Non-compliant bids: in goods, the cheapest bid is set aside nearly one time in five

I have put together bids running well over 300 pages, most of them on SEAO. What I feared most was never the price. It was losing on a detail: a date, a document, a clause.

That fear has a frequency, and Québec's tendering system (SEAO) lets you measure it. It is not the same everywhere: depending on what you sell, it runs from one time in thirty to nearly one time in five.

What SEAO publishes, and what it does not

On some tenders, the public body records two marks next to each bid on SEAO: was the firm admissible (eligible), and was the bid conforme (compliant). A bid marked non-admissible or non-compliant is set aside before prices are compared.

Two limits, stated up front:

• these marks are published on only part of the tenders — about one in five

of the single-lot open public calls that closed from 2021 to August 2026;

• SEAO publishes the mark, never the reason. You know a bid was set aside, not

why.

Every figure below is therefore about the 11,798 tenders on which the body published both marks for every bid it received.

One bid in sixteen is set aside

On those tenders:

• 6.2% of bids are marked non-admissible or non-compliant — about one in

sixteen;

• 14.9% of tenders have at least one — about one in seven;
• and on tenders with at least two priced bids, the cheapest bid is the one

set aside 7.3% of the time.

The last figure is the one that hurts. When the winning bid is not the cheapest, four times in five at least one cheaper bid had been set aside. The lowest price is no protection; the lowest compliant price is what wins, almost always.

Construction, services, goods: three different worlds

The picture changes once the categories are separated.

On construction work, the cheapest bid is set aside 3.3% of the time — one time in thirty. One bid in thirty is marked non-compliant or non-admissible, and one tender in ten has at least one.

On services, the cheapest bid is set aside 9.3% of the time — about one time in eleven. Bids set aside make up 8.4% of the total.

On goods (supplies), the cheapest bid is set aside 18.8% of the time — nearly one time in five. One bid in eight is set aside, and one tender in four has at least one.

The gap is not a one-year accident. From 2021 to 2026, the share of cheapest bids set aside on goods never fell below 12%; on construction it never rose above 5%.

The direct consequence: on goods, the winning bid is the cheapest of all in only 76.9% of cases, against 96.0% on construction. But it is the cheapest of the admissible and compliant bids in 95.1% of cases. Nearly the whole gap is bids that were set aside.

Why goods?

The data does not say, and I will not pretend otherwise. But anyone who has answered both kinds of tender will recognise a lead.

On construction, compliance is mostly about the file: the contractor's licence from the Régie du bâtiment, the bid guarantee, the signed form, the completed price schedule. These are documents you prepare once and reuse from one bid to the next.

On goods, it is also about the product itself, line by line: each item must meet the technical sheet in the specifications — dimensions, standards, certifications, an "or equivalent" to demonstrate. One characteristic that does not match, on one item among dozens, and the bid can be declared non-compliant. The more lines there are, the more places there are to get one wrong.

That is a hypothesis, not a measurement. It still deserves a place in how you check a bid.

What it changes before you file

The check that counts happens before the deadline, not after the opening:

• the firm's eligibility — licences, attestations, authorisations — which

cannot be fixed on filing day;

• the documents required, and above all the conditions the tender documents

designate as grounds for automatic rejection;

• on goods, every line of the price schedule against the technical sheet that

describes it, including any addenda that changed it.

For a bidder coming from outside Québec, bidding on Quebec public tenders from Ontario lists the documents to have in hand before the first bid.

Where Offra helps, and where it stops

This is the problem that made me build Offra: the tool I wish I had had.

• You upload the tender documents. Offra pulls out every requirement, tied to the

clause it comes from, and the list of what you have to hand in — what you fill in, what you produce, what you must obtain from a third party (document analysis).

• Before you file, your bid is read against those requirements and your profile;

each gap found comes with its fix (bid review).

What Offra does not do: it does not certify that a bid is compliant, and it does not replace your own review. The compliance decision belongs to the public body, and it is your signature at the bottom of the form.

In short

• Where the body publishes the marks, one bid in sixteen is set aside.
• The lowest price is set aside one time in thirty on construction, one time in

eleven on services, nearly one time in five on goods.

• When the winner is not the cheapest, a cheaper bid had been set aside four times

in five.

• SEAO says a bid was set aside, never why.

Method

Open public calls on SEAO (calls for tenders and their variants; neither invitations nor gré à gré), single-lot, whose bidding period closed from January 1, 2021 to August 31, 2026: 59,382 tenders that received at least one bid. Of those, 11,798 where the body published the admissibility and compliance marks for every bid — the population for every percentage above. A missing mark is never counted as "compliant". "Cheapest" compares total prices, on tenders with at least two priced bids (9,709). Category: the one the body records on the notice.

Data: Système électronique d'appel d'offres du gouvernement du Québec (SEAO), under the CC-BY 4.0 licence. Figures measured on October 7, 2026 on data published up to September 18, 2026.