Single-bid public contracts: what one bidder actually tells you

Award values are missing from a large minority of notices, and missing most often exactly where the money is largest. Bid counts are not: most notices state how many tenders were received, because the number is procedural rather than commercially sensitive. That makes competition intensity the most complete signal in public procurement data, and it is available to anyone willing to count.

What the rate looks like

Across the awards in our corpus that state a bid count, about 21% received exactly one. The average across all awards is a little under five bids. But the aggregate hides the useful part, because the rate varies enormously by who is buying and what they are buying.

• By buyer: federal bodies award on a single bid roughly 36% of the time; municipalities roughly 16%. A central-government contract is more than twice as likely to have drawn one tender as a local one.
• By sector: laboratory and optical equipment sits above 60%, research and development above 50%, security and defence equipment above 50%, software close to 50%. Construction is under 10%, and forestry services lower still.
• The pattern is not about corruption. It tracks how specialised the requirement is and how many firms can credibly serve it, which is why lab equipment and civil engineering sit at opposite ends.

Three different situations produce the same number

1. A genuinely concentrated market. One or two firms can supply a mass spectrometer to a specification; the others were never going to bid. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is winnable either.
2. A requirement written around the incumbent. The specification names capabilities only one supplier has, sometimes without anyone intending it — a spec is often written from the last contract. This is the addressable case, and it is addressable long before the tender appears.
3. Nobody knew. Below-threshold procedures, short deadlines and low-visibility publication routinely produce one bid simply because the market was not watching. Also addressable, and the cheapest of the three to fix.

You can usually tell them apart by looking at the buyer rather than the contract. A buyer whose awards across several unrelated CPV divisions all drew one bid has a visibility problem or a process habit. A buyer with one sole-bid category and healthy competition elsewhere probably has a genuinely concentrated market in that category.

How to use it if you sell to the public sector

• Rank target buyers by sole-bid rate within your own CPV divisions, not overall. A high rate in your category means the incumbent is not being tested.
• Work backwards from the award date to the specification, not forwards from the tender notice. By the time a notice appears, a spec written around an incumbent is already fixed and you are bidding to lose.
• Use the buyer’s market consultation. Buyers are permitted to talk to the market before a procurement starts and often want to; the constraint is that they must treat everyone equally once it is live.
• Treat a sole-bid history as a reason to bid, not a reason to avoid. A single-bidder market with a contract expiring in eighteen months is the highest-leverage situation available to a challenger.

How to quote the number without getting it wrong

Every rate above is a share of awards that state a bid count, not of all awards. Roughly three quarters of awards state one, so the denominator is large but it is not everything, and a rate quoted without it is a rate that will be corrected in public. Small groups are worse: a 60% sole-bid rate over eleven awards is not a finding. We do not publish a rate for any group with fewer than 200 awards that state a count, and neither should anyone else.

Our live figures, with denominators attached and updated daily, are on the competition intensity page. They will not match this article exactly, because the corpus grows every night — which is the point.

Frequently asked questions

What share of EU public contracts receive only one bid?

In our corpus, about 21% of contract awards that state a bid count received exactly one. That aggregate spans a very wide range: from under 10% in construction to over 60% in laboratory and optical equipment.

Is a single-bid award illegal or improper?

No. Some markets have one credible supplier and some procedures are legitimately single-source. It is a signal about competitive tension, not a finding of wrongdoing, and it is treated that way by the European Commission, which tracks single-bidding as a public-procurement performance indicator.

Why are federal contracts more likely to draw a single bid than municipal ones?

Central-government requirements tend to be larger, more specialised and more tightly specified, which narrows the field of firms that can credibly bid. Municipal buying is weighted toward construction, maintenance and services, where many local firms compete.

Can I see the sole-bid rate for a specific buyer?

Each buyer page lists that authority’s awards with the number of bids received where the notice states it, so the pattern is visible per buyer. The aggregate rates by buyer type and by sector are on the competition intensity page.

Where does the bid count come from?

It is a field in the award notice itself, stated by the contracting authority under the eForms standard. We do not estimate it: an award with no stated count is excluded from every percentage rather than assumed.

See how Adjudera’s expiry radar automates this