Roadwork, Waste and Water: Why Bids Rarely Land Neck and Neck

Denis runs a 30-employee municipal services firm in the Montérégie region. Collection, street sweeping, winter maintenance. He bids every year with the same municipalities, and he often feels the prices filed bear no relation to one another. The data backs him up.

We looked at 7,950 contracts in this family awarded in Québec between 2021 and 2025: snow removal and winter maintenance of the road network, waste collection and treatment, street and catch-basin cleaning, water treatment and sewer rehabilitation. The buyers are the Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable, the boroughs of Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal, and many cities.

Bids rarely land neck and neck

Among tenders in this family with at least two opening prices published, only 19.4% are decided by less than a 5% gap. That is the smallest share of the eight sectors we measured. In civil engineering, it reaches 36.0%.

The median gap, for its part, is 16.8%.

In other words: when two firms bid on the same collection or sweeping contract, their prices are often separated by far more than a margin adjustment. This suggests they do not read the specifications the same way, or that they do not have the same cost structure.

What that is worth to a firm that can estimate

A market where prices scatter is a market where estimating matters more than margin.

In civil engineering, where the median gap is 7.8%, winning often comes down to shaving. Here, a median gap of 16.8% leaves room for a firm that has properly measured its tonnages, its haulage distances or its machine hours. It also leaves room for one that got it wrong.

That does not mean the low price always wins easily. It means the right price stands out.

Here, competition is the rule, not the exception

61% of contracts in this family are awarded after competition. That is markedly more than in computer hardware, where the proportion falls to 27%.

One clue about the nature of these contracts, and we measure neither their duration nor their amount: when a direct award in this family declares a reason on SEAO, it rarely cites an amount below the threshold. 24.0% do so, against 70.7% in building. Among the direct awards that declare a reason, it is therefore not mainly small contracts.

That share is read on the 58.7% of direct awards that actually declare a reason: the rest publish none, and we do not presume theirs.

One tender in three has a single bidder

32.9% of tenders in this family receive a single bid, and the average stands at 2.5 bidders.

Our data does not give the cause, but the explanation likely lies in the nature of these contracts: they require machinery, disposal sites and availability across a territory, which limits the number of firms able to serve a given municipality.

It takes 231 firms to cover half the contracts in this family awarded by tender. In building, it takes 406.

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.

Snow removal, a case of its own

Winter maintenance of the road network looms large in this family of contracts, with its own seasonality, multi-year terms and availability requirements. We devoted a separate analysis to it: municipal snow removal tenders, what cities actually assess.

What this changes for your next bid

Your estimate is worth more than your margin. In a family where prices scatter, the firm that measures its costs well stands out without having to shave.

A local presence is an asset. Few bidders per tender, one in three with no competition at all: already being established in the territory counts.

Look at who won the previous rounds. These contracts come back periodically: knowing the incumbent and the price it won at changes how you prepare a bid.

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 published total amounts. They represent 93.9% of the sector's tenders that received at least two bids. 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.