A Decade Without Tenders: Non-Competitive Federal Contracting, 2015–2026
Roughly one federal contract in three is awarded without a competitive tender — and after a mid-decade decline, the share has drifted back to its highest level in the published record.
- Across the full 2004–2026 corpus, 29.3% of federal awards were non-competitive.
- The year series runs from 32.8% in 2015 down to 23.7% in 2018, then back up to 32.7% in 2026 — a net drift of 9.0 points since the trough.
- Every year since 2022 sits at or above 28.9%; the last three years are the highest sustained block in the series.
- Three departments — DND ($471.4B), PWGSC ($239.3B) and SSC ($137.1B) — account for 69.9% of all contract value.
- The published record does not break non-competitive share by department — a transparency gap this report documents rather than fills.
The measure. Federal contract records carry a solicitation procedure field; when an award is recorded as non-competitive, it flowed without a tender call — under thresholds, urgency provisions, national-security exemptions, or a determination that only one supplier could perform. Each route is individually legitimate. The aggregate is still worth watching, because it measures how much of the public market never sees competition, and because the drift of that measure over time is the cheapest early-warning signal procurement governance has.
The shape of the decade. The series opens at 32.8% in 2015, falls through 2016 to a trough of 23.7% in 2018 — 23.7% that year, the most competitive in the record — and then climbs in three stages: a step up through 2019, a pandemic spike to 30.0% in 2020 consistent with urgency purchasing, and after a partial retreat, a settled plateau at 32.5%–32.7% from 2024 onward. The 2026 rate of 32.7% sits within a point of where the decade began. Whatever discipline the 2017–18 years briefly imposed did not survive the following six.
Where the question bites. A share this large is not a fringe practice; it is a third of the operating system. The departmental cross-section shows the scale of the exposure. Three organizations — National Defence, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Shared Services Canada — account for 69.9% of all federal contract value ($847.8B combined). Their profiles differ sharply in kind: Defence buys in volume (362,845 contracts at an average $1.3M), while Shared Services consolidates (29,177 contracts at an average $4.7M — the legacy of collapsing departmental IT purchasing into single counterparties).
| Department | Value | Share of all value | Contracts | Avg. award |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DND-MDN | $471.4B | 38.9% | 362,845 | $1.3M |
| PWGSC-TPSGC | $239.3B | 19.7% | 73,111 | $3.3M |
| SSC-SPC | $137.1B | 11.3% | 29,177 | $4.7M |
A gap in the record. Here the published data stops short: the proactive publication does not report non-competitive share by department, so the drift documented above cannot be attributed to specific buyers. That is itself a finding of this report. A market in which 29.3% of awards skip competition, concentrated in three organizations holding 69.9% of value, is a market whose most consequential behaviour is unmeasurable in the public record. Quebec, by contrast, publishes bidder names on every tender (see The Single-Bid Economy); the federal standard for what is knowable about competition is, on this measure, lower than a province's.
Reading the drift responsibly. Non-competitive is not a synonym for improper. Defence procurement runs through structured single-source programs; IT renewals extend incumbents because transition costs dominate; urgent purchases are urgent. The 2020 spike in the series is the pandemic recorded in contract procedure, and no one should wish it otherwise. What the series does establish is direction: from the 2018 trough, the non-competitive share rose 9.0 points and has held its gains for four consecutive years, through three calendar years of stable, non-crisis conditions. Sustained levels this high, moving in this direction, are the pattern that justifies asking departments to publish the breakdown — not because sole-sourcing is scandalous, but because a third of the market is too large to leave unexplained.
What would settle it. A department-by-department non-competitive series, published annually against the aggregate line, would attribute the drift in one stroke. Until then, the Institute's position is documented: the aggregate is real, rising, and concentrated where the money is; the attribution is unknowable from open data. Practical tooling for working these records — including non-competitive flags on live awards — is maintained by the research team.