How much competition to expect on a Quebec public tender

Before you register a company in Quebec, get an RBQ licence or have a contract read in French, you want to know one thing: how many companies you would be up against.

The answer is on the public record. Quebec's tendering system, SEAO, publishes who bid on each contract and who won, and on a large share of contests the price of every bid. We counted. The short version: it depends far more on how the contract is being awarded than on anything else, and on the tenders you can actually answer, price decides most of the time.

First, check how the contract is being awarded

SEAO lists three kinds of procurement side by side, and they are not the same market.

• Open tenders (appel d'offres public): any eligible company may bid. These are the ones you can answer.
• Invitation tenders (appel d'offres sur invitation): the buyer asks a handful of firms. Unless you are invited, you are not in it.
• Direct awards (gré à gré): no competition at all. The contract is published because the law requires disclosure, often once it is already signed.

Here is what each one draws, measured on processes launched since 1 January 2024, counting the distinct companies listed as bidders:

• open, construction: 4.5 bidders on average, and 10% of tenders draw a single bid;
• open, services: 4.3 bidders, 19% single-bid;
• open, goods: 2.9 bidders, 27% single-bid;
• invitation: about 2 bidders, with 37% to 48% single-bid depending on the category;
• direct award: 1.1 to 1.2, and 78% to 87% single-bid.

If you have read that most Quebec public contracts draw a single bid, this list is why. That statistic is true of direct awards, which are the most numerous notices and have nothing to do with you. Across open tenders alone, it is roughly one in six. We wrote about the gap at more length, in French.

Where price decides

To know whether the lowest bid wins, you need the price of every bid and the identity of the winner. SEAO publishes both on part of the record. We kept the contests with a single lot, a single winner and at least two priced bids that were not marked inadmissible — 68,727 of them — and asked whether the winner's own bid was the lowest.

• construction: the lowest bid won 95.6% of the time;
• services: 89.1%;
• goods: 84.3%.

One population note that matters for services. A contest whose bid prices are not published cannot appear in this count, and services are where that happens most: across open tenders with at least two bidders, bid prices are published on 98% of construction contests, 88% of goods contests and only 67% of services contests. The missing third may well be contests where price is not what decides. Read the services figure as "where prices are published", not as the whole services market.

It also varies by buyer. Among the 630 public bodies with at least twenty such contests, the lowest bid won 91.7% of the time at the median buyer, 81.6% at the buyer ranked in the bottom tenth, and 97.4% at the top tenth.

How close the two lowest bids land

When price decides, the useful question is how much room there is between the winner and the runner-up. Across the same contests, the second-lowest bid sat above the lowest by a median of:

• 8.7% in construction, where one contest in three is decided by less than 5%;
• 10.5% in goods;
• 16.4% in services.

These are descriptions of the field, not a number to aim for. The spread of a particular tender depends on its size, its buyer and who shows up, which is exactly what an average cannot tell you.

Region matters

Competition is not spread evenly across Quebec's seventeen administrative regions. Open tenders in Montreal and Laval draw noticeably more bidders than those in the regions far from the large centres, such as Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the Côte-Nord or the Gaspésie. For the figures, region by region, see the regional market reports — the section "How many competitors to expect" gives the average number of bidders and the single-bid share for each one, rebuilt from the published record rather than typed in by hand.

What changes if you bid from outside Quebec

Less than you might fear, on the evidence we have.

• The incumbent's edge is small. A firm that already won the same kind of contract from the same buyer wins about four points more often than other bidders once you account for the size of the field. Seven times out of ten, an incumbent who bids still loses. The detail is here, in French.
• Losing on paperwork is the common way to lose on price. Where SEAO records whether each bid was admissible and compliant, a cheaper bid that lost had usually been set aside. For a firm new to Quebec forms, that is the risk worth managing — the French article on what follows the closing date has the figures.
• Eligibility comes before any of this. Whether an Ontario or other out-of-province firm may bid at all turns on the contract's value and the trade agreement that applies. Our guide for Ontario companies covers it.

Where to look next

• Bidding on Quebec public tenders from outside Quebec — which trade agreements open which contracts
• Regional market reports — bidders, single-bid share and buyers, for each region
• How we predict a tender before bids open — how the same record becomes a forecast for one notice

Data: Système électronique d'appel d'offres du gouvernement du Québec (SEAO), licensed under CC-BY 4.0. Figures measured on 14 September 2026, on data published up to 6 September 2026. Bidder counts cover processes launched since 1 January 2024; price figures cover every year of the record where bid prices are published.