The essentials in 30 seconds
- A public contract does not appear on SEAO the day it is awarded. Half of contracts show up within about three weeks, at least one in ten takes roughly nine months or more, and at least 6% are still not published a year after being awarded.
- So a month read early is incomplete. One month after it ends, about 39% of the contracts awarded that month are still missing, and about 22% three months later. No month is ever entirely complete: the gap shrinks as you step back, it does not vanish.
- The core finding does not move from one edition to the next: nearly 2 public contracts in 3 are awarded without a call for tenders, and that share varies sharply by buyer family, from about 49% at school service centres to about 87% in the health network.
Every month, we read the SEAO open data (the public registry of Québec government contracts) to pull out what matters for an SME. September 2026 edition. This time the figure that stands out is not about what SEAO holds, but about how long it takes to hold it.
The finding of the month: weeks pass between the award of a contract and its publication
A public contract does not appear on SEAO the day it is awarded. It appears when its record is published there, and the gap between the two is measured in weeks, sometimes in years.
Across contracts awarded since 2021 and observed long enough for the measure to settle, half show up within about three weeks of being awarded. But the spread stretches far beyond that: at least one contract in ten takes roughly nine months or more, and at least 6% are still not published a year after being awarded.
That lag is not the same on both routes:
- contracts awarded without a call for tenders: half show up within about four weeks, and at least 8% wait more than a year;
- contracts awarded through a call for tenders: half show up within about two weeks, and at least 3% wait more than a year.
So what is still missing, in the months following an award, leans toward contracts awarded without a call for tenders.
Now take the contracts awarded in a given month, and count them at various distances from that month. Still missing:
- about 39% one month after the month ends;
- about 28% two months after;
- about 22% three months after;
- about 19% four months after;
- about 8% one year after.
None of those months is ever entirely complete. The gap shrinks as you step back, it does not vanish.
That tail is nothing abstract. We have recorded contracts awarded in 2021 whose award only appeared on SEAO in 2026, more than four years later. Those cases do not state the rule. They state how far it can go.
Source: Adjudica analysis of the SEAO open data, corpus as of August 31, 2026. Lag measured between a contract's award date and the first appearance of its record in SEAO publications, counted by award process (one contract = one OCID). The waiting rates are floors: a contract that has never been published cannot be counted.
What this means for you. If you open SEAO to size up a market, a buyer or a competitor, do not count the latest months as if they were complete. Two practical consequences. First, a buyer with no recent publications is not necessarily an inactive buyer: you cannot conclude there were no purchases from the absence of publications. Second, if you file contracts by their award date, as one naturally does, what is missing from recent months leans toward contracts without a call for tenders: the share awarded without a call for tenders that you read is then too low, not too high. To compare two periods, take them at the same distance in the past, otherwise you are mostly comparing their states of publication.
The core finding hasn't moved
Over the twelve months with consolidated data, from June 2025 to May 2026, SEAO counts 56,373 contracts whose record was published during that period. Of these, nearly 2 in 3 are awarded without a call for tenders: about 65%, against about 64% over the twelve months of our June edition.
Taken one by one, however, the twelve months of that same period run from about 60% to about 74%. It is the twelve-month aggregate that is stable, not the month: a share read over a few weeks tells you nothing about the trend.
That share also varies sharply by buyer family, and the gap between families stays in the same range as in June:
- health and social services network: about 87% of contracts awarded without a call for tenders;
- provincial and other bodies: about 68%;
- municipal bodies: about 60%;
- school service centres: about 49%, the most competitive of the four families.
Half of contracts are services (50%), close to a third are goods (31%), and under a fifth are works (about 19%). We spell out the mutual-agreement mechanic in our article on contracts by mutual agreement.
The most recent month: what was published in July 2026 (provisional figures)
Among the contracts whose record was published in July 2026, the August 31, 2026 extraction counts 3,869. The share without a call for tenders looks very high there, around 83%, well above the consolidated share of 65%.
Why "provisional", and how to read that 83%. This barometer files each contract in the month its SEAO record was published, not the month it was awarded. On that basis, the publication lag does not tell you which way a recent month's share will move: it only tells you that the count for a recent month has not finished rising. That 83% describes the August 31, 2026 extraction; it is not an estimate of July's final share. That is exactly why we anchor this barometer on twelve months ending in May 2026, setting aside June, July and August, and never on the latest month alone. You cannot fill in what has not been published. You can refuse to count it as if it had been.
The most active sectors
Among the contracts published during the consolidated period, the fields most present on SEAO, by number of contracts: buildings (about 12%), maintenance, repair and installation of goods and equipment (about 9%), architecture and engineering services (about 8%), professional and administrative support services (about 7%), then, at nearly equal shares, computer hardware and software and civil engineering works (about 6% each). You don't need to be a construction firm to sell to the government.
What to take away
The SEAO open data says a great deal, and it says it late. An awarded contract usually takes a few weeks to appear there, but at least one in ten takes more than six months, and at least 6% pass the one-year mark. This is not a methodological footnote: it decides whether the figure you are reading describes the market, or only the part of the market that has already been published.
The practical rule fits in two lines. No month is ever entirely complete, and the gap shrinks as you step back. That is why our window ends in May 2026 and sets aside June, July and August: it is not a completeness threshold, it is a safety margin.
Your move this month. Pick a buyer you follow and a recent month. Count what SEAO shows for it today, and write that number down with the date of your extract. Run exactly the same count again in three months, on the same buyer and the same month. The gap between the two extracts is what you would have taken for empty space had you concluded right away. It is the only way to see the filling-in with your own eyes, and it costs two searches. We explain the mechanics in the guide to SEAO advanced search.
Methodology
The figures in this barometer come from the SEAO open data (Système électronique d'appel d'offres). We keep awarded contracts (with a supplier and an amount greater than zero), assigned to the analyzed period by the publication date of their SEAO record rather than by their award date, counting by award process (one contract = one OCID). The "consolidated" shares cover the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026; June, July and August 2026 are set aside because the publication lag still distorts them, and the most recent is presented separately, as provisional. Buyer type is identified from the organization's name (SEAO's buyer identifier is unstable), then grouped into four families. Shares are always computed within a single family. No company and no public body is named.
The publication lag is measured differently: for each contract, between the award date carried by its record and the date of the first SEAO publication in which that record appears with its award. The measure only covers contracts observed long enough for their lag to be known, which makes the waiting rates conservative: a contract that has never been published appears nowhere and cannot be counted. Since SEAO publications follow a weekly rhythm, these lags are given to within a week, never to the day.
The missing shares by month age are computed instead on the contracts' award month, because that is the question a reader actually asks: how many contracts awarded in July are not yet visible? ⛔ They therefore do not apply to the month of publication presented above: these are two different groupings. They are estimated from the behaviour of past years and assume that behaviour repeats. Two reservations are worth stating: the estimate leaves out the most extreme lags, which makes it slightly conservative; and the lag appears to have shortened over the years, which may on the contrary make it a little high for recent months. These are orders of magnitude, not values to the decimal.
Frequently asked questions
Sources
Data source
Dataset: “Système électronique d’appel d’offres (SEAO)”, published by the Secrétariat du Conseil du trésor (Québec Treasury Board Secretariat), released on Données Québec under the CC BY 4.0 licence.
Processing: data extracted, cleaned and analysed by Adjudica; the figures shown result from this processing and are not an official SEAO publication. See our data.
- SEAO corpus in OCDS format, as of August 31, 2026. The consolidated values cover the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026; the reading for the month of July comes from that same extraction.
- Publication lag measured on the history of successive SEAO publications since 2021.
- Categorization by nature of good or service according to the Québec public-procurement nomenclature.
- Buyer type grouped by Adjudica from the organization's name.
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