European public procurement: the competition study
Transparency study · European Union · March–August 2026
Public procurement in Europe: the competition study
Rennwick read every award notice published in the EU’s official journal over six months
— 221,931 award notices, 519,004 individual lots that record how many bids came
in. In the euro area, 29.2% of those lots were decided on a single bid, and those
single-bid lots carry €61.2bn — 30.9% of all the
contract value we can price in euro. Bigger contracts are not better competed: the share is flat across the
whole spending range. This is what the published record shows, with its limits stated at the end.
One bid, and it happens everywhere
Single-bid share of award lots, by buyer country (countries with 300+ reporting lots).
The all-country figure is 36.1%; the euro-area figure is 29.2%.
Ireland is highlighted.
Poland (56.5%), Cyprus and Greece sit above
54%; France (18.6%),
Finland and Switzerland are in the teens. A single-bid-heavy country also publishes more, smaller lots —
see the method notes.
Spending more does not buy more competition
Lots ranked by published value, split into ten equal groups; the bar is the single-bid share
in each group. If competition fell with contract size we would see a slope. There is none.
The cheapest decile is contested about as thinly as the most expensive
(31% vs 27%). Median lot in this euro-area cut:
€161k; nine lots in ten are below €2.0m.
Where competition is thinnest
| Sector (CPV division) | Lots | Single bid | Median lot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laboratory, optical and precision equipment | 3,390 | 58.3% | €162k |
| Software packages and information systems | 2,505 | 53.1% | €340k |
| Repair and maintenance services | 7,080 | 44.2% | €210k |
| Security, fire-fighting, police and defence equipment | 1,359 | 42.5% | €250k |
| CPV division 64 | 955 | 41.6% | €346k |
| Chemical products | 1,028 | 41.1% | €86k |
| CPV division 42 | 1,581 | 40.9% | €249k |
| Transport equipment and auxiliary products | 7,522 | 39.2% | €220k |
| IT services: consulting, software development, internet | 5,536 | 38.2% | €450k |
| Education and training services | 3,851 | 38.2% | €133k |
| Radio, television, communication equipment | 1,279 | 36.1% | €270k |
| Medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal care | 40,178 | 35.7% | €46k |
Specialist supply is the pattern: laboratory and precision equipment
(58.3%), software and information systems (53.1%) and
repair-and-maintenance (44.2%). Broad commodity markets — medical supplies and
pharmaceuticals, construction — are contested far more, simply because more firms can bid.
Incumbency: the same names, again and again
Public buying looks like a long tail with a hard core: two thirds of the
135,815 suppliers that won anything won exactly once, while the busiest
1358 firms (1% of winners) took
29.8% of all awards. Some buyers never ran a real competition
at all — these are the largest such buyers by number of bid-counted lots.
- U.A.T Judetul Constanta - Consiliul Judetean Constanta ROU · 884 lots · 84% one bid
- Szpital Uniwersytecki Nr 1 Im. Dr. A. Jurasza W Bydgoszczy POL · 595 lots · 84% one bid
- Szpital Wolski Sp. Z O.O. POL · 405 lots · 90% one bid
- Unidade Local De Saúde Santa Maria, E.P.E. PRT · 337 lots · 98% one bid
- Directia Generala De Asistenta Sociala Si Protectia Copilului Prahova ROU · 305 lots · 100% one bid
- Specjalistyczny Szpital Miejski Im. M. Kopernika W Toruniu POL · 254 lots · 87% one bid
Most-awarded suppliers in the six-month window, by number of award notices:
- Farmexim S A 1,141 awards
- B Braun Medical 1,129 awards
- Urtica 1,057 awards
- Fresenius Kabi Romania 956 awards
- Bialmed 937 awards
- Dr Max 928 awards
- Farmaceutica Remedia Distribution And Logistics S R 725 awards
- Asclepios S A 693 awards
Repeated single-bid award to the same supplier is not proof of anything improper on its own.
It is, however, exactly the pattern that procurement rules exist to make visible — and the reason
buyers should be able to show their market was tested.
Ireland, in context
Ireland is one of the most competitive markets in this dataset: 20.6% single-bid
against 29.2% for the euro area. But the same Irish data shows
14.5% of priced award value going to single-bid outcomes — the share of
money decided without a contest is larger than the share of contracts, because those contracts are the big ones.
Our 2023–2025 Irish study covers that market in detail.
What this data is — and what it is not
- Source TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), EU official journal — monthly eForms bulk packages
- Window March–August 2026 · no trend or seasonal claim is made
- Bid counts 519,004 lots report 1–200 bids; 65,439 zero-bid records and 73 lots claiming 200+ are held out as non-competitions or noise
- Zero-bid lots 65,339 lots record zero bids - no award, or unpublished bid count
- Value coverage 69.4% of award notices state a value; 48.8% in euro
- Money basis euro-area lots only, EUR €1k–€500.0m — no FX conversion, medians lead
- Not included below-threshold buys, framework call-offs recorded elsewhere, contract amendments
- Attribution buyer country, not supplier country; bid count is bids received at award, not bidders pre-qualified
python3 build_study_stats.py # rebuilds every figure in this study from tender.db
The data
Download the tables behind this study:
competition by country · single-bid by sector ·
headline metrics. CSV, UTF-8, no registration.
This study is the public half of Rennwick’s tender-intelligence work. The operational half tells an
individual supplier where the thin competition is, and what a winning bid looks like in it.