EUR 61.2bn of European public contracts went to a single bidder
Superseded, 26 September 2026. A later piece, EU public procurement competition: 519,004 lots, sets out the full record behind it.
We read every award notice the EU's official journal published over six months: 221,931 notices, and 519,004 individual lots that record how many bids came in. In the euro area, 29.2% of those lots went to a single bid, and those lots carry €61.2bn. That is 30.9% of all the contract value that can be priced in euro.
The spread across countries
Single-bid share of award lots, for countries with at least 300 reporting lots:
- Poland 56.5%, Cyprus 55.5%, Greece 53.7%
- Portugal 48.8%, Slovenia 48.2%, Bulgaria 45.0%, Czechia 43.6%
- Lithuania 38.8%, Spain 38.0%, Hungary 37.5%, Italy 36.1%
- Romania 33.7%, Malta 33.6%, Estonia 31.7%
- France 18.6%, with Finland and Switzerland in the teens
The all-country figure is 36.1% and the euro-area figure is 29.2%. The gap between Poland at the top and France at the bottom is more than a factor of three. The study page carries one caveat: a country heavy on single bids tends to publish more, smaller lots, so the comparison is not purely about how tough the buyers are.
Competition by contract size
We ranked every euro-area lot by published value and split them into ten equal groups. If competition improved with contract size, the chart would slope. It does not. The cheapest decile is decided on a single bid 31% of the time, the most expensive decile 27%. The whole range sits between 27% and 33%.
This is mostly ordinary public buying, not mega-contracts, and the thin competition is spread evenly through it. The median lot in that cut is €161,000, and nine lots in ten are below €2.0m.
Where the fewest bids land
By sector, the pattern is specialist supply:
- Laboratory, optical and precision equipment: 58.3% single bid (3,390 lots, median €162k)
- Software packages and information systems: 53.1% (2,505 lots, median €340k)
- Repair and maintenance services: 44.2% (7,080 lots, median €210k)
- Security, fire-fighting, police and defence equipment: 42.5% (1,359 lots)
- Chemical products: 41.1%, transport equipment 39.2%, IT consulting and software development 38.2% (5,536 lots, median €450k)
That is where a new bidder is most likely to win, by showing up. A tender for laboratory equipment or a software package that drew one bid is a tender no rival entered.
Limits of the data
The share is computed over lots that report a bid count, not over every notice, because reporting is uneven between countries and notice types. A single-bid award is not automatically a problem: it can be a re-run after a failed competition, a sole viable supplier, or a contract with no realistic second bidder. The data shows the shape of the market, not the intent of any buyer. Every figure comes from a published notice.
Ireland, for comparison
Our separate Irish study covers 25,151 tenders and awards from 2023 to 2025, including the below-threshold work the EU register never sees. The two cuts are not directly comparable, since one counts lots and the other counts notices. There, 20.8% of the 19,133 records that report bids went to a single bid, national-rules work was single-bid 23.3% of the time against 17.4% for EU-wide competitions, and 3,260 awards went out by direct invite.
The data files
The Irish file is downloadable and hash-stamped: ireland-etenders-awards-2023-2025.csv. The EU study's method notes, tables and limits are on the study page. If you want the sector numbers for your own product line, that is the work we do.