How Many Québec Public Contracts Are Awarded by Mutual Agreement Above the Tendering Threshold?

This is a method note. It explains where a figure we published comes from, how it is calculated, and what it does not allow anyone to conclude.

The figure

Between 2021 and 2025, 13,180 contracts of at least $150,000 were awarded by mutual agreement by the departments, agencies and public institutions subject to the Act respecting contracting by public bodies.

Widening to municipal bodies and to the other regimes that share the same notice-of-intention mechanism, the count reaches 18,584. Across every buyer present on SEAO, it reaches 18,771.

Why a $150,000 floor

There is no single threshold written into the law. Section 10 of the Act respecting contracting by public bodies refers to the minimum threshold set out in any applicable intergovernmental agreement, and those thresholds change from one vintage to the next. The highest of those in force over the period stands at $133,800.

We therefore set a single floor of $150,000, which sits above all of them. That choice is ours: it makes the count insensitive to which threshold vintage applies to a given file, at the cost of being conservative. State-owned enterprises, whose thresholds run far higher, are excluded from this count.

What the figure does not say

These are not notices of intention. The SEAO open corpus carries none as a notice type. We are counting contracts already awarded by mutual agreement, not intentions published in advance.

We do not know how many of those contracts required a notice. Above the threshold, the law allows mutual agreement in five cases only. One of them, where a public call for tenders would not serve the public interest, requires the body to publish a notice of intention fifteen days in advance. This count is therefore an upper bound on the population concerned by that mechanism, never its equal.

Bodies are classified by their name, not against a legal register. SEAO open data does not carry the buyer's legal regime: we infer it from the name. A small share of buyers stays undetermined and falls out of the count. The figure therefore describes the scope we were able to classify, and the upper bound holds within that scope.

A contract is counted per notice, on its first award line. A notice covering several lots is not added up lot by lot. Other counting conventions move the total by less than two points.

The municipal regime changed its trigger on 1 April 2026. Before that date, the municipal notice of intention was triggered by the sole-supplier reason; since then, it is triggered by the public-interest reason, as at the provincial level. Our window ends in 2025 and therefore describes the former regime.

Method version

This figure is recalculated as of 10 August 2026, under version 2 of our method: windows by award date, counting by process, one contract counted once whatever the number of lots or amendments, revisions published by the source applied.

An earlier version of this count, calculated under version 1 of our method, gave 14,062. We have not broken the difference down between the conventions that produce it: it comes from a set of changes applied together, award dates, revisions published by the source, and unification of the calculation lineage. We publish the recalculated figure and we say which of the two you are reading.

Sources

Act respecting contracting by public bodies, CQLR c. C-65.1, ss. 4, 10, 13 and 13.1. Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, CQLR c. C-65.01, ss. 33 to 35, in force since 1 April 2026. Public tendering thresholds: Secrétariat du Conseil du trésor, Info-marchés publics bulletins.

Further reading