Index › Canonical stats › Single-bid economy
The single-bid economy
Across 405,956 Quebec tenders with named bidders, 67.4% closed with exactly one offer. The measurable core of the single-bid economy.
What this measures
Quebec publishes what almost no other jurisdiction does: the identity of every bidder on every public tender. Across 405,956 such calls, 2021–2026, 67.4% closed with exactly one offer and the average tender drew 1.98 bidders. Two of every three advertised competitions had no competitor.
A single-bid tender was advertised but drew one name — the process ran, the contest did not. It is the measurable core of the single-bid economy: markets where the tender exists on paper and competition has evaporated in practice.
Methodology
Denominator: Quebec SEAO tenders with at least one named bidder, 2021–2026. Single-bid rate is the share with exactly one named bidder; average bidders is the mean named-bidder count. The yearly chart series on the Quebec page covers the 389,825 tenders bucketed by year; the corpus total is 405,956. Both figures are published — cite the one that matches your denominator.
The companion working paper — the single-bid analysis across categories, buyers, and methods — is The Single-Bid Economy at the Public Service Institute.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single-bid economy?
The finding that 67.4% of Quebec public tenders with named bidders — 405,956 calls, 2021–2026 — close with exactly one offer. Roughly two-thirds of measured tendering attracts no contest at all.
Why Quebec?
It is the only large North American jurisdiction that publishes bidder identities on tenders. Where bidders are named, single-bidding is measurable directly; elsewhere it must be inferred from proxies like the no-tender rate.
What is the window discrepancy?
The corpus holds 405,956 named-bidder tenders; the yearly series used for charts buckets 389,825 of them into 2021–2026. The gap (16,131 records) is a documented window discrepancy — cite 405,956 for corpus size, 389,825 for the yearly series.
How does this relate to the services statistic?
Services tenders alone run at 75.4% single-bid (n=184,316) — worse than the economy-wide 67.4%. Category detail is on the competition stat.
Public Service Index (October 2026). The single-bid economy. Release 2026.10. https://publicserviceindex.org/stats/single-bid-economy