direct award or a prior consultation the buyer invites the suppliers, so one bid is the design of the procedure and not a lack of competition. The rate also changes with the place: among the 19 districts and regions with at least 100 measured tenders it runs from 6.5% in Vila Real to 30.9% in the Azores. A single bid shows that a tender had no rival, not why, and the Barómetro measures the outcome, not the cause.

How many rivals should I expect on a tender?

The median public tender received 4 bids and the mean was 6.3. 26.6% of tenders closed with two bids or fewer and 49.5% drew five or more. The counts fall steadily: 2,116 tenders with one bid, 2,035 with two, 1,959 with three and 1,737 with four. The mean sits above the median because a minority of tenders attract many bids. Plan for a field of about four, not twenty, and size the effort of a bid to that.

Which sectors have the least competition, and which the most?

Software and information systems had the highest share of single bids: 38.9% of 431 tenders, with 3.0 bids on average. IT services and consulting followed at 34.4% (531 tenders, 4.1 bids) and repair and maintenance at 22.6% (617 tenders, 3.5 bids). At the other end, medical and pharmaceutical equipment drew 5.1% single bids and 10.8 bids on average across 2,495 tenders, the largest sector measured, and agricultural and forestry services had the lowest share at 3.0%. Below the sector, the register goes down to codes: single-bid share by CPV shows where single bids cluster. In a thin sector the risk is missing the notice, not losing to a rival. In a crowded one, expect to compete on price and delivery.

Does price alone decide the award?

70.6% of public tenders were decided exclusively on price. Most of the rest weigh price against other factors. With a price-only criterion the bid is arithmetic: the lowest compliant price wins, so the work is in the cost base and in submitting every required document correctly. Where several factors are weighted, spend the time on the specification and the evaluation grid instead.

How long do I have to prepare a bid?

The median window was 14 days between the notice and the closing of proposals, and 36.1% of notices gave 10 days or less: 7,718 of the 21,378 measured. Another 6,544 gave 11 to 20 days, 5,444 gave 21 to 30, and only 1,672 gave more than 30. With windows this short, checking the portals once a week is too slow. Fix your CPV codes and your priority buyers in advance, so that reading a notice takes minutes and not a day.

How much is bought without an open tender?

Direct award was 42.0% of contracts by number, 72,291 contracts, but only 15.9% of the value, about €2.3bn: many contracts, and small ones. The buyer invites the supplier, and Portal BASE publishes the contract after it is concluded, with no prior announcement (items 3.7 and 3.8 of its FAQ). No announcement feed can warn you in advance, so the way in is to be known to the buyers who use the procedure. The direct-award ranking gives the share of each of the 568 buyers with at least 50 contracts in the period, out of 3,129 that used it at least once.

Who buys, and who wins the money?

Infraestruturas de Portugal is the largest buyer at €825m, and eight of the ten largest buyers are health entities, led by the Santa Maria local health unit at €502m. The buyers register lists the 919 entities that contracted at least €1m each. On the supply side, pharmaceutical companies hold the top of the table with fuel and electricity behind them, and the 100 largest suppliers hold 42.8% of the value. Small firms are not shut out: SMEs were awarded 67.7% of the value and 88.5% of the contracts, and the supplier pages show each company's buyers, CPV divisions and the rivals that win with the same buyers. Watch hospital buyers by name, not only by sector: the money sits in a few institutions.

What changed between edition 1 and edition 2?

Edition 1 read 13.8% single bid for January to July 2026 (extraction of 7 September), with 153,477 contracts and €13.6bn. Edition 2 reads 13.5% for January to August, with 171,806 contracts and €14.7bn. Two things changed, the period and the method, so do not read the gap as a trend: the second period has one more month, and edition 2 counts each contract once. The IMPIC file repeats contracts on more than one row (855 surplus rows across 843 contracts in the file read on 5 October). Edition 1 counted repeated rows twice, which is why its supplier ranking had a different leader.

Five fixed rules sit behind every figure:

Aggregation by NIF, never by name. The same entity appears spelled up to 55 ways and 802 entities have more than one spelling. Adding up by name would hide €213m of double counting.

Competition only in public tenders. Direct awards and prior consultations are excluded from every bid percentage.

The current month stays out. September 2026 is excluded, and each edition republishes the earlier months revised.

Revised upwards. Bidder-list coverage rose from 48.6% in January to 65.3% in August, so the recent months will move.

Double check. Each headline metric is computed twice by independent routes. If they disagree, the edition is not published.

Foreign suppliers and individuals without a Portuguese NIF stay out of the rankings. They hold 4.7% of the value, which is reported separately.

How do you put the Barómetro to work?

Start with three comparisons: your sector's single-bid share against 13.5%, the direct-award share of your main buyers against 42.0%, and the window of the last notice you missed against 14 days. The aggregate files behind every figure are open, CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. TRINTA publishes the Barómetro every month. If you want the tenders that fit your catalogue rather than the market average, book a demo and we will show you the Portuguese tenders scored for fit against your catalogue.