Tender Results: Reading What Gets Published After the Award

You want to know who won. The page exists, it is public, it is free, and you will find a name and an amount in fifteen seconds.

That is exactly where most bidders stop, which is a shame, because the useful part starts afterwards. A misread award result produces two common errors: believing you lost against a price you never actually saw, and drawing from a single file a conclusion that only several files can support.

Article updated on July 22, 2026. Two methodology adjustments changed some figures: de-duplication of SEAO corpus exports (which lowers some totals) and the reclassification of mandated purchases as tenders rather than sole-source contracts. The figure-by-figure detail is in our methodology note.

Here is what these pages really contain, in what order to read them, and where the traps are.

Two different publications, regularly confused

The first reflex to acquire is knowing which of the two publications you are looking at.

Opening results report what was submitted. It is a snapshot of the submission, taken before the compliance review and before any verification.

The arrangements vary by regime and procedure, and that is the first thing to establish. Under the municipal regime, tenders in an open procedure are as a rule opened publicly, and names and prices are then disclosed, subject to the exceptions in the Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, in particular where the price stays hidden until after the quality evaluation or in certain staged procedures. For public bodies, the regulations also provide for public openings, but in several processes involving a quality evaluation, only the names are disclosed at opening, and prices are not disclosed at that stage.

The awarded contract reports what was signed: the selected business and the amount. That is the result in the proper sense. Since April 1, 2026, section 99 of the Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies requires every municipal body to publish on SEAO the list of contracts it has concluded involving an expenditure of at least $25,000. This is a transparency publication after the contract is concluded, distinct from the notice that launches a procedure: it is not a notice a business can bid on. Procedures and contracts covered by the transitional rule in section 257 remain under the former framework.

Not every procedure produces both publications. A contract concluded by mutual agreement gives rise to no public opening of tenders. Where it reaches the applicable publication threshold, it is published on SEAO after it is concluded, subject to the exceptions provided by law. In some cases it may also have been preceded by a notice of intention allowing businesses to express their interest. We documented the scale of that route in our analysis of contracts by mutual agreement in Québec.

The five fields that decide your reading

Once you have the right page open, five pieces of information carry most of the meaning.

The award method is essential to interpreting results. In a lowest-price process, the contract is awarded on price among the admissible and compliant bids, subject to the adjustments and exceptions provided for. In a process involving a quality evaluation, the role of price varies: it may decide the outcome once a quality threshold is met, be adjusted by a quality-price formula, be weighed together with quality, or in some cases not be a selection criterion at all. We set out these mechanisms in our guide to award methods.

The winner is not always the lowest price shown

This is the most useful fact in the exercise, and it is measurable.

Across tenders where opening amounts are published, the lowest price matches the selected business 89.0% of the time. Price decides, and it decides almost always. That is the rule, and it is overwhelming.

But 11.0% of files escape that rule. In those cases the selected business is a median 16.4% above the lowest published opening price. So roughly one file in ten does not go to the lowest amount submitted.

Why? The published data does not, on its own, allow the cause to be determined or fault to be attributed. The gap may stem from the award method, from the inadmissibility or non-compliance of a bid, or from a difference between the nature of the price read at opening and that of the amount published after the contract was concluded.

What a single result cannot tell you

A result tells you the outcome of one file. It tells you nothing about the market, and that is where quick reading turns against the reader.

Three questions can only be answered in series, never on one notice.

Is this market actually contested? Over the period observed, 30.7% of notices drew only one bid. A third of these competitive processes pit no one against anyone. If the notice you are looking at is one of them, the absence of rivals is the salient fact, not the price.

Was the winner already in place? Our analysis of the incumbent supplier shows that when the incumbent comes back to defend a contract, they lose it 47% of the time, and that they come back in only 31% of cycles. The incumbent advantage exists and varies enormously by market: about 37% retention in civil engineering, close to 70% in construction materials.

Do the same names keep coming back? Among firms that win on SEAO, the top 1% of most frequent winners take 28% of contracts and 60% of awarded dollars. That concentration is visible across three years of history, never on one notice.

The single-file trap

There is a way to misuse these pages, and it is widespread: pull up the result of the file you just lost, find a gap, and adjust your next price accordingly.

An isolated gap contains no instruction. It describes an encounter between your cost structure and a given competitor's, on a given day, over a given scope. The median gap between the winning price and the best losing price reaches 10.6%, and one file in four is decided by 3.8% or less: many losses are close ones, which means an adjustment calibrated on a single file is as likely to cost you margin as to win you a contract.

The reading that has value is the one covering a series: your submissions, your recurring rivals, your categories, across several years. That is compilation work, not lookup.

What SEAO does not publish is not thereby inaccessible

This is the least understood distinction in the field, and it is worth money. Three separate mechanisms sit on top of one another, and confusing them makes people see a wall where there is a door.

General publication on SEAO, open to everyone, does not usually include the full content of bids or detailed internal evaluations.

Communication to the tenderer concerned is an entirely different regime, and it is largely mandatory. For public bodies, the regulations require the communication of certain evaluation results and, on written request made within the prescribed time, of results by criterion together with summary reasons. The ground for a rejection on inadmissibility or non-compliance must also be communicated to the tenderer concerned.

The right of access to a document, under the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies, remains open above the first two, subject to the applicable restrictions, in particular those protecting third parties' commercial information and certain opinions, recommendations or analyses.

For municipal bodies, no equivalent general obligation appears in the provisions in force of the Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies. An additional obligation may nonetheless arise from the body's contract management by-law or from the tender documents. On the other hand, section 99 of that Act makes public, in the procedures it covers, the existence of a bid found non-compliant whose price was lower or whose score was higher than that of the selected bid, without giving the specific reason. Municipal data can therefore sometimes reveal that general cause.

An informal request, finally, replaces neither a remedy nor a time limit provided by law, and does not suspend them.

In short

A results page answers "who won". It does not answer "why did I lose", and it certainly does not answer "what should I ask next time".

What it does allow, read properly, is placing a file: contested market or empty one, entrenched incumbent or open field, a gap of two per cent or of forty. Those four situations call for opposite decisions, and confusing them costs more than never looking the result up at all.

Browse all of Adjudica's public procurement data and analysis.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, CQLR, c. C-65.01, in force since April 1, 2026: s. 99 (publication on SEAO of the list of contracts concluded involving an expenditure of at least $25,000, and mention of a non-compliant bid that was cheaper or better scored), s. 257 (transitional law), ss. 49, 53, 58, 60, 68 and 75 (opening arrangements), ss. 33 to 35 (mutual agreement and notice of intention). Act respecting contracting by public bodies, CQLR, c. C-65.1, and its regulations (c. C-65.1, r. 2, r. 4, r. 5 and r. 5.1): opening arrangements, communication of grounds for rejection, and communication of results by criterion on written request within 30 days. Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information, CQLR, c. A-2.1, s. 9, subject in particular to ss. 22 to 25 and 37 to 39.

Legal references verified on LégisQuébec on July 18, 2026 as part of a cross-review.

Adjudica analyses of SEAO open data, published in full in the articles cited: price gaps (535,908 priced bids, 2016-2025), incumbent supplier (50,800 recompetitions, 2021-2026), supplier concentration (432,000 bids, 2022-2025), single-bidder tenders (88,000 notices, 2021-2024). Observation windows differ from one analysis to the next: each is stated in the corresponding article, with its method and limits.