The Single-Bid Economy: Competition in Quebec Public Tendering

An unusual disclosure. Through its electronic tendering system (SEAO), Quebec publishes the names of every supplier that submitted a bid on every public tender — municipalities, health networks, universities, school boards and departments alike. Compiled into a single dataset, the record covers 405,956 tenders between 2021 and 2026. It permits a measurement almost nowhere else possible in North America: how many suppliers actually show up when a public contract is put to market.

The headline result. 67.4% of tenders received exactly one bid. The average tender drew 1.98 bids. Competition in public tendering, in the only jurisdiction that publishes the full distribution, is the exception rather than the rule. The single-bid tender is not an edge case produced by unusual categories; it is the median experience of the Quebec public market.

The 2025 discontinuity. Published tender volume jumped from 41,509 in 2024 to 108,260 in 2025 — a 2.6-fold expansion that coincided with the most competitive year in the series: an average of 2.31 bidders and a single-bid rate of 56.6%. In 2026, with publication volume holding at 112,657 tenders, the single-bid rate returned to 71.0% and average field size fell back to 1.96. The pattern is consistent with a coverage expansion drawing in easier, more bid-worthy work rather than a durable improvement in market structure — though only the coming years of stable-coverage data can settle that reading.

Method of call, not just count of bids. The tendering record labels each call by procedure. Direct procedures — negotiated or invited without open advertisement — dominate: 213,328 of 400,081 method-labelled tenders (53.3%). Open calls account for 34.4%, limited procedures 11.6%, and selective frameworks under one per cent. A market in which most calls are never opened cannot produce bidder counts above one regardless of supplier appetite; the method mix and the single-bid rate are two views of the same structure.

What single-bidding means. A single-bid tender is not automatically a failure — specialized requirements legitimately narrow fields, and low-value calls cannot support bid preparation costs. But at two-thirds frequency, the measure stops describing exceptions and starts describing the market's operating system. For suppliers, single-bid categories are not necessarily easy wins: the incumbent is structurally embedded, and displacement usually requires the buyer's dissatisfaction rather than a better price. For buyers and regulators, the rate offers an early-warning indicator for categories where competition has quietly collapsed — a signal that is measurable in Quebec and invisible almost everywhere else, because nowhere else is the bidder list published.

Where the variance actually lives. The single-bid rate moves far more between buyers than between years. Quebec's infrastructure buyers routinely draw 2.5–2.9 bidders per tender while major health and university buyers sit below 1.5; the spread across the thirteen largest buyers spans 37.3% to 92.6%. That buyer-level anatomy — which buyers get competition and which buy alone — is developed in our companion working paper, Quebec's Quiet Markets, and the behaviour of the firms that do the bidding in The Bidders.