One bid: 61bn of European public contracts had a field of one - press kit and data
Press kit · for immediate release
One bid: €61.2bn of European public contracts had a field of one
New analysis of the EU’s official tender journal finds that
29.2% of euro-area contract lots published between March and August 2026 attracted a
single bid — €61.2bn of award value. Contract size makes no difference: the single-bid
share is flat from the smallest to the largest decile.
Press release — 14 September 2026
Europe’s public buyers keep awarding work without a contest, and spending more does not fix it.
A study published today by Rennwick, an Irish procurement-intelligence firm, analyses
221,931 award notices published in TED, the EU’s official journal, between March and
August 2026. 519,004 contract lots record how many bids arrived.
Across all reporting countries, 36.1% of lots received one bid and
55.7% received two or fewer. In the euro area the figures are
29.2% and 49.2%. Priced in euro, €61.2bn of
the €198.1bn awarded in the window — 30.9% — went to a
lot with a single bid.
The study tested the common assumption that larger contracts attract more bidders. It found the opposite
of nothing: splitting euro-area lots into ten equal value groups, the single-bid share ranges only from
27% to 33% with no upward or
downward slope. A €200,000 contract is contested about as thinly as a €200m one.
Thinning is concentrated in specialist supply: laboratory and precision equipment
(58.3% single bid), software and information systems
(53.1%), and repair and maintenance (44.2%). Where many
suppliers can bid — pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, civil engineering — competition is far
broader.
On the buyer side, 866 public bodies awarded at least 80% of
five or more contracts with a single bid, and 113 awarded ten or more
contracts with no competition at all. Two thirds of the 135,815 suppliers
that won anything won once, while the top 1% of suppliers took
29.8% of awards.
Ireland performs comparatively well: 20.6% of Irish lots were single-bid against
29.2% for the euro area. But single-bid outcomes still account for
14.5% of Irish award value, because they fall on the larger contracts.
Rennwick publishes the underlying tables with the study, free and without registration, so that buyers,
bidders, auditors and journalists can check the numbers themselves.
“The published record is clear enough to act on,” the study notes. “A buyer that cannot show
that its market was tested cannot show that it got value.”
Key figures
Notes to editors
- Study the full study
- Data CSV tables, free to republish with attribution to Rennwick
- Window TED eForms packages, March–August 2026
- Method lot-level bid counts; euro-area only for money; no FX conversion
- Basis limits 69.4% of award notices state a value; 48.8% in euro
- Interview available on request via rennwick.com/contact
- Figures every number above is reproduced by
build_study_stats.pyfrom the TED packages
Rennwick is an independent Irish firm based in Kiltyclogher, Co. Leitrim. It publishes
competition studies from official tender data and sells the operational version of the same analysis to
suppliers.