Before you price a bid, look up the sector. A country average mixes contests that a supplier should staff differently. In TED awards for the EU27 and Norway, published from October 2025 to September 2026, lab and precision instruments drew a median of one bid. Construction work drew a median of four.
The chart covers the 20 largest CPV divisions by awarded lots with a reported bid count. Across those lots, 33.1% received exactly one bid. Lab and precision instruments are at 57.2%, 6,319 of 11,041 lots. Software is at 53.5%, 5,129 of 9,581. Medical equipment and pharmaceuticals are at 49.6%, 68,006 of 137,084. Construction work is at 11.6%, 6,701 of 57,624.
What the longer record shows
A single bid is an old pattern, and it has been getting more common. The European Court of Auditors found that the share of procedures with one bidder rose from 23.5% in 2011 to 41.8% in 2021. Over the same years the average number of bidders fell from 5.7 to 3.2. The Court looked across sectors and found the rise in every one of them. Construction stayed lower, and rose more slowly. Health services, transport services, and transport equipment sat higher.
That is the same shape as the chart above, on a different cut of the data. The Court measured procedures over a decade. This chart measures awarded lots with a reported bid count in one later year, and it keeps the main CPV division of the procedure. The Single Market Scoreboard treats a single-bidder share above 20% as the unsatisfactory mark, and it drops framework agreements and direct awards before it calculates the indicator, because those procedures were not built as open contests. Our 33.1% includes a wider set of awarded lots, so it should not be read as the Scoreboard number for 2026.
The Court also found large country gaps at the end of 2021. Finland, Malta, and Sweden were under 20%. Cyprus, Poland, and Slovenia were over 50%. The later country ranking is the place to check the market you actually sell in. A software lot and a construction lot in that market are still different contests.
Why a sector can sit at one bid
A single bid has more than one cause, which is why the median is a historic benchmark rather than a prediction of the next tender's field. A 2019 study for the Commission by Mihály Fazekas lists the usual ones: the local market may have few firms that can deliver, the buyer may lack the capacity to attract bids, suppliers may have agreed not to compete, or the specification may fit one company. In the Court of Auditors' survey, more than 40% of respondents named restrictive selection criteria or technical requirements, and nearly half named a thin market.
For a bidder, the split is a reason to investigate comparable competitions. A median of one means that single bidding was common in the awarded lots measured here. It does not tell you how many suppliers will answer the next notice. The dataset also covers a wider set of procedures than open competitions. Plan the response around the actual selection criteria, award criteria, price requirements and delivery risks, whatever the historic median.
How to use it
- Take the main CPV division off the notice and find that row. The chart uses the procedure's main division, for awarded lots that report a bid count. Notices with mixed lot outcomes are left out of the sector figures.
- Where the median is one, investigate why single bidding was common. Lab instruments, software and medical equipment sit here. Check whether comparable tenders require specialist equipment, references or service capacity. The medical row is large as well as high: 68,006 of 137,084 lots were single-bid. Keep time for a competitive price and every scored part of the response; the next tender may attract several bidders.
- Where the median is four, use the record as a prompt to research competing offers. Construction work, architecture and engineering (16.2%), and business services (21.4%) sit here. Several tenders arrived on the typical awarded lot, but the notice's award criteria still determine whether price, scored quality or both decide the result.
- Use medians of two or three in the same way. Repair and maintenance is 46.3% single-bid with a median of two. IT services are 43.3%, also a median of two. Food is 15.9% with a median of three. Cleaning is 24.4% with a median of three. These are observed distributions, not promised field sizes.
- Then open the country ranking. If the procedure splits into several lots, repeat the check on each lot.
If you are an SME, the selling sequence is in how to sell to the government as an SME. If your company is registered in a different country from the buyer, check whether the tender needs a local company before you translate the response.
Sources
- TED Search API v3, contract award notices (can-standard), EU27 and Norway, published October 2025 to September 2026. Awarded lots with a reported bid count. The bid count prefers TED field
tenders. Where that field is absent and the electronic-submission count matches the lot count, that count is used instead. - Sector figures use the main CPV division of the procedure, for the 20 largest divisions by awarded lots with a bid count. Notices with mixed lot outcomes are excluded.
- European Court of Auditors, Special Report 28/2023, Public procurement in the EU.
- European Commission, Single Market Scoreboard, access to public procurement.
- Mihály Fazekas, Single bidding and non-competitive tendering procedures in EU co-funded projects (2019), prepared for the European Commission.
