Reading competition data before you bid

Two numbers describe a competitive environment better than any amount of reading the solicitation: average bidders (how many suppliers typically respond to a tender in this category or for this buyer) and the single-bid rate (the share of tenders that receive exactly one response). Together they tell you whether you are walking into a contest or an empty room — before you spend a single proposal hour.

What the record actually shows

Québec is the only Canadian jurisdiction that publishes bidder counts systematically, and its record is deep enough to teach from: 389,825 tenders between 2021 and 2026 with named bidders, averaging 1.98 bidders each, with 67.4% drawing a single bid. Two-thirds of the market is, in the literal sense, uncontested.

The average hides a sharp category split. Over the compiled corpus:

Construction markets are genuinely contested — prequalified contractors price real work against each other, averaging 3.14 bidders. Services and goods tenders, 75.4% and 74.4% single-bid respectively, more often describe a room where one qualified supplier was expected to walk in.

Cold arithmetic: the baseline win rate

Divide one by the average bidder count and you get the win rate of an undifferentiated bidder — a floor, not a forecast. Against a works field of 3.14, the baseline is about 32%. Against a services field of 1.78, about 56%. Incumbency and evaluation craft move you off the baseline in both directions; the baseline just tells you which game you are playing.

Worked example A — the road-resurfacing tender

A municipal works tender for road resurfacing, valued around $600,000, lands in your inbox. Works average 3.14 bidders, and the most active firms bid relentlessly: Eurovia Québec Construction submitted 3,159 bids in the compiled record, winning 798. Assume you will face three or four credible regional contractors with recent, comparable projects.

The bid/no-bid call therefore turns on differentiators you can document: a paving crew actually available in the construction window, a reference project for the same municipality, and a price built from recent asphalt costs. If none of the three is true, the 32% baseline is optimistic — decline and bank the proposal hours.

Worked example B — the IT services RFP

A provincial RFP for application-maintenance services, valued around $180,000. Services tenders average 1.78 bidders and are single-bid 75.4% of the time. The most likely scenario is that you are the only compliant respondent, or one of two. Here the competition is not the field — it is the mandatory criteria: security clearances, insurance levels, named personnel. Precision in meeting pass/fail requirements beats polish in the technical narrative.

Note the inversion: in the works room, presence is given and price-craft decides; in the services room, presence itself is the scarce resource.

Refine by buyer, not just category

Averages blur further at the buyer level. In Québec's record, the transport ministry's main tendering office averaged 2.74 bidders with a 37.3% single-bid rate across 6,569 tenders — a genuinely contested room. The Société de transport de Montréal averaged 1.44 bidders with 84.9% single-bid across 5,866 tenders — effectively a series of arranged appointments. Same province, same period, opposite markets. Buyer-level data, where published, should override category averages every time.

Reading trends without fooling yourself

Québec's single-bid rate by year runs 70.6% (2021), 72.7% (2022), 74.0% (2023), 70.1% (2024), 56.6% (2025), 71.0% (2026). The 2025 figure coincides with a posting surge to 108,260 tenders — average bidders rose to 2.31 — before the 2026 rate returned to 71.0%. One year against trend is a reporting or policy artifact until it repeats. Compare like years, and weight recent years more heavily than the pandemic-adjacent ones.

Average bidders and single-bid rates are the cheapest intelligence in public procurement: public, free, and decisive for the competition row of any bid/no-bid score.

Practice this against live opportunities with

@misc{pi-2026-primers-competition-data,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Reading competition data before you bid — Primer},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/primers/competition-data},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}