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 who you were up against, or whether you ever stood a chance.

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.

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. Was that notice ever open to you?

That is the first thing to establish, and it decides what everything else means.

Not every public contract is contested. Among the contracts recorded on SEAO, awarded between 2021 and 2023 and whose award amount is published, 58.9% were awarded with no call for tenders at all. Those were never offered to you: they appear on SEAO once concluded. You did not lose them, you never saw them.

And among those that do go through a call for tenders, not all are addressed to everyone. A public notice is addressed to every eligible firm; a call for tenders by invitation is addressed only to the firms that were solicited. The difference shows in the competition received, and it is large: among competitive tenders from 2021 to 2024 that are not invitations, 20% received a single bid; among tenders by invitation over the same period, 58%.

The practical consequence is direct. If you only watch public notices, you only see part of what is being bought, and you show up in the most contested part of it. Becoming known to the procurement office therefore conditions access to part of the files, before any response is written.

Price itself stays readable file by file: when a tender is awarded to the lowest compliant price, the opening amounts of the bids are published on SEAO. You can see the winner's and your own, provided you check that they cover the same thing: same lot, same quantity, same unit. That is a figure to go and find on your own notice, not an average to apply.

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 39% of the time in civil engineering, 45% in buildings. In recurring goods, it is substantial: close to 75% in construction materials, and much the same in specialised vehicles. Maintenance and repair sit in between, at around 63%.

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 44% 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 about 31% of their value. A handful of suppliers comes back far more often than the rest.

But the figure to face squarely is this one: 110 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 46,000 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.

You also need to know what published prices cover: they are published for price-based tenders, and not for the others. A notice evaluated on a quality-price grid will show you neither the scores nor, most of the time, the competitors' amounts. Where quality weighs, comparing prices is neither available nor decisive.

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 a public notice contested by six firms in a fragmented market, and losing an invitation to the entrenched incumbent in a market where a handful of firms keep coming back, 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

Figures updated on August 19, 2026 (corpus as of August 16, 2026). Our calculations now account more completely for the contracts each company has won, and some figures on this page have been adjusted.

Adjudica analyses of SEAO open data, published in full in the articles cited above: mutual agreement (160,508 contracts, 2021-2023), single-bidder tenders (88,000 notices, 2021-2024), incumbent supplier (54,500 re-tenders, 2021-2026), supplier concentration (433,000 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.