Civil Engineering Contracts in Québec: Four Bids per Tender, and a Median Gap of 7.8%

Julien runs a 60-employee road works firm in the Estrie region. He bids almost exclusively on public contracts, and he feels every tender draws the whole world. He is not wrong, and it is measurable.

We looked at 14,781 civil engineering contracts awarded in Québec between 2021 and 2025. Of the eight sectors we measured, it is the one with the largest share awarded after competition.

Nearly nine contracts in ten go through a call for tenders

In civil engineering, 86% of contracts are put out to competition. That is the highest share of awards made by tender of the eight sectors we measured. For comparison, in building it is 69%, and in computer hardware 27%.

Mutual agreement accounts for only 14.4% of contracts. In other words, if you are in civil engineering, the vast majority of contracts go through a competitive process rather than a direct award. The trade-off comes immediately.

Four bids, and a median gap of 7.8%

A civil engineering tender receives on average 4.1 bids, with a median of 4. Both figures are read across all competitively awarded contracts, invitations included. The share of invitations varies widely between sectors, which distorts the comparison where it is high; in civil engineering it is 8.8%.

And the median gap between the two lowest bids reaches 7.8%.

A clarification on the first row: this is the gap between the two lowest amounts filed, not the gap between the winning firm and the one behind it. We publish what we measure.

Tenders without competition are rare here

Only 12.5% of civil engineering tenders receive a single bid. On public notices alone, that share falls to 9.1%: of the eight sectors we measured, civil engineering shows the smallest share of public notices that received a single bid.

For a firm looking for lightly contested files, civil engineering is the wrong place. For a firm looking for volume and able to hold a price, it is the opposite.

Many bidders does not mean many winners

Here is the nuance that separates this sector from building, and it is counter-intuitive.

You have to add up 126 different firms to cover half the civil engineering contracts awarded by tender. In building, it takes 410.

Civil engineering is therefore concentrated among markedly fewer firms than building. We do not compare sectors on the average number of bidders: the share of tenders by invitation varies too much from one sector to another for those averages to describe the same population. What can be said: the same firms often face off, on contracts requiring equipment and bonding that few companies can put together.

An honest caveat on that figure: company names on SEAO are not standardized, and the same firm can appear there under several spellings. Real concentration is therefore at least as strong as what we measure, never weaker.

What this changes for your next bid

The median gap is counted in points, not in tens of percent. It reaches 7.8% between the two lowest bids. That is a measure of central tendency: it says nothing about how often the far gaps occur.

You are often up against the same firms. A sector where 126 firms win half the tenders is a sector where the same names keep coming back. Knowing which ones usually show up at a given buyer changes how you prepare a price.

Volume makes up for margin. This is a sector where tendering is the rule and gaps are thin. Calibration is worth more than hope.

Method

These figures are measured from the open data of Québec's electronic tendering system (SEAO), covering contracts awarded between 2021 and 2025. A contract is counted once, whatever the number of lots or amendments.

The share put out to competition covers public calls for tenders, calls for tenders by invitation, which are addressed only to the firms that were solicited, and purchases made through a mandated body or a group of organisations.

The price gap is measured on tenders that received at least two total amounts published at opening; unit prices, which are not comparable with one another, are excluded. SEAO does not publish the evaluation method used: our measure therefore describes how dense price competition is, without distinguishing an award to the lowest price from a quality-price grid.

Sources

Further reading

This analysis is part of our sector series, published from our corpus of Québec public contracts. The full set is gathered in our data and analysis.