How many bids does an Irish public tender get, and who wins?

How many bids is typical?

Most Irish public awards are decided between a handful of bidders, not dozens. The median is 4 bids per award. The trimmed mean is 5, worked out without the extreme counts described in the method section below.

The spread matters more than the middle. Of the awards that publish a count, 15.2% recorded one bid, 16.6% recorded two, 28.8% recorded three or four, 29.1% recorded five to nine, and 10.4% recorded ten or more.

How often is there only one bid?

A single recorded bid is a count, and the notice does not say why. Across the register 15.2% of awards with a bid count show one. For the last three full award years (2023 to 2025) the share is 15.4% across 2,707 awards, with a median of 4 bids.

The share moves from year to year. The table gives each of the last three full award years that has at least 200 awards with a bid count, which keeps a thin year from reading as a trend.

What can lie behind a single bid?

The notice records the number and nothing else, so we do not infer a cause for any award. What the regulations do show is that a count of one can come out of ordinary, lawful procedure. Under the European Union (Award of Public Authority Contracts) Regulations 2016, a contracting authority may use the negotiated procedure without prior publication of a call for competition in the cases listed in Regulation 32, and a count of one is possible for an award made that way without anything being irregular.

Lots are another route to small counts. Regulation 46 lets an authority split a contract into lots and requires the contract notice to say whether tenders may be submitted for one, several or all of them. The eTenders export labels the field a sum of bids received, so on a multi-lot contract the count can be read differently from a one-contract award.

A single bid is therefore not a verdict. It describes published notices, not a finding about any buyer or firm.

Works, supplies or services?

Competition differs by what is being bought. The table splits the awards that publish a bid count by the contract nature on the notice. Only the three headline natures are shown, and a nature appears only when it has at least 100 awards with a count.

How are the figures built?

A bid count is used only when the notice states a whole number of one or more. The Office of Government Procurement export writes zero where the figure was never recorded, so a zero is read as blank and an award with no bids does not appear in the data.

Some awards show very large counts. Awards above 60 bids are treated as framework outliers or data errors: 15 such awards are kept in every count and share but left out of the trimmed mean, which would otherwise be pulled up by a few extreme rows.

Among the 6,208 awards that record at least one bid from a small or medium enterprise, SME bids make up 84.7% of all bids. This measures only awards that record an SME bid, because a zero is stored as blank, so it does not tell you what share of all awards drew an SME bidder. For the same reason we do not publish a share of awards won by an SME.

How do I read an award notice?

An award notice is the public record that a contract was awarded. A contracting authority has to send a contract award notice for publication no later than 30 days after the award, under Regulation 50 of the 2016 Regulations. In Ireland the notices appear on eTenders, and larger contracts also on TED, the EU journal.

The fields that matter for a bid team are below.

• Buyer and contract nature: who is buying and whether it is works, supplies or services.
• CPV code: the common procurement vocabulary classification, a number that groups similar goods and services.
• Procedure and competition type: open, restricted, framework or a call-off under one.
• Award date and contract duration: when the decision was made and how long the contract runs.
• Bids received and SME bids: how many tenders were submitted, where the notice states it.
• Winner and value: the winning organisation and the contract value, where published.

Why is the value or winner sometimes blank?

A blank means the notice did not publish the field. A buyer may state a value in a form that is not a single number, or publish an award without naming every supplier on a framework. Under Regulation 50(4), a contracting authority is not bound to send a notice for each contract based on a framework agreement, so call-offs under a framework may have no notice of their own.

6,331 of the notices we hold name a winning organisation. Where a field is missing, the original notice on eTenders or TED is the authoritative record, and our awards page carries the same note.

How do I improve my odds as a contractor or supplier?

Start with the structure of the tender, because the notice states it. Read whether the contract is split into lots and whether you can bid for one, several or all of them. Regulation 46 requires that information in the contract notice, and where the contract is not divided into lots the authority must give its main reasons in the procurement documents or its report.

Plan around the clock. In an open procedure the minimum time limit for receipt of tenders is 35 days from the date the contract notice was sent (Regulation 27), so check the date the notice was sent, not the date you first saw it.

Watch awards as well as calls. Because award notices must follow within 30 days, they show who is winning work like yours, at what size and against how many bids, which tells you how crowded the field is before you commit to pricing.

Small and medium firms should read the lot structure first, since that is where the notice states what size of bid is invited.

How does our register help?

We collect award notices from eTenders and TED into one table and show organisations only, with the bid count, procedure and value where the notice published them. The awards page lists them and the find-work page shows open calls. For work that comes from planning rather than tender, the commencements feed shows notices of sites about to start. The data is refreshed weekly and was last updated 2026-10-20.