Maintenance and Repair Contracts in Québec: The Least Concentrated Awards of the Eight Sectors We Measured

Sylvie runs a 25-employee building maintenance firm in the Mauricie region. She long believed public contracts were reserved for large firms. The data says the opposite, and it also says why she sees so few of them.

We looked at 20,611 maintenance and repair contracts awarded in Québec between 2021 and 2025.

The least concentrated awards of the eight sectors we measured

You have to add up 657 different firms to cover half the maintenance and repair contracts awarded by tender in Québec. That is the highest figure of the eight sectors we measured. In building, it takes 410. In computer hardware, 30.

The sector's top winner holds only 1.2% of contracts awarded by tender. No single name stands out in these tenders.

That half is counted on contracts put out to competition, or 41% of the sector.

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.

But most contracts never go through a call for tenders

This is the other side of the sector, and it explains why Sylvie sees so few.

59.3% of maintenance and repair contracts are awarded by mutual agreement, with no competition. Only 41% are awarded after competition.

Among the sector's direct awards that declare a reason on SEAO, 64.1% cite an amount below the public tendering threshold. That share is read on the 67.4% of direct awards that actually declare a reason: the rest publish none, and we do not presume theirs.

In other words, most of this sector plays out away from public notices: those contracts exist, they get renewed, and watching the notices will not reveal them. Their award is published only after the fact.

One tender in three has no competition at all

33.0% of maintenance and repair tenders receive a single bid. The contract is put out to competition, and a single firm shows up.

For a firm already in place, that is a comfortable position. For a firm trying to break in, it is the opposite of a closed market: these are files where showing up is often enough to be in the running.

Not all of these tenders are addressed to everyone

The competitive subset is not a homogeneous population. A public notice is addressed to every eligible firm; a call for tenders by invitation is addressed only to the firms that were solicited. In maintenance and repair, 29.0% of contracts awarded by tender go through an invitation.

That distinction changes which figure you should be reading. On public notices only, the ones you could answer without having been solicited, the share receiving a single bid is 23.0%, against 33.0% across all of the sector's tenders.

The overall rate is higher than the public-notice rate: outside public notices, the uncontested share is therefore larger. We do not measure the rate for invitation tenders alone, and we do not claim it; nor do we publish how many files that represents. What the data supports: becoming known to the sector's buyers conditions access to part of the files.

What this changes for your next bid

The sector is not closed to you, it is lightly attended. With 657 firms covering half the tenders and one in three drawing a single bid, the barrier is not competition.

What is announced in advance is the small share. Most of the sector is awarded by mutual agreement. Published notices show the competitive share, not the whole market.

Get known, not just watchful. Part of the sector's tenders is addressed only to solicited firms. Watching public notices is not enough to see those files go by.

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 single-bid rate is given twice: across all contracts put out to competition, then on public notices only. The second is a subset of the first, the files a firm can answer without having been solicited. The remainder is not only invitations: it also covers purchases run by a mandated body or a group of organisations, and calls for tenders not published on SEAO.

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.