Public procurement, in numbers.
In Portugal, January to August 2026, 13.5% of the 15,567 open tenders (concursos públicos) that published a bidder list drew a single bid, with a median of 4 bids and a mean of 6.3, counted on the Portal BASE open register (IMPIC). 70.6% of open tenders were decided on price alone, and the median deadline to bid was 14 days. Direct awards were 42.0% of the 171,806 contracts by count and 15.9% by value, and SMEs took 88.5% of the contracts and 67.7% of the value. The EU Official Journal reads 41.3% for Portugal's lots because it carries only the contracts above the EU thresholds; the national register also carries the smaller ones, which are more contested.
Data: Portal BASE (IMPIC), edition
Every figure on this page is one TRINTA publishes and stands behind, imported from the same data that renders its source page: the two barometers, built from Portal BASE and SECOP II records with the methodology printed beside them, and the platform registry behind the radar. Quote them with their sources; the links carry the full context.
Who buys and who supplies, measured in Portugal
Contracted value reported to Portal BASE, January to August 2026. Eight of the ten largest public buyers are health units; on the other side, pharmaceuticals lead the supply with energy behind it.
Aggregated by tax number, never by name. The same entity is written up to 55 different ways in the source register and 802 entities have more than one spelling, so adding rows up by name would inflate every ranking and double-count EUR 213M in this edition alone. That is why the spelling count is printed beside each name: a league table of Portuguese public buyers built on names is wrong before it starts. Both tables are downloadable as CSV from the open datasets.
Where competition is thinnest, by CPV division
The same Portuguese register, cut by what is being bought. A supplier reading down this table is reading how hard each part of the market is to enter. Procedures for software package and information systems drew a single bid 13 times as often as procedures for agricultural, forestry, horticultural, aquacultural and apicultural services. 14,522 open procedures across 26 divisions, January to August 2026.
Portugal only, and open procedures only: direct awards are excluded because there the buyer chooses who bids, so a single offer is the design of the procedure rather than an absence of competition. Divisions below the reporting threshold do not appear. Method and sources on the Barómetro.
A division holds hundreds of codes, so its average covers procedures a single supplier would never all bid for. The same register answers this one level down: 4,770 individual CPV codes carry what Portugal signed beneath them, 289 of them with enough open procedures to publish a single-bid share of their own, and the whole table is one file at /cpv-market.json. The same register also carries the buyer's own mark for an ecological contract, counted with the EU and Portuguese rules beside it in green public procurement in Portugal.
What another bidder is worth, in money
Every figure above counts how contested a market is. This one prices it. For each Portuguese open procedure that produced a single contract, the contracted price is compared against the buyer's own published base price, and the median discount is grouped by how many bids came in.
A procedure that draws one bid closes 0.6% below the ceiling the buyer set. One that draws more than ten closes 31.1% below it. The curve rises at every step, and the generator refuses to publish an edition where it does not.
This is an association and not a cause, and the difference matters: a buyer who attracts ten bids is usually buying something more standardised than one who attracts a single bid. Counted on 7,326 open procedures in janeiro a agosto de 2026 that produced exactly one contract. Contracts from procedures split into lots are excluded, all 15,190 of them, because a ceiling belongs to the whole procedure while a price belongs to one contract, and dividing the two makes lotting look like price pressure. Also excluded: 4,069 without a declared bidder list, 75 without a usable base or contract price, 43 above the ceiling and 51 below a tenth of it.
The same question in three countries, counted the same way
How often does a public tender draw a single bid. Three states publish enough of their own register to answer it, and each is read on its own open procedure rather than on everything it awards, because a rate that folds in direct awards measures how much a government chose to compete, not how much competition it met.
Same months, January to July 2026, and each figure counted from the state's own open register rather than estimated or surveyed. It is not a verdict on any of the three systems. What it is useful for is narrower and more practical: a supplier deciding which market to prepare a bid for can see where a prepared bid meets less company. Coverage differs and is published on each source page, because a rate without its coverage is half a number: Portugal reports a bidder list on 58.1% of open procedures, France fills offresRecues on 84.6% of marchés. Portugal's row is the barometer edition that measured those months; the current edition, January to August 2026, reads 13.5% over 15,567 procedures.
A fourth reading answers the same question for every member state at once, and it is deliberately not a fourth row here: the EU Official Journal carries the contracts above the European thresholds and nothing below them, so its 35.9% across 571,148 lots is the large end of every market rather than the whole of any. France reads 17.5% in its own register and 18.8% there, and the gap is the threshold and not a disagreement. Every EU country, ranked, with each CPV code beneath it.
How to cite
TRINTA, "Public procurement statistics 2026: single-bid rates", Portal BASE (IMPIC), edition 5 October 2026, https://trinta.ai/procurement-statistics (accessed [date]).
Why single-bid rates matter
A procedure that receives one bid is a procedure somebody won without competition, and the share of them is the most honest single measure of how contested a market really is. The two barometers measure it the same way on two continents, from the official records, with the caveats printed beside the number: equivalent procedure types, different thresholds, so it is an order of magnitude, not an exact ratio. For a supplier, every single-bid award is a tender someone else saw first.
The questions these figures answer
- Does more competition actually lower the price in public tenders?
- How often does a public tender receive only one bid?
- What percentage of EU public tenders receives only one bid?
- What percentage of Portuguese public contracts receive a single bid?
- What share of French public contracts receive a single offer?
- What share of Spanish public tenders receive a single bid?
- What share of UK public contracts receive a single bid?
- Which EU country has the least competition in public procurement?
- Which sectors get the fewest bids across the EU?
- Which sectors of public procurement have the least competition?
- Why are there no EU-wide figures on how many bids public tenders receive?
- Can you trust a published single-bid rate?
- Which countries publish enough data to measure tender competition?
- 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?