The Public Procurement Barometer
The official numbers on public contracts come out once a year, with a significant lag on the facts. The Adjudica Barometer takes the market's measure every month, from the SEAO open data, and turns it into decisions an SME can use.
Data: “Système électronique d’appel d’offres (SEAO)”, Secrétariat du Conseil du trésor, on Données Québec under the CC BY 4.0 licence; Adjudica analysis and calculations.
Current edition · 7 min
Québec Public Procurement Barometer, September 2026: What You Count on SEAO Is Not Everything That Was Awarded
September edition. Half of contracts show up on SEAO within about three weeks of being awarded, but at least 6% wait more than a year. What that changes about how you read the registry.
Read this editionWhat the Barometer measures
Share of mutual agreement
The proportion of public contracts awarded without a call for tenders, month after month.
Median contract
The value of the typical contract published on SEAO, to gauge what's really within an SME's reach.
Active sectors
The public purchasing categories that publish the most, and the ones that are closing up.
Why a monthly barometer
Québec's public market represents tens of billions of dollars in contracts every year, but its public measurement is slow: the official reports come out once a year, long after the fact, and reason at the scale of the state, not that of an SME wondering whether it's worth bidding this month. The Barometer fills that gap. By reading the SEAO open data as it's published, it gives a recent, regular benchmark, in language a business can use.
Each edition starts over from the raw data rather than commenting on the previous ones. We count one contract per award process (not per contract line, which would distort the share of mutual agreement), we date each indicator by its real period, and we flag the current month as provisional until every publication has come in. What can't be measured reliably isn't put forward: the full method is in our editorial policy.
For an SME, the point is concrete: knowing what share of contracts actually goes through an open call for tenders rather than by mutual agreement, what contract size to expect, and which sectors are publishing the most right now. Three questions that guide where to focus your bidding effort. The Barometer extends our data analyses with a running read, month after month.
Previous editions
This analysis also exists for the tender you are targeting: the tender analysis, $190 CAD + taxes, delivered in one business day.
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