The procurement calendar, measured.
Public buying has a rhythm, and it is usually described from folklore. This page shows it from the records instead: month by month from Portugal's Portal BASE, France's DECP and Colombia's SECOP II, the three markets whose numbers TRINTA publishes with methodology attached. Every figure is imported from those datasets; the peaks are computed, not asserted.
Bars are contracted value; the figure beside each is value and contract count. Source: Portal BASE records, open dataset.
The January concentration is the annual service contracting the Colombian barometer documents; the drop that follows is the market's real baseline. Source: SECOP II processes, methodology here.
Marchés by month of notification, after de-duplication; the last month is incomplete by construction, since buyers publish with a lag, and is revised upwards in the next edition. Source: DECP consolidated files, methodology here, in French.
Response windows in Portuguese notices, January to August 2026: median 14 days. Deadlines in dias úteis are counted with the free calculadora de prazos.
01When are most public tenders published?
Measured rather than assumed: in the Portuguese record for January to August 2026, the strongest month by contracted value was 2026-04 (2,615 M€) and the busiest by count was 2026-03, with 24,727 contracts. In the Colombian record for the same window, Enero was the heaviest month, with 498,792 contracts, driven by the annual service contracting that concentrates at the year's start. In the French register, Mar carried the most notified marchés (20,807) and May the fewest (10,313). The honest answer is that every market has its own rhythm, and it is measurable.
02How long do suppliers get to respond?
Less than most assume. In the Portuguese notices measured by the TRINTA barometer, the median response window is 14 days and 36.1% of notices give 10 dias ou menos. That is the practical case for daily monitoring: a weekly check discovers a meaningful share of procedures with most of their window already gone.
03Is there a year-end spending rush in public procurement?
It is the most repeated claim in the market and the one this page deliberately does not assert: TRINTA's published measurements currently cover January to August 2026 at most, so they neither confirm nor deny a December effect. What the measured months do show is that intra-year variation is real and large. When the barometers extend through the fourth quarter, this page will say what the records say, in either direction.
The questions this calendar answers
- How many days do public tenders in Portugal give suppliers to bid?
- How many public tenders are published in Portugal, France and Colombia?
- How many tenders does TED publish?
- Which month is the busiest for public procurement?
- Quantos dias dá um concurso público para apresentar propostas?
- Em que mês se assinam mais contratos públicos em Portugal?
- ¿En qué mes firma más contratos el Estado colombiano?
- Quel mois la France notifie-t-elle le plus de marchés publics?