What It Costs to Bid on a Public Tender, and When to Walk Away

An SME that bids on three public tenders a month and wins none of them does not only have a pricing problem. It also has a triage problem. The cost of a bid is real, it is counted mostly in hours, and those hours come out of something else.

This article will not tell you what a bid costs. Nobody can tell you that, and any page that put a number on it would be wrong for most of its readers. What it gives you is the method for costing your own, then the public signals that tell you to sit one out before you have committed anything.

The cost is your hours first

Access to the documents for a public tender costs a few dozen dollars on SEAO, electronic filing included. The fee schedule is in our complete guide to SEAO. That is not where the money goes.

The line items that weigh are the same everywhere, and every one of them is time:

• reading and understanding the specifications (the cahier des charges), including the addenda that land partway through;
• assembling the administrative file: attestations, licences, bonds, forms, documents kept current;
• pricing the work, which usually means chasing subcontractors and suppliers who answer when they can;
• writing whatever is asked for beyond the price, when the award method calls for it;
• proofing and filing, in a format and on a deadline that forgive nothing.

The only calculation that matters is a multiplication: the hours it takes you, times the loaded hourly rate of the people who spend them. Loaded rate, not salary: it includes payroll costs, and above all it includes what those people are not doing during that time.

Three line items fall outside the hourly calculation and deserve to be added separately: the bid security when one is required, the mandatory site visit when there is one, and the platform fees. On a construction contract, those three are not details.

Run the exercise once, honestly, on the last bid you filed. The number that comes out is your reference cost.

Five things you can read before committing an hour

The public file on a notice says more than people think, and it costs nothing to look at. Here is what to check, in order.

1. The award method decides what kind of work you are in for

A lowest compliant price contract and a contract evaluated on quality do not ask the same effort of you. The first is a matter of pricing and compliance. The second means writing, demonstrating, sometimes presenting, and it turns on a score awarded by a committee that, under the two-envelope system, does not have your prices in front of it.

The method is in the notice itself, in the "Award method" or "Tender type" field depending on the notice: you read it before buying anything. The criteria and their weighting, on the other hand, are in the tender documents. At the municipal level, the exact weight of price against quality may only be revealed when the bids are opened. The method tells you whether you are preparing a price or a case, and the gap in workload between the two is large. We go through the mechanics in our guide to award methods.

2. The channel the notice went out through changes the competition you face

Not every contract goes through an open public notice. Of the contracts awarded between 2021 and 2023, about 58.9% were awarded without a call for tenders, by mutual agreement. The rest goes overwhelmingly through either a public notice or an invitation-only call for tenders.

The difference matters to you. On calls for tenders awarded between 2021 and 2024, a single bid was filed on about 20.4% of public notices, and on about 57.6% of invitation-only calls, which only reach the firms that were solicited. Being invited and competing in the open are not the same situation, and the file tells you which of the two you are looking at.

3. The competition your category usually draws is known

The number of bids a notice attracts varies with what is being bought. On competitive contracts awarded from 2021 to 2025, invitations included, civil engineering work drew an average of 4.1 bids. Maintenance and repair drew 3.0. Construction materials, 2.2.

That number is read within your own category, never in your neighbour's: the share of invitations is not the same, and it distorts any comparison between sectors. It is the number of bids, yours included, that usually show up where you are going, and it predicts nothing about the notice in front of you.

4. The incumbent supplier is not unbeatable, but it counts

When a public buyer runs a new call for tenders in a purchase category where it has already awarded a contract, the winner of the previous round is among the bidders in only about 31% of cases. And when it does come back, it loses about 44% of the time.

Watch what that means: this is not the legal renewal of a single contract. The new notice may cover a different job, and an absent incumbent may simply be busy elsewhere. What changes your decision is knowing there is one. The public registry tells you who held the previous contract with that buyer, and at what price it was awarded. A supplier that has won the last three cycles in the same place is not the same opponent as one that arrived two years ago.

5. The registry is incomplete, and that works against you

A public contract does not show up in the registry the day it is awarded: it shows up when its record is published there, and the gap is counted in weeks, sometimes in years. A buyer that looks inactive for the past three months may not be: what you are looking at may be a publication gap, not an activity gap.

That is the subject of our September 2026 Barometer, and it is the most useful warning on this list: never conclude from an absence of publication that there is an absence of buying.

When to walk away

None of these signals is enough on its own. Taken together, five situations are worth a rule.

You find the notice less than a week before the deadline and the file calls for documents you do not have current. The calendar does not forgive, and a bid filed non-compliant costs full price for nothing.

The method is quality-based, and you have nothing to put against the criteria that carry weight. The weighting is in the tender documents. If you read it and cannot score on half the points, the price will not save you.

The incumbent has been in place for several cycles with that buyer, and nothing in the specifications has changed. Specifications carried over unchanged can be specifications written around what is already there. Before you give up, remember that specifications can be challenged: the question period and the addenda exist for that, and a requirement that unduly restricts competition can be the subject of a formal complaint, on short deadlines.

The contract is too small for your reference cost. That is the calculation from the start of this article. If you need to win one bid in two to cover your costs and you win one in five, the notice is not for you, even if it is winnable.

You cannot deliver if you win. It sounds obvious, and it is worth writing down. A public contract badly performed is paid for twice: on that contract, and on the reputation that will decide the next ones.

What to take away

The cost of a bid is mostly time, and yours looks like nobody else's. Cost it once, on a real case, and keep the number.

After that, the question stops being "can I win this one" and becomes "is this the best place to put those hours this month". The public file answers part of that question, before you have opened the specifications.

And the answer is often no. A firm that bids less and chooses better at least stops paying for bids it had no reason to file.

Method

The proportions cited come from SEAO open data, analyzed by Adjudica, and each one covers a different population that has to be read along with it.

The share awarded without a call for tenders covers contracts awarded from 2021 to 2023. Our monthly Barometer measures the same share over a more recent window and by publication date, which gives a higher figure.

The single-bidder rates cover competitive calls for tenders awarded from 2021 to 2024, separately for public notices and for invitation-only calls for tenders.

The sector averages cover competitive contracts awarded from 2021 to 2025, including invitations and purchases run by a mandatary or a purchasing group. The share of invitations differs from one category to the next: comparison between sectors is distorted by it, and we do not make that comparison.

The behaviour of the previous winner covers the cases where the same buyer ran at least two competitive calls for tenders in the same purchase category, appearing in the registry from 2021 to 2026. That window is anchored on the publication date rather than the award date. The loss rate is calculated only on the cycles where the previous winner comes back to defend its place.

Counting is done by contracting process, one contract being one OCID. No company and no public body is named.

Sources

• SEAO corpus in OCDS format, analyzed by Adjudica.
• Act respecting contracting by public bodies (CQLR, c. C-65.1) and its regulations, for the award methods and compliance rules of provincial public bodies.
• Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies (CQLR, c. C-65.01), in force 1 April 2026, for municipal bodies.

Going further

All of Adjudica's analyses and data on public tenders are gathered on the data page.