How competitive are UK public contracts?

Great Britain only, 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2026. Bidder figures are Find a Tender only — Contracts Finder publishes none. See how we counted below.

The single-bidder statistic measures paperwork, not competition

58,715 Find a Tender award notices fall in our window. Of those, 19,967 publish a bid count, and 9,328 of them — 46.7% — say one. That is the statistic in circulation, and taken at face value it describes a market that has all but stopped competing.

Now look at which notices bother to fill the field in:

A direct award — an award made without any call for competition — publishes a bid count on 96.4% of notices, and 84.6% of those say one bidder. Of course they do: that is what a direct award is. An open procedure publishes the field on 74.2% of notices, and says one bidder 12.0% of the time. Below-threshold limited competitions publish it on 9.3%.

So the field is filled in most diligently by the lane that is guaranteed to read "1", and most patchily by the lanes where real competition happens. The 46.7% is a weighted average of two completely different things. Among the 10,634 competed awards that publish a bid count, 1,447 drew a single bidder — 13.6%.

Half the notices, under a third of the money

Grouping every award by the procedure the register itself states gives four lanes. The split is the real story of the Procurement Act's first year:

51.1% of award notices record a contract nobody was invited to compete for. But they are small: median £61,800, and 31.3% of stated value between them. The competed lane is 39.3% of notices and 68.3% of the money.

It is worth being careful about what this does and does not say. "Uncompeted" describes a route, not a scandal. Parliament expressly permits below-threshold contracts to be awarded without competition, and for a £40,000 purchase a full tender exercise can cost more than it saves. The finding is not that something improper is happening at scale. It is that half of what looks like "the market" was never available to bid for — which matters enormously if you are sizing an opportunity from notice counts.

The Act did not create this. It revealed it.

The obvious misreading of the table above is that direct awards have exploded since the Procurement Act 2023 took effect on 24 February 2025. They have not. What changed is disclosure: below-threshold award notices went from absent to two-thirds of Find a Tender in five quarters.

Share of Find a Tender award notices that are below-threshold. The step change lands exactly where the Act does — and a statistical artefact would not know the commencement date.

The decisive check is total volume. If the Act had caused more direct awards, the number of published notices would have risen. It did not move much; it moved house. Contracts Finder falls from 13,696 award notices a quarter to 5,390 while Find a Tender rises from 5,143 to 13,147, and the combined total stays in a band between 16,891 and 23,462.

One caveat we would rather state than have found: Contracts Finder publishes award notices long after the award date, so its most recent quarters are still filling in. The right-hand edge is a floor. That works against the flatness we are claiming, not for it.

Why there is no total contract value on this page

Every instinct in this format says to open with a big number: £X billion of public contracts awarded. We are not going to, because the value column will not carry it.

Of 46,861 Find a Tender awards stating a value, the largest 10 carry 26.4% of all stated value and the largest 100 carry 66.8%. A total is therefore not a description of the market; it is a description of about a hundred framework ceilings, plus whatever errors are sitting in the top of the distribution. And there are errors:

One county council’s road-dualling scheme publishes an award value of £21,191,000,000 against its own stated tender value of £25,000,000 in the same record — 848 times larger, and almost certainly £21.19m with three extra zeros.

That is not a parsing failure on our side — both figures are in the published record, in the same notice, and the register carries them as they were entered. Any total built on that column inherits it.

So the honest headline figure is the median: the typical valued Find a Tender award in this window is £72,453, and the 90th percentile is £1,674,759. For a small or mid-sized supplier that is the more useful number anyway. The money you read about in the headlines is not the money you can win.

What this means if you bid

Three practical reads, in the order they change decisions.

1. The competed market is smaller than the notice count suggests. Roughly four notices in ten record something you could have bid for. Sizing a market from raw notice volume overstates it by about half.
2. It is also far less crowded than the fear. A median of 7 bidders on an open procedure, and a 13.6% single-bidder rate, is a normal competitive market — not a closed shop, and not a lottery with 200 entrants.
3. The uncompeted half is not lost, it is early. Below-threshold work goes to suppliers buyers already know. That is a relationship and pre-market-engagement problem, not a bidding one, and it is won months before any notice appears.

If you want the market sized rather than the competition measured — how small the typical contract is, and which sectors carry the winnable ones — that is the companion report, State of SME public-sector bidding 2026.

The same buyer-level data behind this page — who buys, how often, how contested, and who currently holds the work — is what our buyer profiles and market intelligence tools are built on. If you want it filtered to your sectors and regions rather than the national aggregate, start a trial.

Questions this data answers

How we counted

99,549 award notices — 58,715 from Find a Tender and 40,834 from Contracts Finder — with an award date in 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2026, the five complete quarters after the Procurement Act 2023 took effect.

• Window: award date from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2026 — the five complete quarters after the Procurement Act 2023 took effect. Quarters before the Act are shown only where the page is explicitly about the change.
• Source: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder award notices, deduplicated to one row per procurement and award value, so a contract published on both registers counts once.
• Bidder statistics are Find a Tender only. Contracts Finder published no bid count on any of its 40,834 award notices in the window; the `bids` block is absent from the raw OCDS payload, not merely unparsed by us.
• Procedure lanes are grouped from the register’s own `procurementMethodDetails` string. We never infer a procedure a notice did not state; 4,995 notices (8.5%) state none and are reported as their own lane.
• "Uncompeted" means no call for competition was published. It is a description of route, not an allegation — below-threshold awards without competition are expressly permitted.
• Bid figures use medians and are capped for plausibility: published counts include clear data-entry errors, the worst being a notice recording 10,000,000 bids.
• No total contract value is published. The top 100 of 46,861 valued Find a Tender awards carry 66.8% of stated value and the largest entries are not signed values, so a sum would mislead. All value figures on this page are Find a Tender only, and medians are used throughout.
• Northern Ireland is out of scope: our index covers Great Britain only. Scotland runs its own procurement regime and its notices are not governed by the Procurement Act 2023.

Our full data sourcing and its known limits are on the methodology page and coverage page. This report is free to cite and reuse under CC BY 4.0; a link back is all we ask. If you are a journalist or researcher who wants a cut of this we have not published, ask — we would rather you had the right number than an approximation of ours.

This is a description of published procurement data, not legal advice. Whether any particular award was lawfully made depends on facts no register records.