One bid in five: what 25,151 Irish public contracts show
Superseded, 26 September 2026: Competition in Irish Public Procurement: 25,151 Records replaces this piece and covers the same ground on the full record behind it.
Every public contract the Irish State published between January 2023 and the end of 2025 is now in one file: 25,151 tenders and awards, €79.7bn of awarded value as published, 2,882 public bodies buying, and 6,996 supplier names, with every named partner on a joint bid counted. We read all of it. What follows is what it holds, and how to check each number against the published file before you rely on it.
What the State actually buys
Technology is a small share. Of the 25,151 records, the largest blocks are these:
- Minor building works and civils: 5,197
- Professional services: 3,515
- Facilities management and maintenance: 3,078
- ICT and office equipment: 2,710
- Fleet and plant: 2,038
- Managed services: 1,854
If you sell software, the slice that applies to you is a few thousand records out of that pile. If you sell maintenance, grounds work or trades, the pile is bigger than the software slice, and it includes the below-threshold work that never reaches the EU journal.
Who spends, and who wins
The Office of Government Procurement leads on volume with 1,608 contracts. It runs central frameworks on behalf of everyone else. The HSE follows on 1,078, the OPW on 472, the Education Procurement Service on 413, Iarnród Éireann on 399. Local authorities cluster lower, around 300 to 370 each.
On the winning side the counts spread thin. 12,467 of the 25,151 awards name at least one supplier, and counting every name on every award, joint bids included, gives 6,996 supplier names sharing the work. The top of that table is consultancies plus one catering firm, and no single name owns it: Ernst and Young 126 awards, Ergo 118, Deloitte Ireland 115, The Lunch Bag 113, Forvis Mazars 98, PFH Technology 92, KPMG 76, Arup 65, and PwC and TRIUR Construction 58 each.
One bid in five
19,133 of the 25,151 records report how many bids came in. Of those, 3,976 were decided on a single bid, 20.8%, and 40.4% got two bids or fewer. The median competition is three bids.
The split by route is uneven, and the EU-wide route drew more bidders. National-rules competitions, the below-EU-threshold work, were decided on a single bid 23.3% of the time across the 10,905 records that report bids, against 17.4% for EU-wide competitions across 8,228 records.
Another 3,260 awards went out by direct invite, with no competition at all. That is one in eight of everything in the file.
By year, the single-bid share went 23.8% in 2023, 19.0% in 2024, 19.6% in 2025.
Where the data comes from
Two of the sources are free and open registers, and a third carries payment context. The EU register (TED) publishes Irish above-threshold notices. Ireland's own national tendering platform publishes the below-threshold and national work as well. Payment files from data.gov.ie cover what bodies actually paid over €20,000.
The counts are counts of published records. Nothing in the file is estimated, modelled or bought.
What this does not claim
Awarded value is as published. A framework ceiling is a published number and not money spent, so treat the €79.7bn as the published figure and not as cash out the door. Bid counts are missing on roughly a quarter of the records, so every competition share above is quoted on the 19,133 records that report them and not on the full file. Supplier counts are award events: a company that won eleven small contracts counts eleven times, and every named partner on a joint bid is counted. Treat 6,996 as the number of distinct supplier names in the published record and not as a company census. The source column separates partners with both a semicolon and a pipe character, so both are treated as separators; counting semicolons alone gives 5,834.
Correction, 26 September 2026: an earlier version of this article gave 6,308 supplier names and a lower per-supplier table, because it treated the source column as semicolon-separated only and so dropped every partner after the first on a joint bid. The figures here follow the rule stated above: 6,996 distinct names when both separators are counted, 5,834 when semicolons alone are counted, and reproduce from the published file.
Check it yourself
The file is public, and the check takes about a minute. It is 9.4MB of CSV, 25,151 rows plus a header:
ireland-etenders-awards-2023-2025.csv · SHA256 1ccd526e4c96fe05ebcdc14717adac48e46074aac19bbb37b121a69908611477
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("ireland-etenders-awards-2023-2025.csv")
print(len(df)) # 25151
bids = pd.to_numeric(df["Sum of No of Bids Received"], errors="coerce").dropna()
print(len(bids), (bids == 1).mean()) # 19133 0.2078
print(df["Threshold Level"].value_counts()) # National 12673, OJEU 9218, Direct Invite 3260
The full study, with the charts and the method notes, is here: Irish public contracts 2023-2025. If you want the wider picture, the same exercise across the whole EU is in the European competition study, where 29.2% of euro-area lots went to a single bid and those lots carry €61.2bn. A shorter version of this piece ran on Substack first.
If you sell into any of this and want the slice that applies to you, that is the work we do: more in the insights section.