You Lost the Tender: The Public Data Often Says Why

The email runs three lines. Your bid was not selected, thank you for your interest. No figure, no reason, no lead. You spent forty hours on that file and you close it without knowing whether you lost by two per cent or by forty.

Most small firms treat that moment as an ending. It is in fact the only chance you get to learn something about your market for free.

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.

Because the data published after the fact on SEAO says a lot. Not everything, and we will be precise about what it withholds. But enough to answer three questions that decide whether you should adjust your price, change your target, or never set foot in that market again.

Question 1. Did you lose by a hair, or by a mile?

That is the first thing to establish, and it is often readable.

When a tender is awarded to the lowest compliant price, the opening amounts of the bids are published. You can therefore see the winner's price, and yours, and work out the gap.

What our analysis of price gaps shows: in tenders where opening amounts are published on SEAO, the lowest price matches the successful bidder in 89.0% of cases. Price decides, and it decides almost every time.

But the figure that matters to you tonight is this one: when the lowest price prevails, the median gap with the best losing price is 10.6%. And 30.4% of files are decided by less than a 5% margin. One file in four comes down to 3.8% or less.

A narrow gap tells you that you are competitive and that the next file is worth your time. A vast gap tells you either that you misread the specifications, or that you do not have the cost structure for that market. Those are not the same conclusions, and they are not reached the same way.

And price is not always alone: 11.0% of tenders do not go to the lowest published opening price. When that happens, the successful bidder is a median 16.4% more expensive than the lowest published price. In other words, roughly one file in ten does not go to the lowest bid submitted, without the data saying why: compliance, quality, or a planned award mechanism. The question is whether your market is one of them.

Question 2. Who were you really up against?

Second question, and it is often overlooked: was the winner already in place?

If you lost to the incumbent supplier, the conclusion depends on the market. Our analysis of the incumbent supplier measures their actual retention, sector by sector, and the spread is considerable.

Every proportion below reads the same way: it says, when the incumbent comes back to defend a contract, how often they keep it.

In project markets, their advantage is weak: they hold their place about 37% of the time in civil engineering, 43% in buildings. In recurring goods, it is substantial: close to 70% in construction materials, and much the same in specialised vehicles. Maintenance and repair sit in between, at around 59%.

What that changes, concretely. Losing to the incumbent on a materials contract means losing to a structural position: coming back every year without changing anything amounts to subsidising a buyer's routine. Losing to the incumbent on a civil engineering project means losing a round: in that market, the incumbent is displaced most of the time.

The most counter-intuitive finding of that analysis deserves to be stated plainly: when the previous winner comes back to defend their place, they lose it 47% of the time. And they come back in only 31% of cycles. The incumbent's advantage is real, but it is very far from a lock.

Question 3. Were you up against a market, or against a wall?

Third question, the hardest, and the one nobody asks after a loss.

Our analysis of supplier concentration shows that among the firms that win on SEAO, the top 1% of most frequent winners takes 28% of awarded contracts and 60% of the dollars. A handful of suppliers comes back far more often than the rest.

But the figure to face squarely is this one: 144 firms filed 20 bids or more between 2022 and 2025 while achieving a success rate of 10% or less.

This is not an invitation to give up. Of the 54,300 firms that bid, more than 45,000 won at least one contract: the majority does win. The question is therefore not "am I able to win", but "am I showing up where I have a real chance".

What the data will never tell you

We have to be clear about the limits, because a misread figure costs more than no figure at all.

SEAO publishes notices, the opening prices of bids, and the contracts concluded. It does not publish the quality scores awarded by a selection committee, nor the precise grounds for a rejection on compliance, nor what was said around the table. In a quality-evaluated tender, public data will therefore not tell you why your technical offer was judged average.

And the sample itself carries a bias worth knowing: tenders whose opening prices are published over-represent price-based processes. The 89.0% describes that universe, not public procurement as a whole. Where quality weighs more heavily, the link between the lowest price and the award loosens markedly: 75.3% in medical equipment, with wider gaps (18.0% median gap in professional support services).

For everything the data withholds, one source remains, and it is very widely underused: the buyer itself. Three things get confused almost every time, and they need to be told apart. What SEAO publishes for everyone. What the body must communicate to you, the bidder concerned. And what an access request may open up, subject to the applicable restrictions.

The second category is the least understood, and it is the most useful. For public bodies, in processes that include a quality evaluation, several regulations require a debrief on written request submitted within the 30 days following the communication of results: the body must then present the results by criterion and set out, in summary form, the reasons your bid was not selected. The ground for a rejection on inadmissibility or non-compliance must also be communicated to you.

For municipal bodies, no equivalent general obligation follows from the provisions in force of the Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies; an obligation may nonetheless arise from the body's contract management by-law or from the tender documents.

Keep the deadline in mind: it runs fast, and it cannot be recovered. An informal request, for its part, replaces neither a legal remedy nor a deadline set by law, and does not suspend them.

Four things to do in the days after a loss

A documented loss is an asset. A loss filed away is a pure expense.

In short

Losing a tender says nothing in itself. Losing by 2% to a newcomer in a fragmented market, and losing by 40% to an entrenched incumbent in a market where three firms take everything, are two unrelated events. The first invites you to come back. The second invites you to change target.

Public data will not tell you what to bid on tomorrow. It will tell you which of the two you have just lived through, and that is already a great deal.

Find all of Adjudica's public-tenders analyses and data.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

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

Legal framework: regulations made under the Act respecting contracting by public bodies (CQLR, c. C-65.1, r. 2, r. 4, r. 5 and r. 5.1) for the opening terms, the communication of grounds for rejection and the debrief by criterion on written request within 30 days; Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, CQLR, c. C-65.01, ss. 49 and 99; Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information, CQLR, c. A-2.1, s. 9. References verified on LégisQuébec on 18 July 2026.